At half six on Friday, 25th September, a 22-year-old BRIT School graduate called jo from school will play a set in a hair studio at 352 Mare Street. Next door at 352a, which is Paper Dress Vintage, thistle. and Madrid's Toldos Verdes go on at quarter past eight. On Saturday at noon, there's a DJ set among the racks at the BBE record store, in an arch off Helmsley Place. Then the Sebright Arms. Then The Victoria in Dalston, where Honeyglaze headline.
That is Soundhood, which SON Estrella Galicia are careful to say is not a festival. Instead, it's a musical, culinary and cultural route around the neighbourhood, taking in the bar downstairs, the venue further along, and the place on the corner where you would do your laundry if you could afford to live in this part of town. Soundhood is taking the things we like to the places we like to hang out.
"What excited us was the idea of putting neighbourhoods and local communities at the heart of the event," says Gabriela Cárdenas, from the SON Estrella Galicia team. "We wanted to create something that went beyond a traditional music programme and became a wider cultural experience, connecting different spaces across a neighbourhood and encouraging people to discover them in a new way. It's about celebrating the people who make these neighbourhoods special: local communities, venue owners and the bars, pubs and hospitality partners that serve Estrella Galicia and play such an important role in the local music scene."
But Soundhood isn't just some smart idea from a blue sky thinking session. It exists because of us.
"The inspiration actually came from the UK," Gabriela says. "We saw how strong the culture of supporting live music venues is there, and we felt there was an opportunity to bring that spirit to Spain, where venues can sometimes be overshadowed by the sheer scale and number of festivals."
A Galician brewery watched at least the cultural obsessives of Britain try their best to look after their small venues in the face of developers, noise complaints and rising rents, decided that was a thing worth having, built an event around it, and has spent the last two years exporting it back to the country from which it learned it. It would be a lovely circular story if the British end of it were in any state to be flattered.
Music Venue Trust's annual report, published in January, counted 801 grassroots venues left in the UK. The report recorded 30 permanent closures in the year to July 2025. Fifty-three per cent made no profit whatsoever last year, and the average margin across the sector was 2.5%. The average ticket cost £11.56. Some 6,000 jobs were lost, a 19% contraction, and 175 towns and cities, home to roughly 25 million people, now get no regular touring shows by professional artists at all. MVT's own summary is that most grassroots venues are one financial shock away from crisis.
The rescue mechanism, such as it is, remains the voluntary £1 levy on arena and stadium tickets. The first £500,000 distributed reached 372 venues, 211 shows and 81 festivals, with a further £1 million subsequently committed. By 2nd September, creative industries minister Ian Murray was telling a parliamentary committee that 7.5 million tickets had carried the levy that year. Uptake remained disputed, and the Treasury was still taking VAT. A DCMS official said Live Nation reported the levy on 34% of its shows in the first half of 2026: participation, but a long way from every ticket. Mark Davyd had called for legislation if voluntary action failed by June; September arrived with ministers still keeping that option on the table. July’s £45 million music package had not settled the levy question.
So when a beer company turns up offering to put a band in your shop, the correct question is what it actually wants, and the answer here is refreshingly unembarrassed.
"They need economic support, but they also need the right partners," Nacho Ruiz, from SON's booking team, says of independent venues. "Organisations that understand their culture, personality and identity, rather than forcing them to change the way they operate. They also need support from artists and audiences. Grassroots music only works when people actively participate in it. We need fans who are willing to discover new artists, attend shows regularly and become part of a venue's community."
"Sometimes people forget that these venues are businesses as well as cultural spaces. A large part of their income comes from ticket sales and bar revenue, so every ticket bought and every beer ordered contributes directly to keeping the doors open."
Estrella Galicia has been brewing in A Coruña since 1906 and is still owned by the family that started it. SON, its music arm, started in 2009 and has done more than 1,500 shows since; this season alone runs to nearly 100 concerts across 40-odd venues in five countries.
"We're a team of unapologetic music and beer nerds," Gabriela says, "and we've always wanted Estrella Galicia to be associated with the magic of live music, especially its most raw, independent and authentic side. In many ways, our story as a brewery has a lot in common with the artists and venues we support. We've always felt more like David than Goliath: an independent family-owned company from the north-west corner of Spain, competing in a world dominated by much bigger players. Maybe that's why we naturally gravitate towards emerging artists, grassroots venues and independent scenes."
