Well now, firstly, let’s start with the rant I put on the Facebook…
That thing where an event puts out an APB for folk to play their (say, for example) food festival, so you round everyone up, ask the band to put their diary on hold for that day, forward the ‘organisers’ your expression of interest and a couple of links, send a follow up email, and they still can’t be bothered to reply to you, even to say “no, thank you”.
It’s always the musicians who are the afterthought, the disposable aspect, the #nomoneybutgoodexposure fall guys and girls. A pox on the event wranglers who are more interested in £ per stall frontage than common courtesy.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
As you might imagine, I was not in the best of humours at the time.
“You don’t say…”
It’s not the worst experience I’ve ever had with well-meaning civilians. That was probably the time The Star Club were contracted to play a charity gig on the basis of our well-acknowledged popularity, agreed a (much reduced) fee, played our (verbally) contracted two sets then had to do a runner after a disgruntled audience barged into the dressing room to berate us, physically hassled a couple of our camp followers and bad-mouthed us around town on the basis that there was no incidental music, raffle, and the house lights were on throughout. That the entire audience could fit into our allotted backstage space tells you something about the amount of promotion that the (so called) organisers had put into rounding up an audience. After a quick post gig conflab in a lay-by on the way home we deducted some petrol money and gave our fee back, chastened by the opprobrium generated by our willingness to lend a hand. I don’t think we ever donated our services to charity again.
Of course, worse than the willing volunteer, the well-meaning organiser, the out of their depth committee member are the people who have a hugely monetised organisation who, as an afterthought, reckon “D’you know what? We should have some music.” These people value nothing more than the free exchange of talent (or at least ability) for a parking space half a mile away from the stage and a guest pass to some event you weren’t going to go to anyway. They generally have no idea what constitutes a PA, a power supply, how big the footprint a five piece band requires is or what a gazebo behaves like in a high wind. At this point you may care to revisit the Blazing Saddles scene wherein Gene Wilder explains to Sheriff Bart who he is dealing with.*
Let’s lighten the mood. I have played an end of term Thank You gig for a bunch of teachers** where the Head made sure there was enough material allocated from the buffet to keep us so well fed that the second set had a mildly sluggish air***. We did a free show (at our instigation) where the landlord dipped into his own pocket to drop two hundred quid into the tip jar, and a corporate do where, although we had to fill in a risk assessment and take out public liability insurance, we had a free go at the burger stall and a sofa backstage. Even when we had to run a four way extension across the road to a nearby house for the village fete we got - get this - a vegan burger with vegan cheese.****
My advice, well, who knows? Check things. Is it lucrative? Will it be fun? Can you go home and, in the form of that anti-smoking ad from the seventies, sink into an armchair and mutter to yourself “‘as bin a good daayyy.”
In the immortal words of Jim Steinman and/or Meatloaf (delete as applicable according to personal preference) two out of three ain’t bad.
*I won’t lie to you, we had a residency in Spalding during which we were introduced to our minder, who we immediately nicknamed Mongo.
**One of them threw up into a Tesco carrier bag behind the sound desk and - heroically - carried on chugging Chardonnay like a Boss. I won’t have a word said against Primary School teachers. Apart from that one I fell out with after the ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ incident of 2006.
***He later joined the band, trivia buffs.
****No, you’re judging.
