The Sheffield Scenester

Today we were meeting up with Paul and Andy at The Pomona, who essentially started up the Sheffield Unsigned Bands website, a site that seems devoted to letting bands play good venues without the hassle of selling ‘X’ number of tickets. We wanted to find out how such a set up works, if it works and what does the future hold in store for it….

Scenester: So how did the Sheffield Unsigned Bands (SUB) begin…..?

Paul: What happened originally was me and Andy got to know each other because he plays in Lateral Vision….
Andy: I put together a few nights at Varsity and played a few gigs with the band Platinum Blind….
Paul: Yeah we kept meeting up at gigs, cos my partners son’s in Platinum Blind, and it was the same bands meeting up in the same places...so we just got together and said “lets start something up” and see if we can get different venues and get the bands on where they don’t have to pay to play...so that was the basic idea. Then we started the Facebook page and it seemed to go quite well...so we decided to start up a website as well, then we got venues on board, then got more and more people in touch really, you know... “can we put bands on here..?” and things like that. It’s been a bit crazy lately; I mean we use four or five venues at the moment…..

Scenester: So...what venues are we talking about here?

Paul: There’s this one here (The Pomona), Penelope’s, The West End...we did quite a bit there and they are now opening up on a Sunday night....which is when they don’t normally open. The first Sunday of every month is gonna be a band night and we’re gonna put like six bands on. Sometimes we use The Lescar; we go and do things at The Dickens Bar in Rotherham and Vintage Rock Bar in Doncaster, so by the end of the year there should be six or seven venues we’ll be using regularly. That’s the basic gist of it…..
Andy: We make sure every venue we’ve got, we make successful like. I got fed up with seeing great bands in Sheffield....especially playing in a band myself....and not mentioning what venues they are...but bands were told it doesn’t matter how good they are just as long as they bring people...that’s what some promoters tell bands, as long as they’ve got loads of friends to come we’ll give them a chance……
Paul: We’ll give every band a chance as long as we’ve heard them first……
Andy: Yeah we want bands to be good, and bands that have got following to play alongside bands that haven’t got much following, to give them a chance…….
Paul: At the end of the day if you put some bands on that aren’t really well known with some bands that are, then hopefully they’re going to make a few fans aren’t they. When they come to see the main band they might catch the others and think ‘Yeah, they’re alright!’ we’ll pop down and see them again, and that’s how we’re hoping it works.
Andy: Certain bands have to play with certain other bands now as well, for instance Who Dares like to play with Vagrant Kings and they like to gig together now…….
Paul: We do mix the genre, you know put four or five bands on from different genres and it gives people some variety…..

Scenester: So where do you actually get the bands from?

Paul: We poach them off the internet; you know MySpace, Facebook and Twitter……
Andy: Actually seeing bands as well and knowing quite a few bands through gigging, so there are different ways of getting bands…..
Paul: We’ve got 200 bands on the database now and they range from not only Sheffield and South Yorkshire, but we have people coming from Manchester, Liverpool, Midlands and Sunderland……
Andy: We don’t put on all out of town bands...but one out of town band on a night is nice…..
Paul: There’s also a couple of bands we got last week from Glasgow and Ireland, even a really big American band wanted to come over...but we said we haven’t really got the venue for you to play...but we did put a band on here called The Zee Band who have a Polish singer and they play Poland quite often. In fact the week after they played here they went to Poland and played to 12,000 people and the Mayor of the actual place where they play in Poland paid all their expenses and everything.
Andy: That’s what they do; they make their living with a couple of grand out there and loads of airplay…..
Paul: Yeah, they go out at least four or five times a year and play to arenas……
Andy: But they’re getting four or five grand a gig aren’t they, not a bad life if you ask me!
Paul: The thing is...when we started we would go up to bands and say “We’re putting on a gig, do you want to play with us?” and now they just come up to us, we don’t even have to advertise it anymore! I mean we got the dates here till the end of October, but last night they said we can do it till the end of the year!

Scenester: When you say you’ve got bands from as far a field as Glasgow, Ireland and Sunderland, how much is it actually worth to them to come and play in Sheffield?

