MUMBAI: Live music venue franchise blueFROG Delhi, which was rumoured to have uttered its dying croak, will soon be resurrected and is scheduled to reopen by end of May or early June.
The club is expected to have quite a few changes in the services that it originally provided.
When asked about these changes, blueFROG National Programming Head Jehan Johar replied, “There will be some structural changes. Since the property was very large, we have scaled down the outer area. We have taken out the fine dining restaurant. We had a massive kitchen that was supplying to these F&B outlets that we had. Since we are doing a little bit less of F&B, we have given up the kitchen and kept only a quarter of it. But overall, from the point of view of a customer who is going to the venue, the space is slightly scaled down from before.” The club initially had an outer courtyard, a rooftop terrace and a fine dining restaurant.
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Jehan also clarified, in brief, the reason behind the club shutting down. “There were many factors why we shut it down before. Many clubs in Delhi have either shut down or are not doing well. Generally, the city was not the best environment for all of this for the past year and a half. The combination of that plus what we were doing did not really work so well. So we wanted to stop, rethink and come back.”Amongst other reasons, low returns were suspected to be the primary cause for the initial shut down.
In addition to structural tweaks, the club will also see cut backs in the number of programmed days. “Before, we used to program every day of the week. We might not have that now; it will be only four days a week of programming.”
The management will open their new Pune club to the public in June and the Bangalore club by the end of this year.
Radioandmusic.com wanted to know if the Frog was going to follow the infectious trend of organising music festivals, but Johar assured us that they would not. “We do not want to have festivals. We would rather have a big artiste once every quarter and then take them to different cities. Every year there is a whole bunch of new festivals and it is getting redundant which is why we are focussing on getting one or two great artistes and doing an amazing one evening show, instead of doing a festival just like everyone else.” The club, however, does curate for festivals like the Sula Festival in Nashik and the first Falaknuma Festival.
Speaking of Falaknuma, Johar mentioned that blueFROG is presently in talks with the Taj chain of hotels for curating music events at all their heritage properties, but nothing is confirmed as yet.
