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
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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.