Day 548
Sunday January 5 2025
Mark:
We’ve decided to do something of a two year report here. No exact science dating, but we arrived in London from Ireland on December 21 2022. So with Christmas happening almost immediately, the first week of January would signal the real first days of our time here. We arrived with an apartment we’d secured while still in Ireland. Quite a contrast to the initial move from London to Ireland 19 months before when we’d packed everything we had in a car we’d bought two days before, then set off on our journey without having secured anywhere to live at all, losing the most tentative of prospects we possibly might have had on the way to the ferry when the car – which had passed an MOT the day before we bought it by the way, on the insistence of my friend Chris who was selling it and wanted to absolutely make sure it was all fine so all good on him – broke down and we realised we were going to miss the ferry. Yeah, that happened. This time, while in Ireland as I said, we’d landed ourselves an apartment in Shoreditch, right in the heart of the city, just a short walk from the financial district. But despite the party location, our own immediate area was relatively quiet as we’d managed to find a place in something of a Shoreditch oasis of calm in an actual cul-de-sac just a little way off from the whole hectic night time thing. We had landed.
It’s been hinted, or perhaps actually said once or twice in the past two years here that life has got in the way a few times. We have done some cool stuff and made decent progress in the two years we’ve been here and it’s all been written about of course, but there have been a few challenges we’ve not gone into so much, or maybe not as much as we could have done for various reasons. So we’ve decided to go there now. We’re also going to have a look at some of the issues facing grassroots acts in London for which we’ve made our own plans to get through and around. In this we’re going to highlight just what people like ourselves are up against when trying to catch their own headlines through all the noise. And I’m going to keep it mostly analogue. Because that’s where we’ve decided we should be. Mostly.
To survive in London, the first thing you have to do is survive in London. Which is to get your base sorted. For me, after my almost destructively bumpy start in late 2014, that was to try to get a bar job, but really any job, then to make sure I was actually able to hold onto the thing. Because at the beginning I was just a terrible waiter and non-existent as a barman. I ended up getting pretty good at both and managed to really establish myself in London barworld while making some serious inroads into the London music scene as a professional bass player. A highlight there has to be when I was the only ever-present at the world record breaking non-stop 100 hour jam at the Blues Kitchen in Camden Town. A stint which saw me stay awake for an unbroken 66 hours and spend a combined total of 24 hours on stage. The place we have now in Camden is 10 minutes’ walk from the Blues Kitchen.
When me and Maja started the Diaries in February 2021, although we weren’t called The Diaries ourselves yet, the bars were still on furlough due to the pandemic. It was during this time we decided we were going to dedicate ourselves to music and try and really do something. When furlough was in sight of being lifted and I was about to head into the bar again, Maja declared she earned enough to quite comfortably support us both. With that, she suggested, strongly requested really, that I not return to the bar, instead dedicating my time to making our thing work. Songwriting, recording, Diary writing, general management and maintenance of the whole project. So that’s what we did and it’s been like that ever since. At first we did this totally full time together. In London, then continuing throughout our time in Ireland. Once we arrived back in London, with Maja taking a day job here, my role continued, and has continued. All of which is to say that our stability here was underpinned by Maja’s dayjob, and still is until we can make The Diaries an actual going concern.
So, back to the surviving in London thing and making sure the ground beneath your feet is at least somewhat solid. Because without that, you can do nothing. With that in mind, the first thing Maja had to do was make sure she could get past the three month probation period in the job she had which had allowed us to come here in the first place. To give herself the best chance of passing probation, she insisted we didn’t pursue any kind of gigging at all until after that had happened. We broke that rule twice. Once to play at the one-off curated open mic event run my friend Alex, which just happened to be within walking distance of where we lived, and once when we went to The Marquis for a drink, and the guys playing, who knew me from before, insisted we get up and do a few of our songs. In my journalism days, I had a similar approach Maja took to her probation here; I set a rule for myself that I wouldn’t get involved in playing on any kind of music scene at all until I could feel at least somewhat established as a journalist. This took me two years, maybe even almost three. And yeah. In that time I didn’t try to get into one band. I actually suppressed my music side so much that my long time and wonderful house mates didn’t even believe I could play music to any kind of level when I first mentioned it. I had never even spoken to them about it.
