Tornado Concerts is an independent live-music booking agency & promoter since 1991. The company was founded by Arnold Wegner and due to his connection with the legendary Amsterdam Blues Festival it started out in the blues scene. In the first years he worked with acts like Ronnie Earl & The Broadcasters, The Paladins, Lonnie Mack, The Nighthawks, Mike Morgan & The Crawl and Kim Wilson (of the Fabulous Thunderbirds), to name but a few.
In the years that followed Tornado Concerts branched out into other American music styles and started working with a.o. Reverend Horton Heat, Ryan Adams, Buddy Miller, Gillian Welch, Jimmy LaFave and Slobberbone. Meanwhile Wegner was also working as a club promoter at the Arena club in Amsterdam, which was a 400 capacity venue in the former Sleepin building. In this venue he promoted the first shows of bands like Oasis, dEUS, Spearhead, The Verve, Dick Dale, etc. After 3 years Wegner stopped working there, to focus for 100% on Tornado Concerts. In 1998 he took on a new Dutch country/pop artist called Ilse DeLange, who sold more than 500.000 CD’s of her debut album “World Of Hurt” in The Netherlands only.
In that year Margot Landeweerd joined Tornado Concerts, who had formerly worked at Epitaph Records, Mojo Concerts and the Dutch National Pop Institute. The artist roster became even more eclectic and Tornado Concerts became one of the leading Dutch music agencies. In 2001 Tornado Concerts was asked to merge into The Agency Group, which was and still is one of the best and biggest agencies in the world, with artists such as Muse, The White Stripes and The Strokes. After an interesting two years Wegner and Landeweerd left The Agency Group again, to proceed with Tornado Concerts. It had been a great experience and they both learned a lot, but being part of such a big company simply was not their thing. They wanted to keep it small, simple, direct and music driven, without much overhead.
Wegner kept on working on the careers of meanwhile established artists such as Antony and The Johnsons, Beth Hart and Saybia, but also kept his eyes and ears open for new talent. As a true independent company he builds up new talent from scratch, which luckily happens to be one of his favorite things in life!