At the Schooner, we’ve taken care to adhere to social distancing, whether daily pub life, Sunday lunches, or live music events. We take pictures at every gig to show that distancing is being maintained. We aren’t posting these here because that could invade the privacy of anyone caught in the frame. However, we’re happy to blur faces and share images on request.

It’s probably common knowledge that complaints have been made by a small number of residents from across the Tyne in St Peter’s Basin. This isn’t new; previous landlords had the same problem. But we do take complaints seriously; after all, we’re in the business of making people happy, not miserable. We’re working with a specialist team to try to reduce the degree of noise that reaches our neighbours across the Tyne. That includes some pretty expensive work to our stage area. We’re an independant pub, without the large bank balance of a chain, so we think this shows that we genuinely want to help. We’re nice people, after all.

We’ve monitored sound levels recently. At The Kill‘s gig on Saturday, and 1977s on Sunday (respectively), we found that both were pretty loud by the stage area.

But, while the music could be heard at St Peter’s Basin, noise levels were as below on both nights. We have a video of Saturday’s sound level check if anyone would like to see it.

At the weekend, we saw someone taking pictures at a gig. They appeared to be taking pictures from angles which would give the imprression that social distancing was not being observed. They then used one of their images to support a complaint to Gateshead Council. Needless to say, the scene in that image isn’t reflected in our own pictures.

We have, of course, provided Gateshead Council with our pictures. Meanwhile, we have some additional conditions that we need to meet to continue with live music. We should stress that these aren’t related to complaints about noise levels.

We’re doing our best to get some changes in place to meet these conditions, but that might not be possible before our next planned gig on Friday. If we’re sucessful, we’ll have live outdoor gigs this weekend. If things take a little longer than we’d like, we’ll need to reschedule these bands.

We’ll also probably be moving towards ticketing. At minimal or nil cost, naturally. We’ll update here tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we have a new ale, coming soon on cask.