Keeping it real with Rory Auskerry - October 2007

I’ve been back in Sunderland three weeks now. Just to recap, my self and five friends from Uni have teamed up to form Northern Hype which is essentially a promotion company. We have been given the chance to run a local nightclub every Friday and I therefore decided to come back a week before fresher’s even started so we could all work together for the final preparations. I knew there would be a lot of last minute stuff to do in preparation for the launch of ‘Hype’, the name we have given to our Friday night party, but what we have managed to achieve in the last couple of weeks has been a pleasant surprise.

We designed and bought 5000 flyers which we can use for the next few weeks as they are reasonably generic but we have already shifted 3500 of them. We did the same with posters and a large canvas banner with our logo on it. All the lads have pulled their weight consistently and after hours spent distributing flyers, putting up posters, talking to people about the night, going to meetings and on the night even going round the halls of residence with poster boards and a megaphone we felt we had done everything we could. Despite all this effort, by 6pm on the big day I was really tense, to be honest I was pretty hopeful it was going to go ok but I’m a worrier and there was just this nagging doubt that we had forgotten something or the band wouldn’t turn up or my mixer would crash or something.

In the end we did have a bit of a worry because the band turned up but our sound man who had been booked by the guys who run the club didn’t. We were faced with having to tell the band they couldn’t play, pay them and send them home. However, we were very lucky and got a stand in sound man at the last minute. In the end we half filled the club with about 250 people, the band got a good review, the bar sold out of Alco pops used to make our exclusive ‘pints of hype’ and despite letting in all the students for free and only charging non students after 12 we even made a small profit from the door. We all felt that it had gone better than we had even hoped and went home contented if a little worn out.

The trouble is, were doing this every Friday so on the Sunday night we had a meeting to decide who’s doing what in preparation for the new week, more posters to be designed and distributed, more flyers and more talking to people about the night. I feel very strongly that one of Northern Hype’s key selling points is the fact that we are all students running a club owned and managed by two young men from Sunderland who did what we are doing when they were at university. We are not some faceless money grabbing corporate entity.

Therefore people see us out and about giving people flyers and actually having a bit of banter with them, not just handing them out as people walk past, then they see us chatting to people in the pre club bar, and then they see us on the decks in the club. We are expecting a lull now after the initial ‘hype’ of the first week, but we are hopeful the night will grow and develop into a weekly fixture in peoples social calendars.

In this last few hectic weeks I have moved into my new flat, just 100 yards along from Flat 11, I’m now upstairs in Flat 30 with three of the guys I lived with last year and two new ones, Andy and Darren. The two Andy’s is proving quite confusing but nick names are helping, plus we have a balcony and an even better river view than last year so its all good.

I have also been doing the lunchtime 12 to 2pm slot on Utopia FM for the last two weeks. It will be over by the time this is published and I have to say I haven’t enjoyed it much as last time when I did breakfast. I believe this is due to two things, firstly the format of the show, and second the general lack of promotion for the station. First of all, doing a play listed show on my own quickly made me realize that I much better suit a format of radio programming called ‘zoo’. The Chris Moyles and Steve Wright shows are Zoo format, it basically means upwards of 2 presenters talking or at least in the studio at one time, often 3 or 4. It’s like a party on the radio and gives the presenters the chance to ‘bounce’ off each other. It’s very difficult to be funny and entertaining in a room on your own with nobody there to even smile at your jokes, whereas if you have two people with you laughing and bantering with you, you can be fairly sure you are reasonably entertaining. I would be happy playing classic rock music by myself in the evening because then the emphasis is on the music rather than the presenters banter.

The second reason for me not enjoying doing the show that much is the fact the station has had virtually no promotion. Therefore there are almost no listeners and as a result the presenters get no text messages or emails to speak of. This leads to people feeling they are making a lot of effort for it just fall on deaf ears. Also, without listener feedback you have no way of knowing whether you are funny, or rubbish so doubt creeps in, you get disheartened and a bored, the quality of your output drops and then you are rubbish. This cycle then continues. The reason there has been no promotion is because the University management have dragged their feet so much over money there is no cash available even for a poster campaign around the city. This makes me very annoyed and I’m therefore intending to run for management in May with Chris from Northern Hype so we can start making a fuss and try and make things change for the better of the presenters and the listeners. Cheers.