All Time Top 100

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Why We Quit B'Lo

There were cracks appearing the week before the 'incident' when the venue owners told us we were to sack one of our residents or we would lose the night. In spite of the fact that he had rocked it for us, like, four / five times already. They objected to his use of a laptop, claiming records were better and that his music was 'dead' - he was playing The Clash at the time so that might give you an idea of the people we were dealing with here.

As well as being one of my best friends and a LONG time Top 100 partner and confidant he's an awesome DJ, so to threaten us with losing the night or sacking him left us in a bit of a quandry, to say the least. Even though we were confused and fuming we let it go for the night - knowing that he wasn't playing again for a couple of weeks and that maybe by then everything would have blown over or at least we could talk it through with the club owners during the week / in light of day.

A week later and we were back in the club again for what was to be our last night. Again the owners approached me complaining about the DJ and his choice of music, only this time they said we had to get him off immeadiately. Furthermore, they had their own DJ from the bar upstairs who was going to play instead. I explained - No - he's on for another half an hour and then one of our residents, Rosie, was going to play. This wasn't enough for them and they told me that if I didn't eject our DJ from the booth - they would.

By this time a minor scene was developing, me negotiating with couple of the club owners (there are three of them in total) and some close friends, but before I knew what was going on, one of the owners has crossed the club to the DJ booth with two 'heavies' off the door upstairs to physically remove our DJ. Aside from the fundamental lack of respect for DJ or promoter (more on this later) quite why the Security staff had to be involved I don't know. Our DJ's justifiable reaction to this confusing scenario was, shall we say, defensive. He had no idea what was going on, he hadn't been smoking weed, wasn't pissed up and being abusive, doing none of the things that would typically warrant ejection from a club. IN FACT the opposite - he was playing records for the GOOD of the people in the club. In the ensuing melee the door staff adopted an obscenely heavey handed approach (whether they were doing their job or not / just following orders is another matter) and eventually dragged our DJ - literally kicking and screaming up the feted spiral staircase and threw him out into the street, leaving him tattered and torn and his right arm covered in the most horrific of bruises.

Needless to say we were aghast. I had NEVER seen anything like it. After neutralising the scene in the street I spent a bit of time explaining the situation to our crowd then we collected our things and left.

What was the possible justification for this unprecedented, grotesque scene?

Perhaps they objected to our music policy and felt it we weren't gettting enough people in? Well why not just wait till the end of the night and say 'Sorry Folks - it's not working, don't come back next week?' We had done our research and sent a few people out on missions and as it turned out, proportional to venue capacity, we were actually out performing most other Friday nights in town. Our numbers were averaging 100 - 130 every week but I don't think they saw the bigger picture.

But that aside - the way that we were all treated on that final night simply beggars belief. It was a total breech of promoter / club owner relationships. Why should we work solidly for 2 months building a reputation for ourselves as a club as which plays good music just for you to force us to have DJs on that play The Bodyrockers? Why should we be out postering and flyering our line ups across town only for you to choose the DJs and the music? More to the point: Why are we paying YOU to RENT the club and not getting to play whatever the fuck we want????? Simply unbelievable.

So in a way probably best we left when we did. It became obvious that none of these people had any understanding of night clubs or any interest in contemporary music whatsoever. None of them have ever worked at a venue or run a club before. None of them had even been in a club (other than B'Lo) since May! They've been at that venue for almost a year now and nothing is improving. None of the nights they've had there have stayed, other than deTournement which is arguably something of an institution anyway. Other nights (who shall remain nameless - but I'm sure you can work out which ones they are) have left because of the sleazy or disrespectful conduct of the owners and most of the others have been sacked because they failed to reap substantial enough rewards after a short amount of time.

Their booker (the man between promoter and venue) left as a result of all this and as far as we can tell the venue can't be more than a month away from closing. I think their desperation to stay afloat was at the heart of all this. They'd seen people leave whilst our DJ was on and obviously being so desperate just to get a few more beers bought from the bar somehow decided the only thing to do was put a 'better' DJ on. Obviously this twisted logic failed since the music went off for nearly two minutes, there were ugly scenes in front of everyone in the club killing the atmosphere and I went round and got about 40 people to leave in protest!

So there you go. There's more I could say but I think you get the gist!

posted by: Jim Brackpool @ 7:21 PM

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