Culture Bar-Bars Festival

Bars, temples of living culture

The Culture Bar-Bars Festival celebrates the concert cafés, clubs, intimate cabarets, musical bistros, restaurants, and associative bars that form the primary music distribution network in France. These human-sized venues host emerging and established artists daily, support underground and alternative creation, and animate local cultural life. The festival pays tribute to them every year at the end of November with five evenings of intense programming.

Clermont-Ferrand, participating city

In Clermont-Ferrand, several bars and concert cafés in the city center participate in the festival by offering a special program for five evenings. Concerts, shows, stand-up, exhibitions, performances, and clubbing nights take over these convivial spaces, offering the Clermontois public a rich and varied artistic palette. The program is freely composed by each participating venue, reflecting the identity and artistic direction of each establishment.

A national movement

Created in 2002, the Collectif Culture Bar-Bars brings together over five hundred members across France. The annual festival has become an unmissable end-of-year event, bringing together over three thousand artists, six hundred events, two hundred and thirty stages in seventy cities nationwide, and attracting over one hundred and sixty thousand festival-goers.

Accessibility and conviviality

One of the festival's fundamental principles is accessibility: most events are free or very low cost. The relaxed atmosphere of the bars and cafés encourages direct interaction between artists and the public, in a spirit of free and engaged celebration. The festival highlights the energy of these venues that keep culture alive daily, far from large institutions.