The Full Moon and Attic Bar: Bristol’s 240 Cap RoomA 240 capacity room at the top of Stokes Croft, a free Thursday jam anyone can play, and a venue that has already solved the bit most rooms have not.

Welcome to The Full Moon and Attic Bar, who joined GigXchange in August 2026. They now have a venue page, an open mic page and a profile their team runs themselves.

I have been gigging on the UK circuit since 2009, and the difference between a night that works and a night that eats your afternoon is almost never the fee. It is whether the room turns up ready. This one does, and that is worth writing about.

Inside The Full Moon & Attic Bar, Bristol

1. Who they are, and what the place actually is

Plenty of venues call themselves live music venues when what they mean is that there is a plug socket near the fireplace. We wrote about that gap in what venues get wrong about booking live music. The Full Moon is the other thing, and it has been for a long time.

A room, not a corner of the pub

The venue's own words, from its private hire page: "The Attic Bar is one of Bristol's long standing independent live music and club spaces. It's a 240 capacity space." That is a real size for a grassroots room. Big enough that a good night feels like an event, small enough that 80 people in it still looks busy rather than sad. For where that sits nationally, our grassroots venue directory has the capacity spread across every room we hold.

A Stokes Croft fixture

Stokes Croft is Bristol's cultural quarter, and the Full Moon sits right at the start of it, around 5 minutes from the city centre. If you have played Bristol at all, you have walked past the front of this building. Visit Stokes Croft lists it among the area's landmarks, and the venue itself only claims to be long standing rather than putting a year on it, so that is how we will leave it.

A site, not just a venue

This is the part that makes the room work. The Full Moon is not a bar with a stage bolted on, it is a whole site: a large courtyard, the pub, the Attic Bar upstairs, two kitchens including Fat Dad's Burger Kitchen, and a backpackers' hostel, running to 750 across the lot. People are in the building before a note is played, which is a demand advantage almost no grassroots room has. A crowd that eats stays, a crowd that stays drinks, and a touring act that can sleep upstairs is a touring act whose night just got cheaper.

2. What comes with the room

Worth reading twice, because it decides whether a band night costs you an afternoon or costs you nothing extra at all. The venue lists what a hire includes: "a toilet, green room, stocked bar with staff, security and sound technician."

Every item on that list is a job somebody normally has to do. Here it is against a room that gives you four walls and a fee.

Why that beats haggling over the fee

The Full Moon put the venue problem to me straighter than most rooms do: band nights do not perform any better than DJ nights, but they cost more and they are harder work. That is the honest objection, and it is the right one.

The cost half is a negotiation, and our GX Index and rate calculator exist so both sides can have that conversation with a number in front of them. The harder work half is structural, and it is the half this room has already solved. Nobody at the Full Moon is ringing round for a PA on the afternoon of the show.

3. Where they sit in the Bristol League

We rank every venue in a city by how many gigs it has on the calendar over the next 30 days, and rebuild the board nightly. It is not a quality judgement, it is a work rate. Here is where the Full Moon lands tonight.

The Full Moon and Attic Bar is #38 of 56 Bristol venues for live music, ranked by gigs on the calendar over the next 30 days and refreshed nightly.

They joined in August 2026, so most of what the Attic has on is not listed with us yet and the board has not caught up. Expect that position to move. On the other side of it, 8 Bristol artists already have profiles here, and any of them can approach the room directly from its venue page.

What moves a room up the board

Gigs on the calendar, nothing else. A venue that lists what it has on climbs, a venue that keeps it on Instagram does not. That is deliberate: the board rewards the rooms doing the work of being findable, which is the same work that gets an act through the door.

4. The Thursday jam anyone can walk into

If you are a player rather than a booker, this is your bit. The Attic runs the Suntrap Jam, hosted by Bon Suis, and the invitation is genuinely open: all musicians are encouraged to get down and get involved. It sits on our open mic page for the venue, alongside every other open mic we hold in Bristol.

Thursdays, 21:00 to 01:30

It runs from 21:00 to 01:30, so four and a half hours of it. It is a Thursday night, but not every Thursday, so check the venue's Skiddle listings before you travel. Entry is free.

Full backline, and an engineer on it

The same rig the booked shows use. That is unusual for a jam night, and it is the reason this one is worth a train fare rather than a walk round the corner. If you are new to jams the etiquette is the same everywhere: listen first, take one tune, get off.

Neo soul, hip hop, and wherever it goes

The Suntrap sessions lean neo soul, R&B and hip hop rather than the blues-shuffle default a lot of jam nights fall into. If you play keys you will get used. If you sing, bring something that sits over a groove.

5. What actually gets booked here

Broad is easy to claim and hard to prove, so here is a single stretch of their own calendar on Headfirst: a drum and bass and jungle night, a blues and hip hop album launch, a neo soul jam, and a garage rock triple bill. Same room, inside a few weeks of each other.

Residents and touring acts in the same room

The venue describes itself as home to resident DJs alongside UK and international artists from the electronic and live music scene. In practice a local promoter can put a night on in the room that hosts a touring bill the week after, which is exactly the ladder a grassroots scene needs, and the thing we argued for in why grassroots venues are worth protecting.

6. Bristol, and why a room like this matters to it

Bristol does not have a shortage of talent, it has a shortage of rooms willing to take a Thursday on an unknown. A city where the mid-size rooms only book safe bets is a city where nobody gets a second gig. Rooms that run a jam, hand a local promoter the keys, and put a garage rock triple bill on a Friday are the reason a scene has a middle rung at all. Here is what is coming up across the city, from the same Bristol gig directory the board above is built on.

7. Welcome aboard

Artists can now find the room, see what it holds and what it supplies, and approach it directly. No agency in the middle, and no fee on the booking if the venue pays the act directly.

If you play Bristol, put this one on your list, and use the free tools to put a poster together before you do. If you run a room and you want the same, that is what the venue side is for, and this post walks through how other venues use it. Artists start here.

Annual refresh commitment

This guide was published on 20 August 2026 and is refreshed every August. venue details, capacities and the Suntrap Jam schedule, so annual verification matters. We re-verify every reference, recommendation, and data point once a year. Next scheduled refresh: August 2027. If any claim is outdated before then, email support@gigxchange.app and we will update it within 24 hours.