And so it begins. A long journey.

My name is Tim Hornsby.  Nearly twenty years ago I had this mad idea to start a live music venue.

This is the story of Fibbers, me, the bands, the customers (bless 'em!), the staff, the people that helped, the folks that got in the way and much more besides.  I have booked and operated another two well-known music venues but I still book at Fibbers and elsewhere.  I also lecture on promoting/venues/bands and mentor starter businesses for a famous young persons' charity.  I also contribute under a pseudonym for a couple of music mags.

We all have 'clang' moments, as I call them. They define your life, perhaps without you realising at the time.  But happen, or ‘clang’, they do.

My Fibbers clang moment happened late one Thursday evening in May 1992.  I had been the manager of The Old White Swan, a huge city centre pub, for four years and was already a decade in to a career as publican/licensee. Sucking on a Castella Classic in the front courtyard I noticed a man, a strange man, darting from doorway to doorway.  Odd, as there was nobody else on the street and nobody, except me, watching him.

He fluttered in and out of shop entrances and on his return path (same shops, back the other way) I asked what he was up to.  Looking around for someone who was wasn't there, he whispered, “The bailiffs have been to Ellingtons. I’m guarding it for someone".  To this day I've no idea why on earth 'someone's' flunky was running up and down a street half a mile away from somewhere he was 'guarding'.  It must have been fate.  Thanks, God ...

'Ellingtons' was a fun pub in the bowels of nearby eyesore Stonebow House where the only people that had fun were the owners, frequently drinking in town every weekend when perhaps they should have been providing their customers with the fun instead.

Yes, my next clang moment had come and the next day I phoned an insurance rep, a regular customer.  Further down the line that same insurance rep absconded to Ireland after writing me a dud cheque for cash but, for now, he was invaluable arranging an immediate meeting with the Ellingtons landlord.

But what was I thinking? A single parent with three girls aged four, eleven and twelve, on a good salary running the (then) busiest bar in York, working four and half days a week, settled.  Clang!

Within two months I had cashed in an insurance policy, signed the lease (never paid the solicitor – sorry, mate), bedded the brewery rep (I'm still with her) and I was on my way.  To creating one the UK’s best known, most enduring and loved small music venues, Fibbers.  And nearly, and then totally, losing the lot.  I’m still here.

Along this journey I'll update you, in real time, with bands I'm booking that you have to see and most likely some you should avoid!  You'll discover all you need to know, and a lot you shouldn't, about small venues and why they are more than just the petticoats of the nation's music scene, but the very fabric, the design, the sewing machine, the lot.  I may also tell you the sorry tale of how a rock legend with a blonde and her wheelchair ended up in the venue rubbish skip.

Coming up: being conned out of twenty thousand quid before I even got the bloody keys; the first rule of agents; why banks occupy that special place in my affections between an ice cream headache and a stubbed toe; and how to get a venue going without knowing the slightest thing about what you are about to do ...