Damo Jones is celebrating 25 years of PR in 2025 – it’s now a quarter of a century since he sent out the first press release for Chibuku Shake Shake, the club night he and his friends co-founded as students.
Currently he works with Bongo’s Bingo, The Art School, LEAF and Ma Boyle’s, along with other projects in the North West and beyond.
Jones has just started working with The Florrie and is also back on season three of Newsham Scream Park’s PR for Halloween. He recently launched Picante in Cains Brewery and Hume in the city centre and now manages consultancy projects with Numatic who make the Henry vacuums – aka Henry Hoovers.
Having proudly spent most of his adult life in the city, Damo’s PR has evolved in tandem with Liverpool. Championing the city and the wider region is at the core of Damo’s work, including during the pandemic when he secured months of coverage in national media to help keep the spotlight on the region’s hospitality sector.
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Jones explained: “I started sending out info for Chibuku Shake Shake in the year 2000, with no idea how to approach PR other that it felt like a mad story to tell as an antidote to the superclub culture. That’s how I started – pitching to Mixmag, Muzik Mag, Radio 1 and others, all intrigued by this crazy sounding party ran by hare-brained students in Liverpool. Life was very analogue back then – a Nokia burner with limited minutes and Snake was as advanced as it got. There was no social media, no influencers – you needed word of mouth but getting mentioned in print or on air was always a triumph.”
He then started to write club reviews for the very magazines he’d pitched news and features to. He said: “In the early 2000s Liverpool was an amazing city as a student, but less so once you graduated as employment options were limited – many friends left for London or Manchester. Yet Chibuku kept me anchored to Liverpool way past graduation – a miracle in some ways that we graduated at all – alongside an assortment of dreary, life-sucking 9-to-5 jobs.”
In those embryonic years, Jones chipped away with more journalism, eventually asking the clubs he’d written reviews for if they needed PR which led to TandemPR launching in 2005, with Circus, Garlands, Sankeys, Goodgreef and more as eventual clients.
He added: “Liverpool is integral to me. I fully fell in love with the city the first day I arrived for university. It’s funny to think I didn’t study PR or ever think of it as a career, though I’m a writer at heart; I studied English and Creative Writing so PR was essentially a happy accident. Liverpool was then – and still is now – such an energising and collaborative place and those foundations inexorably bound me here. So I realised there was an opportunity to give PR a proper go as my work grew later into that decade.”
Liverpool winning Capital of Culture in 2008 was a huge moment for the city and for Damo it set the city on a bold new trajectory as the local and UK club scenes continued to thrive. In parallel to this, Jones’s remit had expanded into festivals – locally, nationally and in Croatia for The Garden Festival, Electric Elephant, Outlook, Dimensions and Love International, to Sound City in Liverpool, Nozstock in Herefordshire and Lake of Stars in Malawi.
From late 2015, he started working with Bongo’s Bingo across all locations, which rapidly expanded across the UK and internationally to great acclaim. He remained mainly in the events world until the pandemic hit in 2020, necessitating a switch to new, less social gathering-reliant clients.
He continued: “I’m very lucky to work with some amazing clients and projects, from The Wall Street Journal featuring Bongo’s Bingo in 2022 and being on the front cover, to Chibuku Shake Shake being Mixmag’s Club of The Year in 2003; or from the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt exhibiting at 24 Kitchen Street in 2021 and gaining wonderful and poignant media coverage, to Jonny Bongo and Joshua Burke chatting to Jonathan Ross about all things bingo in 2017 on Radio 2; from landing coverage for Natalie Haywood and Yousef when they spoke to Prince William during the pandemic, to working with Visit Liverpool on championing the city’s hospitality industry; from the Coopers centenary earlier this year which everyone absolutely loved, through to telling the story of The Art School’s tenth anniversary with Paul Askew. There are so many more magical moments which make me smile; like convincing Numatic to create a custom pink Henry Hoover as a Bongo’s Bingo prize, or Andy Johnson from VideOdyssey and his madcap trip to Dundee to save 1000s of VHS cassettes from landfill in 2021 which many media embraced. For me, it’s intrinsic to find the heart of people’s stories and to bring their businesses, charities or themselves to life, and where possible to celebrate Liverpool too. That’s what always excites me…
“It’s a privilege to welcome journalists to the city region and show off Liverpool at its very best. Liverpool’s always had this indefatigable pride and constant evolution, and being part of the industry is a great feeling. How diverse the restaurant scene is, the new wave of club venues and club nights coming through, all of the exhibitions and creative spaces, to lots of fun activities for children and young adults, major music and tourist events and so much more – it all unites Liverpool in this glorious way.”
Jones added that he generally works alone, with new projects usually coming through word of mouth rather than the intricacies of networking, and he clearly has no intentions of changing his methods, or his accidental career path, anytime soon: “I’ve never been a schmoozer and I’m not a self-promoting PR-person,” he explained. “But I absolutely love all aspects of the job, from research and drafting a press release to the pitching. You can’t take yourself too seriously in PR as it’s such a fun role, despite some challenges being freelance. I keep my clients to a small group but I’m always open to new projects – I love getting a good story out there. I can’t think of a better place than Liverpool for my work to have started, from 2000 all the way to how the city is today. I’m excited for the future.”
