The Domino Club in Leeds is celebrating a milestone as it has paid £1 million to musicians since opening in 2017

Yorkshire Evening Post

The Domino Club in Leeds is celebrating a milestone as it has paid £1 million to musicians since opening in 2017. Ryan de Warne is the music director at the club

Transcript

00:00My name's Brian Dewan, I'm the music director of the Domino Club Leeds, I was one of the

00:05founders of the Domino Club in 2017 and we're here to talk about the fact that

00:12we've hit the milestone of paying 1 million pounds directly to musicians, no

00:18need for agents and just, yeah, proud of the fact that we're doing that.

00:23So tell me a little bit about how that works, first of all how did you come up with the idea,

00:27how did you realise that you'd reached the 1 million pound milestone and how

00:34are we celebrating that fact? We realised we hit the milestone through our

00:40bookkeeper basically that alerted us to the fact that yeah we were about to hit

00:47the milestone of a million, we weren't really, you know, it wasn't something we

00:50were aiming for, it just came about and felt it's something worth

00:54shouting about because there's not as many grassroots venues as there

00:59once was and yeah we're proud of the fact that we're going strong, we're

01:05managing to pay people fairly and yeah that money goes directly to the

01:10musicians. Tell me a bit about the payment process then, so you run this

01:14club, you're open five nights a week, you have a couple of hundred musicians on

01:19every year, daily events, how does that money, how does the money reach the

01:25bands and the musicians? It's literally as simple as I do all the booking, the

01:31musicians do their performance and then they send their invoice in, we pay them

01:36basically, within 10 days the musicians play, they get paid, it's as simple as

01:42that. So you're going to host a one million pound week in there, is that correct?

01:47It's this week basically, the whole week is, we're not necessarily doing

01:53anything different to what we normally do, some of our, you know, the bands that

01:57have played here the most are playing this week, bands like the Domino Funk and

02:02Soul Band who have played here from the start, yeah so they're performing, some

02:10of the musicians from the Funk and Soul Band are from a, in my opinion, a

02:15legendary Leeds band which is the Haggis Horns, it's the rhythm section from the

02:19Haggis Horns alongside Cleve Freckleton who's been part of the Leeds scene

02:24from the start, so they're playing this weekend along with some of our house

02:28bands, yeah it's sort of, we're doing what the Domino does but it's in celebration

02:33of the fact that we've hit this landmark. So grassroots venues are a bit of a hot

02:39topic at the moment, you know, Oasis recently announced their reunion and

02:45when they did that the Music Venue Trust basically listed all the venues that

02:50they toured in 1994 and turns out that 11 out of 38 of those are still up

02:56and running, one of them, the Dutch is in Leeds which just received, you know, a

03:01blue plaque, so grassroots venues are a hot topic at the moment, how important do

03:06you think grassroots venues are to musicians in general but I'd say local

03:13bands specifically? It's incredibly important, at the end of the day without

03:17your grassroots venues there are no Oasis, you know, you don't have

03:23these big bands at the end of the day because yeah there's a progression, you

03:26yeah, you learn to perform to a crowd in a grassroots venue, yeah it's

03:34incredibly important, I mean there's nowhere near the amount they used to be

03:37and yeah proudly, you know, we have about 450 performances per year in this club

03:46ranging from, you know, duo performances right up to massive brass bands, 17

03:52piece bands, you know, and up, so yeah it's incredibly important.

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