Thankyou for clarifying that Bryan. Yes I'm well aware of both clubs and know the key people involved (I shold have guessed when you mentioned how close there are).

There are clubs, however, who operate as I describe, and rely entirely on the artists pulling power. That delivers poor results on a first booking uet when they don't get enough people on the first visit they're never invited back (it's even happend to me).

A few people here have endorsed that approach, but I think that's horribly unfair and ciminally short-sighted.

If they the performance was weak, of course no one would expect them to be re-booked, but if they were good, and went down very well with that small audience, then surely the sensible thing would be to assume that two to three years later their pulling power will have improved, but, more importantly, the people who DID come last time will act as advocates and persuade the doubters to be there this time.

With that attitude everyone wins - but not everyone is willing to take the broad view.