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I lost £5000 when my club night was cancelled

Tristan Augier, 19, club promoter, was about to put on the largest urban music concert in UK history, before it was shut down by the Metropolitan Police, using the controversial Risk Assessment Form 696. The form, which promoters need to submit 14 days before an event takes place, has been criticised for targeting black and minority ethnic groups, and specific genres such as grime, garage, bashment and r'n'b.

Tristan

The concept of my event, Project Urban, was that at that time, in May 2009, none of the acts had done a full concert - they'd all been performing at club nights. So I thought let's get Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk, Ironik, Skepta and put them on in London's Indigo2 as a concert. They were all up for it, everyone liked the idea: it had never been done before and it was en route to be the biggest urban music concert ever been put together. But the police saw a different side to it. They said they had 'intelligence' they'd gathered via the 696 form - they ask you for  information about all the artists and the security you're using - which meant the event was 'high risk'.

The first reason was apparently the amount of people that were predicted to turn up (the venue has a capacity of 2500) - but surely that's going to be the case for any decent sized concert? The second reason shows how trivial their reasoning was. They said they'd seen two of the artists, Bashy and Ghetts, on YouTube having an MC battle that got a bit heated. Bashy disses Ghetts about having been in jail. The video was from several years ago, but the Metropolitan Police said it meant there was rivalry and they saw a risk the two artists were going to bring gangs down. Bashy and Ghetts featured on songs together after that occasion - and these 'battles' are just for hype and promotion anyway. They're not going to kill each other. If you meet them they're just normal people, they're not gangsters.

Meanwhile they said one of Chipmunk's crew members had been involved in a stabbing at the Urban Music Awards.Chipmunk's not been convicted of anything. I wonder if he even knows he's being branded like that by the police.

The wrong crowd?

Finally the police said they thought the crowd would be 'wrong', which I interpreted as meaning 'too many black people.' They said 'what do you think the make-up of the crowd will be?' I said: 'mostly 16 year-old white girls probably!' It was going to be on a Sunday and Tinchy Stryder got his first Number 1 that very same day. Ironik and Chipmunk were Number 3 in the charts. It would've been absolutely perfect timing. Tickets were flying off the shelves, so for it to be cancelled was a shock. We were getting national newspapers interested, Radio 1, everyone - it was a big deal.

We were willing to pay for up to £5000-£10000 in extra security to make sure the event went ahead. Because we kicked up such a fuss, one of the Chief Inspectors asked to have a meeting with us and Indigo2 - he wasn't too keen about the way we told our story, because it put the Met in a bad light. But he didn't get any change from me - if you're saying a concert should be cancelled because of what you've seen on YouTube then you really don't know what you're doing.

His response was that there was other 'intelligence' he couldn't tell me about; but if you can't be any more specific than that, then I'm not going to believe you. He could have kept it fairly vague. I wasn't expecting them to say 'this person is definitely going to shoot someone' - but they wouldn't give me any details at all.

Heavy metal has moshing which can cause injuries. Other scenes have drugs associated with them, but urban music fans are just music fans. And this is mainstream music now - the fans don't generally bring any trouble.

Five grand down

We lost £5,000 on Project Urban, mostly in advertising we'd just paid for, right before it was cancelled. I'd like to have another go at something similar, but at the time I booked most of the acts they were just on the verge of mainstream success. People like Tinchy Stryder's fees used to be £1,500, now they're more like £15,000 - in the space of about six months. So it's not really feasible to do it again.

In a way it was a good experience, I learned some of the pitfalls and now I'm working in promotions for some of the high-end Mayfair clubs, like Funky Buddha. My first love musically is grime, but this kind of experience does make you think twice about putting on a grime night.

A Metropolitan police spokesperson said: "When making a decision to stage an event the organisers will liaise with police on a number of factors including security arrangements, police intelligence and other events taking place in the same area on that night. A risk assessment, which includes information from Form 696, will then be provided to the licensee. From police feedback to the event manager at the venue, the event manager decided that the event would be cancelled. The decision to cancel the event was taken by the event manager and not the MPS."

Interviewed by Dan Hancox

Updated: 04/05/2010


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