The literary lights of (every third) Friday nights reveal all about the Spotlight Club

"Let's do it at the Taj Mahal..."

Spotlight Club is now as much a part of friday nights as, well, going to the Pub. We sent roving reporter Paddy Garrigan to find out more from organisers Ron Baker and Sarah Fiske.

pg) can you give us some background on how long spotlight's been going, and how it started?

rb) five and a half years. December 15th, 1995, and it really started because John Freeman, who was then director of Litfest, asked us to put on some late-night, free-and-easy cabarets at The Yorkshire House. We put four nights on which were very successful, and we thought, eh, this is a good idea. So we decided to try and do it monthly. And five and a half years later, we're still doing it.

pg) What were you trying to do - was it simply entertainment, or was there some other kind of agenda?

rb) I was concerned that it should be entertaining, irrespective of the intellectual, high-flying ideas that went into it. It should always be a laugh. But there's also the chance to open up a little bit of a doorway, to facilitate going from writing in your front room and having nowhere to go with it, to having an audience.

sf) It's a chance for people to show their stuff off. We knew there were lots of writers and writing groups and musicians, so it was a chance to let those people show what they had been doing. I also think that people who would maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable at other types of literature events can feel relaxed - I think that's partly because there's a bar up there and they can come in and go out as they like

pg) how do you decide who gets to go on?

sf) one of the ways - one of the main ways - is that, off the floor, you get people coming in and doing five minutes and if they get a really good audience reation or if Ron and I think they're brilliant we get their telephone numbers so we can contact them and make a booking.

rb) It's a good way of testing people; some people come along and do five miunutes off the floor, and that's their entire stock of poems; whereas if you say "can you do fifteen minutes?", it can focus people in to having to edit their stuff and actually have to do something, rather than just turn up and have a laugh. Some people get rather freaked by that, but other people enjoy it.

pg) Following on from that, I was wondering have you ever had to turn anyone down?

sf) well, we do in a sense, in that we don't book people who don't get the reaction

rb) We have had, very rarely, people who have turned up off the floor and done stuff that was racist, or sexist, and there is simply no point in those people coming back. Although they may keep battering on the door, they won't get back in.

sf) there was one particular man, whose name I have now forgotten, who people still talk about four years afterwards, who wrote stuff about his wife which was both sexist and racist to an extraordinary degree.

pg) is it easy to run the spotlight club?

rb) it's easy in as far as we're organised. What happens every month is that we look and say, "oh, have we got Spotlight", and we've always got half of it. We're always plotting to bring people back again, and there's always a sort of mad scramble to think who shall we get. What quite often happens is, the week before, one, two or more people drop out, and then it becomes a real scramble, but having the backlog of people, having the experience of doing it, you can always get someone to fill the gap.

pg) I imagine that half of it is quite exciting in a way, you're sticking a line-up together

sf) it is, but it's also very frustrating when you haven't bargained on what people are planning to do, and suddenly you've got three people reading lengthy prose when you thought two of them were going to be reading poetry, that sort of thing

rb) that makes for a slightly cumbersome night

sf) it's tremendously important how long people are behind the mike, and it's wierd how quickly that can add up, even if people are behind the mike for just, say, five minutes too long, the evening begins to drag, and it builds up a drag

pg) I used to notice in folk clubs that if someone thinks, for a change, I'll do a 24-verse ballad, suddenly everyone thinks, oh, I've got one of those

sf) That's right. So that's always a bit scary, and you fell a bit brutal with people when you say, "you are only doing such and such, aren't you?", but it is essential for the evening to go well

pg) Going back to what you were saying about wanting it to be entertainment, what would be your dream line-up?

rb) Bob Dylan doing the first music spot, just one song. Fifteen minutes......but I think the ideal line-up is a good serious poet, a good comic poet, a good story-teller, and someone completely off the wall. You want someone making a sculpture out of his plastic mac or something.

sf) You know, you want something other, a monologue or something different

rb) When you get a good variety of things, you get fifteen minutes, and then it's over. If it's fifteen minutes of poetry, and then fiftneen minutes of poetry followed by fifteen minutes of poetry, you've had enough, you want to go and get a drink and forget about people's problems.