"This is probably the last time you could see these bands in a venue like this"
The example she reaches for is March 2017, Teatro Lara in Madrid, a 500-capacity theatre off Corredera Baja de San Pablo, where SON put on a 23-year-old flamenco singer touring in support of her debut album with Raül Refree. "Today, Rosalía is a global superstar, but back then she was still performing in relatively intimate spaces," Gabriela says. "The atmosphere that night was incredible. You could feel that something special was happening, even if nobody knew just how far she would go." She is honest about the appeal of that, too. "There's also a slightly selfish thrill in music discovery. Every music fan loves that feeling of finding an artist before everyone else does and saying, 'I was there at the beginning.'"
Which brings us to how the bill gets built, a process Nacho describes with a bluntness that would give most booking agents an incident.
"Talent, personality, charisma, truth," he says. "We don't care about their numbers, data or other issues. We believe in music, and we believe in people."
In 2026, the results of that process have turned out especially well. Dork faves Honeyglaze headline The Victoria on the Saturday, with Error 97 and Brighton's Goodbye alongside them. It's the only guaranteed-entry show of the weekend, everything else being first-come, first-served until the place fills. The Orchestra (For Now), a seven-piece with strings deep into a run of self-released EPs, take the Sebright Arms. thistle., from Northampton, arrive off the back of May's 'backflip' EP. jo from school, whose debut EP 'Grace, Flair and Distance' landed in August via Chess Club, gets the hairdresser's.
"They seem to inhabit their own world, each and every one of them," Nacho says. "You could say that there are some elements that link them all: guitars, youth, a certain fierceness and melodic sensibility, but, at the same time, they're quite different and distinctive. Our motto is, 'This is probably the last time you could see these bands in a venue like this', and we're sure it's going to be like that with some of this year's line-up."
The two Spanish acts are the part SON gets most animated about. Toldos Verdes released their second album in March; Error 97 put out their debut, 'Nadie nos recordará', in February, and were named in the Spanish press as part of the wave of guitar bands coming through behind Carolina Durante.
"We feel they're a good example of today's Spanish indie scene: young, vibrant, exciting," Nacho says. "Also, we thought they'd be a good fit with the rest of the line-up. It's important to us that the audience perceive the whole deal as a cohesive, cool idea, really." As for why bother shipping them over at all: "We have this idea of us being sonic migrants. Our beer travels all around the world, so why don't we try to do it with local talent that we're sure could work in other markets, and that will be a pleasant surprise to the UK audiences that may not know them."
Ask him what the two countries have in common now, though, and the answer is less cheerful. "Both share some of the same threats: the survival of the grassroots venues, the menacing AI world, the disappearance of the 'middle-class' musician as the costs grow."
The non-musical bits are where the sponsorship stops pretending to be anything else, and they're better for it, given they're actually pretty fun sounding. There are three beer workshops across the weekend: two called Soundcrafters, in which you build a piece of music out of beer ingredients, and one called What Does Your Beer Sound Like?, which is a tasting with musical pairings. Places are limited and go to ticket-holders after they've bought. Previous editions have run a customisable clothing market at Paper Dress Vintage and collaborations with local artists.
"For us, as a brewery, it's important to talk about our product and showcase its qualities," Gabriela says. Nobody is pretending the beer is incidental. "You can enjoy great music without a beer, of course, and we're big advocates of responsible enjoyment. But for me, few things beat discovering a new band with friends, a beer in hand and a great conversation unfolding around the music. At their best, both music and beer create a sense of connection. They bring people together, spark conversations and turn ordinary moments into memorable ones. Neither is really about consumption. They're both about sharing experiences."
The hair studio isn't a novelty, incidentally. Soundhood has now run editions in Madrid, A Coruña, Barcelona, Granada and Bilbao, and the same trick turns up every time: a vintage clothes shop in Madrid, a luthier's workshop and an art space in Bilbao, a bike repair shop in Barcelona, and when Soundhood gets to Barcelona next month, a hairdresser's called Peluquería Wit. Put a band somewhere nobody books bands, and the neighbourhood has to look at itself differently for an afternoon.
Where does this go? It's not an answer the scale of the parent company would usually suggest, in a good way. "We'd rather be meaningful than massive," she says. "If, in five years, Soundhood is considered one of the events people trust to discover their next favourite artist, we'll be very happy."
Five years is a long time in a sector where half the venues made nothing last year. But the low bar has its own dignity: a Friday teatime in a hair studio on Mare Street, a bill of seven bands nobody has to be talked into, and 352 and 352a doing something neither was built for.
Soundhood East London takes place at The Victoria, Sebright Arms, Paper Dress Vintage, Hackney Style Council and The BBE Store on 25th-26th September. Tickets are on sale now via DICE.
In partnership with SON Estrella Galicia.
