Hi all

Just a couple of thoughts as I feel I may have been misconstrued. I'm not in any way knocking Type 2 or 3 clubs. I owe both types a great debt as without them I wouldn't have had the chances to hone the skills that I now (hopefully!) have. The reason I went for a type 1 club, or concert club if you will, is that the local area is already well-served with venues and events of the other kind. And I still feel that if you're charging £10 on the door, putting floor spots of variable (and in some cases completely unknown) quality is rather unfair to your audience.

To give you an extreme example, I did a gig at a club a few years ago now. We were booked to do two 45s and were told to come off at 10.30 sharp as the venue hadn't got a licence past that time (this was prior to the new licensing laws.) It was a type 3 club so instead of a support there were a series of floor singers, some of who were good and some of whom were shall we say less than good.

We went on to do our first set at 9pm and came off at 9.35. I'd decided as it was a late start we'd chop a couple of songs from our set and explained this to the audience, around half of whom had come specifically because we were playing (ie - they weren't singers or regulars). I assumed we'd take a 10 minute break and be back on at 9.45ish, and was aghast when the organiser announced that we still had a few more floor spots to get through. Quite a few, as it turned out! People started leaving once it became clear that our last set was going to be drastically shortened and by the time we went back on at 10.10 to play our twenty minute set half the audience had left. The other half left shortly after we finished playing.

I asked the organiser why he'd let the other floor spots go on and cut our set. He replied "We have a policy of not turning anyone away who wants to sing." I pointed out that a sizeable chunk of the audience had come to listen and not to sing and indeed had paid £6 for the privilege, but he accused me of being elitist. At which point we left.

It's an extreme example, but the point I'm trying to make is that singers nights and guest nights are two very different things. Both of them are equally important in my view, but if you're going to mix the two you need to get the balance right. And heresy though it may be, if you're charging door money for people to see a specific guest, I think it's only polite to your audience to exercise some basic quality control over who you have as support/floor singers.