sf) We want more women, I'll say that. We don't understand why, knowing statistically far more women write than men, why statistically far more men perform. There's possibly a venue thing, as well. We like it here because it's a pub, and it's in a nice compact room with a bar upstairs with alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke and, that suits us down to the ground but it doesn't suit a lot of people. I do know a lot of women who don't come because of that.

pg) In an ideal world, then, if the yorkshire house weren't available, where would you choose to hold the Spotlight. I'd thought that Ceasar's Palace would be quite a good choice

rb) personally, if I won the lottery, I would buy the Georgian Club, re-open it, do it out in full georgian fashion and put on shows, and local bands, in a very intimate local venue with a good bar

sf) Yes, with a silver stage and mermaids in a tank..... But, internationally, it's hard to say. There's a very nice theatre where they do something similiar in St Helen's, called The Citadel, and that's a really good venue. Or the Taj Mahal.

pg) if Spotlight were scheduled against, for example, England in the semi-final of the World Cup or something like that, would you consider rescheduling it? Or is it something that you know will roll on?

rb) I don't think that we'd reschedule it for anything, really

sf) It's difficult, really, because we have people that travel from quite a long way away, increasingly - we've got one person from St Helens - and I think that you'd still get a lot of people turning up here with nothing to see

rb) I think the point is that the people who rely on it will always come out, so there is always an audience

pg) during the litfest, you get two or three nights, don't you?

sf) no, not this year

rb) this year, we're doing the poetry slam, we're opening the festival on the saturday night, 17 October. So having just said we wouldn't reschedule...

sf) all those people who would never usually come can write poems.

rb) it'll be compered by Byron Vincent, with three prizes for the best poems on the night:- top prize of £75, second prize £50, third prize £30. £3 to enter, and you get three minutes, one poem, and it's just a play-off, the best poem wins.

pg) How do you think that the literary/musical greats would fare at spotlight?

sf) I think it would be intimidating

rb) we often watch stuff on the telly, and the comment comes out, "I wouldn't have him at Spotlight, I wouldn't have that at spotlight", and these might be top-rate television performers, but they'd go down liike a lead balloon.

sf) I think it'd be intimidating for a lot of people who are used to performing on their own because they wouldn't be used to doing this kind of thing.

rb) i think you've got to engage with the audience, We've had the odd person(s) come, bit of a name, to do a spot and they don't engage, they don't talk to anybody, they don't engage with the room, they just sit there looking glum and do their bit and come off and look glum again. And the audience tends to look glum as well, because what's sad about it is that, if the audience is supposed to sit there and listen to your great wise words, like lapdogs, you've got to be doing something that touches them. I think it's a test - it's a very tight little atmosphere, and you've got to come across; you won't get booed, you won't get hassled, but you may get huffed silence.

pg) I've always liked the idea, with performers, that the only difference between you and them is that they're on stage and you're not

sf) it is like that, i think, and it's great sitting at the door, watching people come in and wondering whether they can do anything at all, and what they're going to do, because often it's the most unlikely ones who turn out to be the ones that will. I love that.

pg) If you could change one thing about spotlight, what would it be?

rb) it's somewhat impossible, but it would be to make the room bigger without losing the intimacy so we could get in more people, or more seats.

sf) and maybe have a really good projector, and a screen, so you could do multi-media stuff.

pg) do you think that'd be important, or would it take away from the performers?

sf) actually, I bet it would.

rb) when we've tried doing similar things at the gregson, which, in terms of capacity, is only about thirty more people, but in terms of size is about four times the size, it just doesn't quite work. You don't get that level of intimacy. You get a different response, and, because it's a bigger space, the performers have to perform bigger, and it all gradually dissipates.

pg) Finally, we're here to advertise the Spotlight - give us one-sentence to sell the Spotlight?

rb) it's more cabaret than poetry reading - I look through a lot of poetry reading things that I've been to, it's people sitting in a semi-circle, or people sitting in ranks and file, and no-one speaks. Here people sit at round tables with their friends and the performance goes on in front of them, it's a much more relaxed thing than your usual literary event: plus, it's sandwhiched between two sets of music which breaks up the atmosphere, and gives it a begining and an end.

sf) Ian Marchant was once described as "Homer Simpson on Speed" at spotlight, so it's from...

rb) it's everything from Homer to Homer Simpson