Read the Fanzine Launch Night:
1st March 2006 @ Extra Time Bar, Barbican
DJs: Colm, Tris, JG, JK, Glyn
With the venue booked and the date of 1st March set, it was suddenly all very real and we had about 6 weeks to get everything together.
Nick Snr Likes to Sing
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We had a music policy (or so we thought, more on that later) so the next thing was picking a name. I favoured "Under the Radar" or "Never 'eard of it!" to signify the fact we were playing lost treasures.
| "I think they are called the Inspirational Carpets or something" |
However Tris came up with a name that grabbed me right away - "Read the Fanzine". The relevance of the name is that we were playing the kind of bands that people would have written about in Fanzines, and it had quite a cheeky aspect to it. I vividly recalled seeing the Wedding Present circa 1988 with a great support band I'd never heard of before. Some bloke kept asking me what they were called, "I think they are called the Inspirational Carpets or something", to which he responded "The Inspirational what?", rather annoyed that he was distracting me from the band I demanded "Go and Read the Fanzine". Therefore the name instantly gelled with me.
Things were really starting to fall into place. Tris designed the logo based on Dymo Tape to highlight the punk attitude and DIY nature of the night, and designed a flyer with fanzines that his missus used to write for laid out as a background. He laughed when I suggested getting 500 printed as the venue only held 120 people - ah if only flyers got that kind of response rate!
| "we thought it would be too cheeky to charge people to come and see a couple of chancers like us playing our CDs" |
Despite paying to hire the venue, flyer printing costs and so on, we thought it would be too cheeky to charge people to come and see a couple of chancers like us playing our CDs, so we decided to make it free entry, but people had to e-mail us to get on the guest list. This had the benefit of making the night seem a bit more exclusive whilst giving us an opportunity to monitor how well the promotion was going, and gave us their e-mail address to inform them of any future nights.
Tris realised that the bar was open from 7pm to 1am so if there was only us DJing we'd be on for about 3 hours each, and he wanted to use it as a bit of a catchup with his old mates so we needed to recruit additional DJs. He had his mate Colmn in mind and I brought my mate JG on board.
DJs JK and Tris
I ordered 500 flyers and a couple of T-shirts from VistaPrint, registered the domain indieclubnight.co.uk (later changed to readthefanzine.co.uk - when starting out we felt that people would be more likely to google Indie Night than Fanzine).
I have to admit that I enjoyed distributing the flyers - most people seemed to be happy at being invited to a "guest list only" event and many seemed to be genuinely interested in the night.
DJs JG, Glyn and Tris
Tris and me handed flyers to people outside Camden tube, the Electric Ballroom, Dublin Castle, outside gigs, in fact anywhere we could. Indeed even going to a tapas bar in Waterloo for a meal with the T-shirt on had people enquiring about the night. Surprisingly, or at least it was surprising to me - guest list requests started to pour in almost daily and it looked like it was going to be a busy night!
| "some bloke from Barnet Council is coming down to play the Field Mice" |
One of the guest-list requests was from a guy called Glyn who said he worked for Barnet Council. He had a bit of DJ experience and was really into The Field Mice so wondered if he could DJ and would bring a lot of his friends down to see him perform.
It seemed too good an offer to refuse since many of the people on the guest list were now starting to make excuses about coming, so we needed to try and keep the numbers up. I found it quite comical when explaining about the night to people "oh, and some bloke from Barnet Council is coming down to play the Field Mice" which sounded wonderfully random.
At it's peak, the guest-list had 128 names on it, which would mean a full house, so it seemed like we'd cracked it!
I'd been on auto-pilot since booking the venue as there was so much to do, but now that things were just about set, with a week to go I got stage fright!
Looking down the list of names I realised that many of them were friends, colleagues and acquaintances - many of whom had pretty mainstream tastes. I began to have nightmares about people standing around tapping their feet saying things like "I haven't recognised a single song all night, where the hell did he get this stuff, this is a crap DJ".
| "Jesus Jones was definitely a mistake" |
I decided that it might be a good idea to tone it down a bit and mix in danceable tunes that made the charts along with some of the more obscure. I even made a playlist and ran it past Tris to see what he thought, and I think he just laughed. There were certainly a few cringeworthy tunes on that list in my attempts to please the more mainstream tastes. For example, Jesus Jones was definitely a mistake!
The night came, and about 64 people turned up over the course of the night - most of them familiar faces or friends of Glyn's.
We waited as long as we could to allow more people to turn up then Glyn went on and played a great mix of indie classics old and new.
He was given the early slot since nobody really knew him. The way it worked out he always seemed to get the short straw in terms of DJ slot, which is a shame as he always brought a lot of people and it's something I'd like to have put right but other issues relating to the night got in the way. He went on to do his own night though, Wig at the Dublin Castle - a venue he first played as part of Read the Fanzine!
I went on next and did an hour mixing the obscure and the popular, which seemed to go down pretty well, with even the most obscure tracks getting a nod of approval from around the room. I was particularly happy that Rock On by The Dave Howard Singers went down so well.
| "The only hairy moment was when I put on Republica just as a group of people turned up" |
The only hairy moment was when I put on Republica just as a group of people turned up and said something like "Oh no it's pop I'm off" and promptly left. It's fair to say Tris was not happy.
One of the tracks I played was a demo I'd received from "Big Cash Prizes" called "Fear of the New". As it turned out, the band were from Stoke on Trent as was Glynn, and he knew them personally - talk about a small world!
It was this discussion with Glynn that lead me to think about the possibility of putting on bands, and getting "Big Cash Prizes" on in particular.
JG came on and played a set of tracks from the era where some of the C86 bands made it into the regular charts such as Pop Will Eat Itself, Wonderstuff and so on.
Finally Tris and Colmn came on and did what the night was supposed to be about - under the radar classics, early Primal Scream and the like, and it went down well with the audience. Perhaps I should have stuck to my guns.
| "considering how badly it could have gone, it was pretty amazing" |
Despite a few ups and downs, and the lack of a concrete music policy causing a few arguments, it was generally a fun night, with a reasonable turnout, and all-in-all for a first night considering how badly it could have gone, it was pretty amazing.