Promoting a local gig is simple, reckons Gappy Tooth Industries founder Richard Catherall. He’s been putting them on monthly with his friend Alan Betteridge under the dentally challenged moniker since 2002, but when asked how he’s managed to run a successful gig night for over a decade, he’s remarkably blasé.

“Just emailing people and that, I suppose. Promoting is really very easy, if you put some effort in, which makes it all the sadder that it’s so often done awfully, doesn’t it?”

Richard and Alan first started the night when their band at the time, abel-jones, were struggling to find gigs. “We decided to book our own night instead of moaning about it on the internet,” says Richard, 37 from Oxford. “Soon enough the ethos of running a well-organised, hyper-eclectic event outweighed the desire to book ourselves, and the band in question died years ago anyway.

“After that we stumbled on, close to bankruptcy until this very day, running monthly gigs in The Jericho Tavern, The Zodiac and, when that morphed into the Academy, our current lovely home The Wheatsheaf.”

The Gappy Tooth guys don’t just stand out because they’ve been doing it for longer than anyone else. It’s also because they’re passionate about booking the most unlikely musical line-ups.

“GTI is all about booking unusual line-ups that will never be repeated. The big pleasure for me is when stylistically divergent acts work well on stage together. Erudite synth-pop act Trademark sharing a bill with American poet Kweisi was a good mix. Country For Old Men, who play the music their name describes, getting on a storm with odd Latin electrobods Poppy Perezz was great. Special mention must go to Klangstorm, who brought their own metal sculptures to bash with mallets, and The Naked Mystic who... well, I’ll leave it up to your imagination.”

The next Gappy Tooth night is no exception, with local hardcore punk veterans X-1 joined by goth rockers Partly Faithful and acoustic singer-songwriter Jordan O’Shea. “It’s the gig everyone says they want,” Richard concludes. “We run on time, we keep the price reasonable, we book original line-ups and we split all the profits between the performers.