Just a few words regarding a soul night we run at Burscough British Legion. The event is advertised as an across the board underplayed soul night and has been running since summer 2007.
The reason we chose this particular music policy was because of the lack of local venues in the area playing underplayed sounds. In a twenty mile radius I could name a dozen events with a strictly oldies music policy----nothing wrong with that but we just wanted to try something a bit different. We do not try to run a rarest of the rare night, the music we play is a mixture of underplayed oldies, r&b, rare motown and a bit of crossover and modern.
Unfortunately some of the people who attend our venue cannot seem to grasp the music policy. There is a certain group who constantly harass the DJs to play overplayed oldies and one or two have given in to them and strayed from the desired music policy. Our last event took place on Saturday 23rd. February and started off really well----a good mix of across the board sounds which is what we state in our advertising. Unfortunately the aforementioned group attended the venue and started requesting sounds that are not appropriate to our policy. This led to the guest DJs playing tunes that were inappropriate to the night and resulted in a bit of ill feeling. Possibly I was wrong but I went on stage, took the mike and had words regarding the music and if people didn't like it they could always attend a number of other venues in the local area that will cater for their tastes. A group of people took offence and left the venue---never to return, I hope.
My point is, if I attend a venue with a particular music policy I would not dream of trying to change that policy. We are not trying to achieve anything revolutionary at Burscough, just play something a bit different to give people an alternative to all the oldies venues in the local area.
Your comments would be much appreciated in this matter.
