Union goes bananas: Top B is back

The New Year heralds the latest overhaul to the Students’ Union’s entertainments programme, with the rescheduling of much of the nightlife in the Copper Rooms venue.

The changes come in response to a period of heavy student criticism of Union nightlife and insufficient attendance on both Mondays and Fridays last term.

For many students the most obvious change to the programme is the return of ‘Top Banana’, the chart music night that had recently been replaced by ‘Manic Mondays’. The new ‘Top Banana’ takes place every Friday night, where its cheap drink deals will place it direct competition with the popular club Kasbah in Coventry.

In a clear effort to attract students who live in Leamington, and were the main attendees of the original ‘Top Banana’, Uni Express has been enlisted to provide transport to and from campus every Friday night. Uni Express is a company started by a Warwick graduate that specialises in transporting students to and from nightclubs.

The return of ‘Top B’ marks the demise of last term’s new Friday night event, ‘O.M.G’, which suffered from poor attendance. In what will surely be good news for the SU, however, the first Top B last Friday was sold out even before doors opened, in sharp contrast to the low attendance at O.M.G.

This term also sees the end of ‘Manic Mondays’, and with it the closure of the Copper Rooms on Monday nights. The Venue and Entertainment Department claim that survey results revealed that students felt that Monday was a inconvenient night to go out, with the demographic that had frequented ‘Top B’ until Summer 2010 now mainly living off-campus.

In keeping with what Nikki Smith, the Entertainments Development Manager, described to the Boar as an indispensable attempt to cater for the musical tastes of all students, the evenings are to be filled by an eclectic mix of smaller events, with the launch of ‘Mixology,’ and ‘La Juerga,’ in the Terrace Bar, and acoustic live music on Tuesdays in the Dirty Duck, as well as the return of the popular ‘Get Funked,’ which brings hip-hop and funk to the Terrace Bar on Friday nights.

Rachel Buchanan, a second year undergraduate who has had a chance to compare the Copper Rooms of first term with that of the previous year, argues that on some nights “The Copper Rooms had a less exciting atmosphere than the library, which is disgraceful considering it monopolises an audience of thousands.”

Students have several theories as to why the Union has historically struggled to provide a competitive clubbing experience.

Paul Norman, a History undergraduate, believes that “The Copper Rooms can hardly hope to compete with other local nightclubs, as the majority of profits that it takes are immediately invested in supporting the Union’s other activities.”

The Copper Rooms is a unique blend of commercial enterprise and a membership-based organisation, meaning it has to provide universal musical entertainment, a problem that many clubs can largely ignore.

The Entertainments Department claims that in spite of the criticism, Warwick SU performs better than most other comparable establishments.

The lack of well-known bands playing in the Copper Rooms has been justified as a symptom of the national shift away from rock music, with the Guardian recently reporting that there were only three rock tracks in the 100 best-selling singles this year.

In other genres, the Union is faring much better, with Chase & Status and Sub Focus having visited the Copper Rooms twice each within the last year and a half.

The next five weeks will be an important period for the Copper Rooms, as the Union tries to gauge student reaction to these changes.

Conspicuously the ‘Term 2 Wallplanner’ doesn’t give any information on the second half of term at all. The Entertainment Department claims that this is an indication of their willingness to adapt the programme according to public feedback.

The position of the Students’ Union has always been that its improvement and development can only be brought about by students attending the events that the Students’ Union already provides.

An article on the SU website states that: “We want our Entertainments Programme to be as good as it can be, but without your enthusiasm, input and attendance, it will always stumble at the first hurdle.”