“Being a rock musician in 2026 is hard, but places like Hastings make it worthwhile”
Ahead of her show at The Carlisle on Friday 5 June, award-winning guitarist, singer and songwriter Chantel McGregor spoke to JOSHUA GEER about music, touring, grief, guitar playing, and why towns like Hastings still matter.
Being a rock musician in 2026 is not easy.
The romance of the road is still there, somewhere, but it is increasingly buried under fuel costs, hotel bills, stretched audiences and venues fighting to stay open. For Chantel McGregor, that reality is not something to dress up.
Chantel is a musician strongly grounded in reality. When we spoke about her latest album The Healing, which she is now taking on tour, she did not reach for myths about life on the road or the grand romance of rock music.
Instead, she talked about the work of it: the travel, the pressure, the costs, the venues, the audiences and the fragile ecosystem that allows live music to happen at all.
That does not mean she has lost her affection for it. Far from it. But she is clear-eyed about how difficult things have become. “The state of live music at the moment is so difficult in this country,” she says. “I’d like to say I’m optimistic, but I’m not at the moment.”
The reasons are familiar, but they land differently when set out by someone living with them night after night. Audiences are under pressure. Touring is expensive. Venues are struggling.
“People are really struggling, and I completely get that,” she says. “If you say; ‘It’s 20 pounds a ticket’, people have got to choose: do they do the shopping that week or do they go to a gig? And that is such a difficult thing.”
For bands, the sums are no easier. Accommodation, fuel, food and the basic costs of moving people and equipment around the country have all gone up. The margins, already thin, are getting thinner.
Still, Chantel does not sound defeated. There is a practical resilience in the way she talks about it. No false certainty, no grand solution, but a determination to keep doing the job properly for as long as possible.
“Just keep doing it for as long as we can afford to keep doing it,” she says, “and hope there are still venues that survive throughout everything.”
It is places like Hastings, she says, that help make that possible. The Carlisle, where she will perform on Friday 5 June, is the sort of venue with its own history, character and audience. For a touring musician, those things matter.
“I love it,” she says of Hastings. “I think Hastings has got a lot of really incredible people … absolutely gorgeous fans that are really welcoming and respectful and lovely.”
Touring can make even the most interesting places blur into each other. Days are often shaped by load-ins, soundchecks, a quick meal, the show and then the next journey. Still, Chantel has had time to enjoy Hastings and the Old Town and speaks warmly about returning.
Her own route into music began early. Her father was a musician, and guitars were part of the household. By the age of 12 she was taking in jam sessions, and by her mid-teens, she knew what she wanted to do.
“I sort of stuck at it … and decided that’s what I wanted to do as a job, as a life, and it went from there.”
Asked to describe her music, Chantel is pleasingly unfussy: “primarily rock, with a little bit of progressive and singer-songwriter.”
It is “very guitar heavy, technical and good fun as well.”
There is serious musicianship behind that, but Chantel does not speak about the guitar as though it is something she has mastered once and for all.
“I don’t think you ever finish learning,” she says. “I always perceive it as whatever room you walk in, there’ll be somebody who can play something better than you can.”
Her influences give some sense of the range in her music. Fleetwood Mac were an early love – “I wanted to be Stevie Nicks” – while Jeff Buckley remains “a massive influence songwriting-wise.” There is heavier progressive music in there too, including Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree.
“It’s quite diverse, my influences,” she says, “but I guess there’s maybe a fraction of everything in what I do.” Or, more simply: “It’s a mishmash. I always just call it Chantelle music.”
Her latest album, The Healing, released last year, is perhaps her most personal work. She describes it as “a very, very emotionally sensitive album,” centred around heavy rock and progressive sounds, but also “very in touch with emotions and feel.”
It is a record shaped by grief, loss, self-confidence and the long process of finding a way through. For Chantel, that meant moving into territory she had previously avoided.
“I’ve always been quite scared of being vulnerable,” she says. But with this album, “this album was an outlet for me.”
She adds that “it was emotionally very difficult to write.
“When you’re singing songs about the worst thing that can happen in your life, and you’re trying to get through it, it’s hard. But you’ve got to sometimes work through those things.”
For all that, the Carlisle show is not being presented as an evening of solemn introspection. Audiences can expect songs from The Healing, older material, possibly some acoustic moments, and the kind of guitar-led rock performance that has earned Chantel such a loyal following.
“It’s just gonna be a really, really lovely night, and we’re so excited to come back,” she says.
What comes across most strongly is not rock-star mythology, but care: care for the music, for the craft, for the people who turn up, and for the venues that keep the whole thing alive. Chantel understands the pressure live music is under, but she also understands the pleasure of it.
Music, she says, is not some decorative extra.
“It’s so intrinsic in what we do,” she says. “We love going out and hearing music, and I think it would be such a massive shame if that becomes too difficult for live bands to go out and do that.”
That is a good case for going to The Carlisle on Friday 5 June, because Chantel is bringing a proper rock show to a proper Hastings venue. In difficult times for live music, and for many of the people who love it, that remains one of the best reasons to leave the house.
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