An Introduction To Club Fandango
Club Fandango is an independent live promotions enterprise based in Highbury, North London. Launched as a weekly event in March 2001 at the Dublin Castle in Camden Town. Club Fandango has since expanded to oversee an average of four shows a week in London and many more across the UK working with a hearty variety of partners and an alarmingly broad range of musical sounds. What the main protagonists have lost over the years is a lot of sleep and a little bit of hair. What they have garnered over that same period of time is a watertight reputation for efficiency, honesty and a darned good ear for top new music while developing a musical Fandango community which now embraces a record company, a fanzine, an online MP3 shop and an annual urban mini-festival.

Club Fandango - The Big Picture
Club Fandango was created seven years ago by two bastions of London's alternative promoting circuit. Between them Andy Macleod and Simon Williams had already been involved in putting on brand new bands at venues such as The Camden Falcon, the Water Rats in Kings Cross, Dingwalls in Camden and the Bull & Gate in Kentish Town under various guises, noticably Club Spangle, Club Panda and the NME 'On' nights. Not only that, but with the experience the two men had of running their own record companies - Pointy Records in the case of Andy and Fierce Panda in the case of Simon - when the duo got back together to set up a weekly event on the hitherto unpopular Tuesday night at the Dublin Castle the musical underground didn't know what was about to hit it.

Since that fine day the Club Fandango booking roll call would make an A&R person weep; Arctic Monkeys, Keane, Bloc Party, Scouting For Girls, The Wombats, The Kooks, Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight, The Feeling, Guillemots, Hard-Fi and The Killers are but a tiny selection of the hundreds of bands who've come through the system over the past seven years. Virtually unknown at the time they have all gone on to infiltrate the mainstream with huge success. Crystal ball watchers may care to observe that more recent Fandango debutants Royworld, Ida Maria and In Case Of Fire should be household names by Christmas, having signed to Virgin, Sony/BMG and Columbia respectively over the past few months.

Seven years on, and Club Fandango has expanded beyond all original expectations: as the flow of phone calls, tip-offs and demos from eager new bands became a deluge, more weekly nights were set up to attempt to cope with the demand; and as the Fandango word spread across the nation, monthly showcase events were set up in Manchester, Bristol and beyond. In London, Club Fandango now promotes regular shows at the 229 in Great Portland Street as well as every Friday at the Wilmington Arms in Farringdon. Add in the flagship Dublin Castle nights and our bi-monthly shows at the Borderline in the West End and there is a monthly capacity for well over 3000 punters at Club Fandango events. Little wonder that this potential audience has attracted media partners across the board, which helps immensely: the BMI music collection society, the BBC 6 Music radio station and the Rock Sound metal magazine all co-promote regular Club Fandango shows, adding to the texture and variety of the events by bringing different genres and ideas to the table. Club Fandango also happily works alongside industry events such as the Camden Crawl, In The City in Manchester and The Great Escape in Brighton in a bid to spread the good word and there are plans in place to set up larger quarterly BBC 6 music gigs at the 229.

Club Fandango aims to be as eclectic as possible: for the sake of the punters' sanity we shall endeavour to ensure that bills flow smoothly and logically, but each week could well see the mood swing from post-rock to electronica to nu-metal to new acoustic and onto lovely, lovely indie schmindie. Club Fandango will contain surprise guests and secret shows. We love launch gigs and concept nights and record release parties and general good time vibes, and when it comes to
booking big names for small rooms we are VERY discreet. Your secret gig will be safe with us.

It isn't all about just putting on gigs, either: late in 2006 Label Fandango records was set up seeking to further aid the progress of the nation's musical youth. The no budget record company (sensible tagline: "No frills, all thrills") specialises in limited edition seven inch vinyl releases and Brinkman, Air Traffic, The Hot Puppies, Royworld and Fanfarlo are just a handful out of the 19 artists so far to move onwards and upwards to larger labels. The next step for the label is to begin releasing albums over the upcoming summer months.

Early in 2008 Zine Fandango joined the fray as well, an independent publication which is ostensibly a glorified flyer and manifesto sheet for Club Fandango's nefarious activities but which is already displaying potential to grow into a stand alone bundle of music opinions, debates and strange tales about Simple Minds wannabees. The next step for the fanzine is to attract advertising from other companies to make the publication a viable commercial concern.

And in the summer of 2007 we finally flipped our lids and invented a week-long event called A Fistful Of Fandango. Last September we took over both rooms at the aforementioned 229, a venue with a potential capacity of 800 people a night. We decided we would do this on June 2nd. Incredibly the first Fistful event took place just three months later with a grand total of 24 bands playing over four nights. Even with the odd technical hitch and the rogue less-than-popular band the event was a tremendous success with established old Fandango friends such as Maps and British Sea Power mingling with a slew of up-and-coming talents like Operator Please, Friendly Fires and Pete & The Pirates. The Get Involved organisation handled the PR side of things with tremendous aplomb, garnering Fandango accolades across the printed press.

All walks of music industry life have tapped their toes on the Club Fandango boards: A&R men, publishers, managers, journalists, press officers, DJs, lawyers, agents and even rival promoters are often to be found checking out the entertainment. Other punters include rock enthusiasts, generally clever people and, most important of all, new band's burgeoning fan bases. The basic truth is that you can go down to the Dublin Castle on a Tuesday night and see three to four carefully hand-picked new bands for £6.00 (or £5.00 with a cheap downloadable flyer from the website) and if that doesn't represent value for money, we bally well don't know what does.