For those of you who weren’t there this is why the Venue is so expensive

Before the start of the 2003-2004 academic year there were lots of high hopes and optimistic expectations for the Venue, the biggest and most stylish nightclub for miles around and the jewel in Kent Union’s crown. There was a new big money makeover, with the Lighthouse morphing from overcrowded café to swanky, overcrowded wine bar with flat screen TVs, and new management ushering in what should have been a new era of prosperity and expansion. Their legacy from the previous year was an expanding business with regularly sold out Mondays, Thursdays and Saturday nights and the momentum and ideas to make Fridays and maybe even Tuesdays big moneyspinners too. The man charged with this responsibility was thirty year-old Phil Summers, a man with big ideas for the year ahead. Unfortunately for Phil, Kent Union and the students of UKC his business acumen did not quite match the expectations he had to carry.

I met Phil in the exam term at the end of the previous year when he was first taking over the club, when he asked me if I wanted to help run his new Tuesday rock night, Wired. The first band he had booked for the start of the New Year was ageing dad-rockers Shed Seven and I, having been manically sticking posters up all week long for a gig that had enjoyed minimal advanced advertising, was entrusted with making sure the whole night ran smoothly. In the end about 250 people turned up. It was the first of many disasters for the 1200 capacity Venue that year, but the extent of the disaster wasn’t clear until I found out how much the band had been paid. Summers was the first to admit he had never booked a band this size before and wasn’t sure how much they expected, so he offered them £5000. Five grand to entertain 250 students. What’s worse is that two weeks later the Wannadies played to another tiny crowd and walked home with £4500. These bands could have been booked for a fraction of those prices and the Venue were also paying hundreds of pounds to the sound engineers, Powerbass, and took nowhere near enough money on the bar. What’s more is that Wired was by no means the only night losing money, the Fresher’s Week events had struggled to capture the new student’s imaginations and they were looking elsewhere for somewhere to blow their student loans.

On Monday nights Pop Ya Cherry at the Works had stolen so much of their business that urgent action was needed. In response they spent huge amounts on glossy advertising for their own Monday night, Naughty, and Summers devised a promotion that he was sure would solve the problem. He made it free entry before ten (every night); the idea being that the Venue would recoup their losses on the door with extended drinking on the bar. What resulted was hundreds of people getting in to the club before ten and then leaving early, leaving poor old Phil at two in the morning with a near empty club and no more money. This new promotion was particularly disastrous at Wired on Tuesdays where Summers had also been charging a pound a pint, so they lost money on the bar and the door. These policies carried on well into the second term and the Venue was haemorrhaging money. The Freshers never returned in the numbers that they had in previous years and eventually Phil lost his job, and I lost my rock night. The new management were forced to increase prices on the door and the bar. The cost of a ticket was raised from £3 after ten to £4 after ten and £2 before and all of a sudden you couldn’t get drunk for less than twenty quid. There were no more live bands in the Venue and there probably never will be, at least not regularly. Then to top it all off before the end of the second term the Licensing Authorities witnessed a bust up in the Venue including several underage Canterbury College students and they came close to shutting the whole place down. In the end they banned non-students altogether, a situation that has only been partially put right since. For the first time in four years the Venue did not have a makeover last summer and the prices are here to stay.

And it had all looked so promising.

By Philip Reilly