There were headlines last month about the plight of live music in Britain. More than a third of grassroots venues are making a loss; more than 100 of them are ceasing to put on live music or closing altogether. Cue the stories about how, if it wasn’t for these broom cupboards giving musicians the opportunity to learn their trade, you’d never have got all those acts you know and love. All true, of course. We need small venues, and not just for the health of the music industry but for the simple pleasure of sipping a pint watching a young band in a small room.

What use is a venue when a couple of hundred people can’t even see the stage?

But dear God, the bigger venues that accommodate graduates of the grassroots circuit need to up their game, too. In London, consider Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a theatre whose sightlines are so bad that many genuinely (and wrongly) believe the floor rakes up towards the stage. Or take Brixton Academy, a venue so poorly managed that two people died following a crush there in December 2022. It will reopen next month. Thankfully, risk to life is seldom an issue at London’s larger venues, but sometimes these places seem too determined to deny visitors a good time.

The Ghanaian-American singer Amaarae played two nights at Here at Outernet, which opened in 2022 as part of a major central London redevelopment. The venue itself is several storeys underground, which always prompts a frisson of fear in me. But more to the point, it feels as though it were designed to be a nightclub in which there might happen to be live music: it’s essentially a big box, with a balcony around three sides of it. The balcony is where I was directed, and I might as well have not bothered going. For in an unraked balcony, only those at the front can see anything. The couple of hundred of us who did not enter as soon as the doors opened were granted views only of the backs of the people in front. I ended up watching the show on a TV screen by the bar, showing a single-camera feed from the mixing desk.

Amaraae’s album Fountain Baby – a winning collision of R&B, hyperpop, Afrobeats and as many other genres as you care to name – was one of my favourites of last year. The gig’s downfall wasn’t that she couldn’t recreate it live (she had a drummer and guitarist and an array of backing tapes), more that when you’re watching a show, you do like to be watching the show. Not her fault – the people on the floor seemed to be having the time of their life. But what use is a venue where a large chunk of the punters can’t even see the stage?

And so to Wembley Arena for Skindred. No problems with sightlines here, but goodness, the old girl is showing her age. The concourses are so narrow as to be a navigation hazard; the bar queues are horrific. You can sense its history as the Empire Pool, but not in a good way. Compared to the O2 Arena, it feels like a relic. But still bands want to play it, in part because of its history, in part because it’s a huge jump to play the O2.

Skindred, a quartet from Newport, Wales, seemed delighted to be there, even though the place wasn’t full, with plenty of seats curtained off. No matter: they come from the branch of heavy music that sees its purpose as wholesome fun. And no matter that singer Benji Webbe swore profusely at the crowd, for all was good-natured, and the audience were given the chance to participate in singalong snippets of other bands’ hits – ‘Jump’, ‘Jump Around’ and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’.

What sets Skindred apart is that their metal is tinged with reggae – Webbe toasts like a ragga MC, rather than growling or singing. In fact they must be the only British metal band ever to have topped the US reggae charts, though that says more about the US reggae charts than anything else. The one change in shading alters the whole dynamic of the band: often guitarist Mikey Demus is churning out grinding, generic nu-metal riffs, but Webbe’s fleetness means it never sounds like the violent self-pity party this kind of thing can easily become.

Despite the ghettoisation of metal, it is one of the few genres these days that really does span generations – it is family entertainment. Whereas at Amaarae the woman on the door checked I was in the right place (I was, I suspect, the only unaccompanied middle-aged white man there), at Skindred, everyone felt part of the fun. All they need now is their own Saturday teatime TV show.