From Asia to the world? MMA music nights rock Bangkok
Full Metal Dojo is a high-octane blend of mixed martial arts, live bands, DJs, food and booze, turning cage fighting into a full-on party experience. The American behind the Bangkok bouts thinks it's a formula the world is ready for
Jon Nutt has a reddish beard and a piratical air, although he professes no family connection to 17th-century English pirate John Nutt who cut a swathe through Newfoundland and Labrador before his capture in 1623.
The latter-day Nutt is content with cutting a swathe through the world of mixed martial arts (MMA) with his Full Metal Dojo show, which he somewhat breathlessly extols as the "fastest-growing show on the planet, in the fastest-growing sport on the planet, in the coolest city on the planet" - his adopted home of Bangkok.
The most recent Full Metal Dojo was held towards the end of August, in the Sukhumvit Soi 12 club Insanity, packing in a capacity crowd in excess of 600 people.
MMA is a fighting style that sees two men or women of more or less equal weight (although often from wildly different fighting backgrounds) enter an octagonal cage and, with few rules and no holds barred, "get it on" over three to five five-minute rounds.
Full Metal Dojo follows a similar model, but Nutt has made it his mission to spice up the showbiz pizzazz. His shows are a full metal racket that combines bare-knuckle fighting with hucksterism, live bands, DJs and copious quantities of food and booze. The Insanity show, Full Metal Dojo 6 - For Those About to Rock, was the sixth outing in just over a year - justification, in Nutt's world, for his seemingly rather ambitious and exaggerated claim.