MUMBAI: With the opening of blueFrog’s Pune venue, people of all ages will have the privilege of calling themselves froggies. The venue will not just be a pub, but a place which will host cultural events like food festivals, film festivals, regional plays theatre and more. The area of the venue is 16,000 square feet (most of which is indoors) and it will also include an outdoor deck space. The space will be open for public from 21 August.
The club has an outdoor extension, an amphitheatre like structure, which previously hosted gigs performed by Above & Beyond and Anoushka Shankar, attracting around 2, 200 people and 1,000 respectively. The amphitheatre can accommodate up to 3000 people with ease and it also has a seating capacity of 672. However, the club has a seating capacity of 150 and can handle around 700- 800 people.
Ishan Bhale and Govind Thakker partnered with blueFROG to help build the venue up. Bhale said, “We have been in construction for seven to eight months now. It has taken us a while to build the place because we looked at every aspect of the club minutely. We tried making the club sound as acoustic as possible. A lot of the club has been acoustically treated to make sure that there is no sound reverberation.”
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Bhale added, “It will be like the Mumbai club which is good with its sound quality. From day one, we have spent lot of time on sound research and sound design. We have spent a fairly good amount on the overall sound of the club.” Munro Acoustics from London looked after the sound for the venue, while the interiors were done by The Bus Ride and other consultants.
Once the club is up and running, it will have four days of programming every week as it does not plan on having live programming as its counterpart in Mumbai. “It is not a market that needs to go live six days a week,” said Bhale. However, as compared to Mumbai, the Pune venue will have a bigger stage and will be able to accommodate “five to six piece bands.”
The first day of programming will start on 21 August with a performance by north Indian blues rock band Soulmate. On the first Friday, it will have electronic music with B.L.O.T. : Basic Love Of Things and then coming weekend t will have R&B artiste Thomson Andrews and DJ SA. There are few more artistes already confirmed for the month of August. Bhale also revealed that they are not targeting any specific genre of music.
Bhale made it clear that they want to create a “hub of music and culture.” He further added, “I do not want people to think it as a pub and that only their children can go there and the old generation cannot. We will help break the mentality with this venue. We want people to relate to the venue as the centre for art and culture. We do not want to be called as the night club. This is a vision blueFROG and Dice hospitality envisaged together”
When asked on the future plan of Dice hospitality. Bhale said, “Dice hospitality will venture into different hospitality space and blueFROG is our first venture into that space which we enjoyed and was a great experience. It has been a phenomenal journey with blueFROG. In the future, we are looking at expanding in dining space and other hospitality areas.”
The venue started its Facebook page ‘Blue FROG Pune’ just a few days ago and it has already garnered more than 2000 likes.
