The Free The Night open letter Belfast has landed, and the names behind it say everything about how seriously the underground music community is taking this fight. David Holmes, Or:la, and Max Cooper are among the artists who have put their names to a public call for urgent reform of Northern Ireland’s licensing laws, a set of regulations that campaigners argue are strangling the region’s club and live music culture at the root.
Northern Ireland operates under a licensing framework that many in the music community describe as hopelessly out of step with how people actually experience nightlife. Venues face restrictions that limit late-night events, complicate the process of obtaining the right permissions, and ultimately push promoters and artists toward safer, shorter, and less ambitious programming. The result is a creative ecosystem that punches well below its weight, despite the undeniable quality of the talent it produces.
Real Artists, Real Stakes
What makes this campaign feel different from the usual industry noise is precisely who is speaking. David Holmes is not a lobbyist. Neither is Or:la, whose reputation as one of the most respected selectors in contemporary underground dance music was built in rooms across Ireland and beyond. Max Cooper brings a different dimension, his work sitting at the intersection of electronic music and immersive live performance, exactly the kind of artistic ambition that rigid licensing laws tend to crush before it even gets started. These are working musicians and DJs whose livelihoods and creative output are directly shaped by whether or not a venue can stay open past a certain hour.
The open letter calls the situation urgent, and the language is deliberate. Licensing reform in Northern Ireland is not a new conversation, but the political will to act has historically been absent. Free The Night is pushing to change that by making the human cost visible, connecting the abstract machinery of regulation to the very real impact on artists, promoters, venue staff, and the audiences who rely on these spaces for community and culture.
Why Belfast Deserves Better
Belfast has a music history that deserves proper infrastructure around it. The city has produced artists of genuine international stature, and its underground dance music scene has long operated with a resourcefulness born partly of necessity. But resourcefulness has limits. When the legal environment makes it harder to run a club night than it does in comparable cities across the UK or Republic of Ireland, talent migrates, investment dries up, and scenes that took decades to build can collapse within a few years of sustained neglect.
The Free The Night campaign and this open letter represent a concrete, public escalation of that argument. The involvement of figures like Holmes and Or:la in the David Holmes DJ campaign and Or:la licensing protest dimension of the broader effort gives it a cultural credibility that is hard to ignore. The ask is not complicated: modernise the licensing laws, bring them in line with what a functioning creative economy actually needs, and trust that the underground music community in Northern Ireland knows what it is doing.
Whether politicians in Stormont choose to listen is another question entirely. But the letter is signed, the names are on the record, and the conversation is now harder to sidestep.