Read the Fanzine Launch Night:
1st March 2006 @ Extra Time Bar, Barbican
DJs: Colm, Tris, JG, JK, Glyn
It's one thing talking about putting on a club night after a few beers when anything seems possible. But a different thing entirely in the cold light of day when you've got to go to work and you realise that your in the latter half of your 30s, you don't know one end of a mixer from another let alone DJ'd before, and you've know idea how much it would cost to put on a night , let alone know how to get people down there.
I still liked the idea and hadn't ruled it out, but it just looked like too much time and effort.
But then I spoke to my friend JG who though it was a good idea. "Why not do it as a party, if it just ends up a few mates playing CDs so be it". He had something there.
In the bleakness of January, the motivation of doing a night started to grow. But where?
Having never done anything like that before I assumed that venues would have a section on their website where you can find out their hire charges. Alas very few do, and with a bit more research found that the established venues are very choosy about who they will hire to (you need a proven track record before they will talk to you) and the venues that will hire to anyone usually don't have any passing trade so you need to build a crowd yourself.
As we were starting out the latter kind was our only option.
I tracked down a place in Barbican called The Extra Time Bar. On paper it looked ideal - stone throw from Barbican tube, short walk from Farringdon, DJ decks supplied and relatively cheap at £125 between the two of us.
It was a bit of an odd L-Shape but all things considered it seemed like the ideal venue, or at least as ideal as a pair of chancer's were going to get!
We booked it for 1st March, and after paying the deposit Tris designed a flyer, I found a cheap printer in Holland. Tris thought I was mental getting 1,000 flyers printed when we only had a capacity of 120!
We did it as a free entry (well nobody was going to pay to see us!) but you had to be on a guest list, places being requested via Email. This gave us an idea of how many people were going to come, so that we didn't overbook (yeah right!)
For the next few weeks we handed out flyers outside tube stations, in the Dublin Castle, gigs etc, oh and I got thrown out of the World's End in Camden for handing them out in there, but the bouncer was very nice about it, let me finish my drink and everything!
We managed to get 124 people on the guest list, which wasn't bad for a capacity of 120. Of course only about half of them turned up, and some only stayed for a short while - I don't think Tris has forgiven me yet for putting on Republica just as a load of people walked in, and promptly walked out again.
There were a few disagreements over music policy over the course of the evening (which is strange as we didn't have one) and the idea of playing lost gems all night went out of the window, and we ended up with a bit of a mish-mash, but the gathered crowd didn't seem to mind.
A lot of the crowd consisted of friends, family and colleagues of the people DJing who had been press-ganged into it. One exception was Glyn Parry who'd asked to DJ and said he could bring loads of people, which he duly did. He now DJs regularly as part of Wig at the Dublin Castle.
It was a fun night, quite chilled, and whilst I did go a bit populist in my playlist, I did manage to play The Dave Howard Singers, The Thieves, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and a few other lost gems.
It's fair to say that I'd gotten the taste for it!