The owners of the Blue Grotto in Kamloops will be opening the Nightshift on Fifth, a new nightclub in the former Cactus Jack’s location downtown.

Speaking on the NL Morning News, Pup Johnston says the new club will feature a DJ playing Top-40 dance hits while also hosting special events to appeal to students at Thompson Rivers University.

“It just sort of landed on our lap,” Johnston said of the opportunity to take over the downtown Kamloops landmark. “The building was vacant and the owners reached out to us and asked us if we would like to move there and operate and we said yes.”

“It wasn’t something I was really expecting or looking for but Sherri [King] said ‘we’ll, I’ll do it’ and so I looked at her and said, ‘okay let’s do it.'”

Unlike the Blue Grotto which is a 21-plus club that focuses on live music, Johnston says the Nightshift of Fifth will cater to people as young as 19 – B.C.’s legal drinking age.

“It is going to be a fun project for us, it is not a particularly difficult thing to do,” he added. “The hardest part is probably going to be finding staff. That is one thing we are starting to look for now.”

“We still will do some big shows [at the new venue] because its a nice big space while the Grotto is a small venue, so we’ll get some good bands in there like the Beaches and the Headstones, who have been there in the past. Bands that played the Grotto and then got bigger, so that will be nice for us too.”

Johnston and King are currently waiting for their insurance to be approved before they can open, though they’re eyeing a late August to early September date, coinciding with when students return to class for the new school year.

“Nightclub insurance is always a hard thing, a very hard thing but we think because we have a reputation at the Grotto of being good operators, that that won’t be too hard to do,” Johnston added.