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Bath Spa were as usual incredibly helpful to Moles Club & The Porter and we have a great relationship with them, which helps us to give the students at that university a really great deal. The students were as usual well informed in advance about “Moles Club” and were enthusiastic to hear about what we had on offer. This year the memberships went down better than ever with over 1000 student memberships being issued at Bath Spa, and about 700 being issued at the University. It’s fair to say that the Bath Spa intake are a lot more live music savvy than their counterparts up on the hill many of whom seemed to have difficulty comprehending the idea of “live music” at all. I suppose that’s technology students for you…. Still those that did have the nouse to join have got a great deal, and will find their stay in Bath much enriched by all the great live music on offer – not to mention all those groovy t-shirts paid for by our great friends Courage Brewery!

Back to Bath University and their “cold war” policies. Can you believe it, they wanted to fleece us for several hundred quid for a poxy stand at the Fresher’s Fair, but wouldn’t allow us to advertise our nights! How ridiculous! If you can’t advertise your nights – particularly if you are a live music venue, then how can you promote yourself? Anyway, Kath our office manager got round that by advertising the bands that we had coming up – and that of course is not advertising a night is it. It worked well, and we generated lots of interest in the live music we were promoting – particular favourites being Pharcide, Howling Bells, and Annie Mack, it’s even rumoured that Milo will be doing a DJ set early next year. One wonders why the university have such a silly policy. Are they worried that their audience, already almost captive up there on the hill, will think that the University Venue is so rubbish that no-one will go there. A big thumbs down to their policy, and why are they trying to prevent their students from finding out what’s going on in town? All very unfair, uncompetitive and petty, and certainly not reasonable to their new students who they should be helping to find things out, and certainly not hindering them. Anyone who feels strongly about this should get the whole issue of censorship debated by their union, and a more open and fair policy instituted in stead.

On the positive side, the Moles & Porter team were great at promoting the club & pub which helped to create a real buzz around the Moles/Porter stand that was conspicuously missing from the other bars’ & venues’ stands. We were mobbed for most of the time we were there, and now have around 1800 e-mail addresses to put on the computer mailing list. So a big well done to the team who went to both freshers fair venues to help promote Moles Club & The Porter. Let’s hope that we’ll see a lot of the new students down at the club getting into some serious live music instead of all that commercial crap dished out at most Bath clubs these days.

Philip Andrews - Moles & Porter proprietor.

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