Colchester's home for live music, gig listings, music venues and musicians
Music Live COLCHESTER is a comprehensive, not-for-profit resource for the thriving Colchester, Essex live music scene
It's just a labour of love, or a hobby, if you prefer. We built it because it wasn't there yet. We're constantly out and about enjoying the live music scene, and just needed a site like this to exist. So here it is.
All information is presented in good faith, and we reproduce it as it is made publically available by the venues and artists. We strive to make the site informative, useful, accurate and fun. But. We are only human, and probably get a few things wrong sometimes. We welcome corrections, clarifications and constructive feedback.
We particularly want to hear from you if you are a band, artist, venue or general-purpose nice person: it seems likely that we can find ways to help each other out.
We are not selling anything, and we are not buying anything either.
Email us. Any address @ this domain will reach us. Or say hello on Bluesky at simon.colchester.social.
The site is built in Python on the Django framework, and the canonical data store is MySQL. A lot of the data is rendered out to Elasticsearch for indexing and, increasingly, a graph database in Neo4j, which powers things like related artists/artist network, and the "You might also like..." gig recommender.
The data is still partly collected by hand: that's how this all began, but these days most of the data comes in via JANE, our own ETL pipeline. At some point JANE will be open-sourced under the OpenEvent initiative, but for now, you can picture it as a production line of loosely-coupled Python components using Redis as a communication bus, and an LLM to extract and structure incoming data. We're looking at using RAG via a vector DB to really make this stuff sing, but that's still in the early stages of experimentation.
Everything is containerised using Docker, and cloud-hosted on a cluster of Ubuntu Linux servers by DigitalOcean and Fasthosts, who—after 25 years with them—I fully recommend.