Andy: Well it’s different isn’t it, kinda like a holiday, if you want to come to Sheffield and see what it’s about and then make a night of it……
Paul: You see Sheffield’s got a good reputation as far as music is concerned, especially with what happened to The Arctic Monkeys. Now people want to come and play Sheffield, but at the end of the day it’s all about putting bums on seats. People aren’t gonna come out here in the middle of the week so we try and stick to Thursday, Friday and Saturday so that bands aren’t coming and playing to nobody…..
Andy: We use venues were we know bands will bring in a few, but there is loads of passing trade...like this one, The Pomona……
Paul: Which does have a good sound, talking of which we provide all the PA ourselves…..
Andy: We do it for all the venues we use, except Penelopes who provide their own…..
Paul: Yeah but for all the others we provide the PA, the mixing desk and the sound engineer, and we bought a five piece drum kit for bands that can’t provide a kit on the night, plus we’re gonna buy a bass amp cos they’re heavy. It saves bands having to drag a load of kit around with them, which obviously can be expensive if they don’t have the transport, the drum kit especially, cos they can stick guitars and amps in a car……
Andy: If they’re driving...because we’re offering them free beers…….
Paul: This place, and The West End provide about fifty beers for the bands, it’s part of the deal we have for setting bands on here, so a three piece band have two or three each, a four piece has two. We had one band on last night and the singer was extremely drunk before he started, unfortunate like but he still sounded alright..!

Scenester: So do you help bands, with wider exposure?

Paul: There’s a couple of bands coming up through the ranks who are getting a bit of a following, there’s one at the moment called Maybe I Might Explode who are playing tonight and they do bring the crowds in. We are putting an event on called OxJam, which is in aid of Oxfam, and there is one happening in Barnsley the night after so because we couldn’t get Maybe I Might Explode on the Sheffield one then we put them on at the Barnsley one instead, so we do try and help bands out like that. If we get people ringing up, say Mark from Dickens saying “We’re stuck can you help us out and get us a band?” then we do try and help them out any way we can. Quite a few promoters do ask us and we’re happy to send a band their way, this helps the bands cos they get to play out of town and to a different crowd, which is what they want! These bands that come from Sunderland and that have played their hometown so they want to try and get recognised in another city….
Andy: We had a Liverpool band down the other day and to them it was like a holiday, they brought a good crowd with them and they also went down well with the local Sheffield crowd……
Paul: Like The Hoover Dams, we had them on last week from Bradford, they’re a signed band and they loved it and say they want to come back! I mean last night we had about 150 people in on a Friday night, if you put that amount of people in some of the bigger venues then they’d still be half empty…..
Andy: I’ve played at some of them and there’s only been about twenty people there, great sound...but at the end of the day you want to expose your music don’t you……

Scenester: You mentioned OxJam earlier……

Paul: We’ve got that here on Friday 29th October and Ruberlaris are headlining that, Steel Trees, Lateral Vision, The Stoops are all playing. We’ve got about 200 confirmed on Facebook already so it is going to be busy, and we’ve had to order a bigger sound rig for that night. We would have liked a bigger venue but everywhere else is booked up, Penelopes might have been better, but when Oxfam approached us we only had The Pomona left! It’s a real venue if you like and not one that’s built for music, so it gets passing trade so people walk by and think ‘Oh they’ve got music on in there, lets pop in and see what it’s like!’

Scenester: What else do you have in the pipeline then?

Paul: At Tramlines we put together a CD, we got nineteen local bands to send us studio recorded MP3’s……
Andy: Basically we’re doing another one for Christmas……
Paul: We called the last one Tramlines at Penelopes CD with nineteen tracks, all totally different from each other, even had a Death Metal band on it and we just gave it out to people who came in. But we still get people asking if they can buy one which they can, the bands all know this and any money we get just goes back into things like buying the bass amp and stuff like that. Plus there’s wear and tear on equipment, like nearly every week a lead will go and they’re about twenty quid each, and hopefully if we get enough money we’ll get a big lighting rig for places like this cos there’s no lighting here.
Andy: Other plans for the future include putting together our own radio station, which will be one night a week or something……
Paul: Yeah, but aside from that we’re just building and building on the website, it’s actually doing quite well, we’re getting hits from places like Japan and New Jersey as well as loads from Sheffield of course…..

Obviously the unsigned market is thriving as both Paul and Andy will testify to, and with plenty of new talent coming up through the ranks they will have no shortage of gigs in the future. We at Scenester would like to thank them both for their time and look forward to seeing them at Oxjam!