Maja’s probation passed and we set off at a pretty decent pace, playing live 12 times between April 9 and June 18 2023. The lease on our apartment was due to run out at the end of July 2023. Rather than renewing it, towards the end of May we decided to make the move to Camden. With that, music activity really slowed as we first found a place then sometime in June began real preparations for the move that would take place on July 8. And of course there was the move itself. Getting everything there, and setting it all up again took quite a while. No sooner had we managed that than we were preparing for the Edinburgh Festival which we’d decided to go to and speculatively attempt to play at. We had nothing booked for it and no idea of how it would go, so we thought it would be best to be ready for anything. With that, we abandoned any ideas of trying to play in Camden immediately and instead threw ourselves into reconnecting with all our songs so that we would be ready for anything Edinburgh could throw at us, as well as being ready for any opportunities immediately beyond should they arise as a result of any efforts. This was the Edinburgh Festival afterall, an event where entertainment careers can be made almost overnight. Mostly comedy careers to be fair, but hey, we were having a go too, so we wanted to be ready for that knock of opportunity.
The Edinburgh story is all there in this Diary, and it would be fair to say it was a big let down with absolutely no room for any music act, or probably any act really, to just show up unannounced and try and do their thing. Everything was booked and managed to the minute, and if your name wasn’t already down, there was no way you were getting in; one or two people even seemed positively offended that we had even asked them if we could do anything in their bar. We did manage to see a few chinks of light in a few bars, but those nascent, ephemeral opportunities came to nothing. There was an amazing open mic experience which we took with all four hands and totally blew the room up, so we did at least come back armed with a really good video which we were able to say was from the Edinburgh Festival.
We felt we had all the beginning stuff sorted. A great six months in Shoreditch. We’d got to know our way around London a bit, had got to know a few bars. No real Now Hustling. Just the one at The Old Reliance when we realised a gig we’d booked was totally unsuitable and so went out on the street to find somewhere alternative to play, and did. If there’s anything we can say we didn’t quite get right in this initial period it’s the lack of Now Hustling. That and a lack of communication with The Marquis which meant we didn’t get across to them the whole non playing for three month thing and it’s fair to say we kind of slipped off the radar there a bit. We’re working on that.
Another thing we possibly got wrong was not trying to play in Camden so much in our first few months here. One reason as I said was Edinburgh preparations. The next was that Maja was off to Sweden in September, so even after Edinburgh we decided to hold off on trying to get anything going in Camden or anywhere else until she got back. Misguided perhaps, but the reasoning was that we didn’t want to risk getting some kind of momentum going only for Maja, and by extension The Diaries, to disappear for a while.
But now this is where that life getting in the way thing really starts to get in the way.
It’s like this. Maja works in tech. Which means so many jobs are in start-ups. And even those that aren’t can be quite volatile for a whole bunch of reasons. Early October with Maja still in Sweden and the first real dog bite of our London life happened. All of a sudden, the promising start up wasn’t so promising, and Maja got caught in a whole round of layoffs.
Maja:
Layoffs. Redundancies. The first real crash of the tech world. During my birthday in 2023 I had a lovely night with my family. I knew nothing. Next morning at 8am I read a message that company wide redundancies were going to happen. I think, “there’s no way that’s going to affect me, I have too important a position.” Next thing I know, HR calls me and tells me I’ve gotten made redundant. Along with a third of the company. Everyone with my seniority went. Like that. Poof. No job. No income. No visa.
You heard that one right. No visa. That’s it. This is the end.
I have two months to try to find another job that can sponsor me with the visa, or I am out. And it’s about 1 in 40 or so positions that can do that. I think that’s about the truth. Call after call, application after application and it’s a no-go. They do not sponsor visas.
That’s when it hits me. Me and Mark have finally lived together for two years, Ireland included. We now, for the first time, qualify for an unmarried visa. Yes it is expensive, but I can spend almost the total of my redundancy pay to get it. And if I have it I can take any job, and I don’t have to leave the country.
It’s hard but doable. So I do that. I use the redundancy payout to buy a visa, and I miraculously quickly manage to get a job no-one else wants to have. Brilliant. It’ll keep the rent costs coming in.
The effort for me to land one job is immense. It’s recruiter call after call, interview after interview with a multiple series of tech tests, where the recruiter promises it’ll only take a couple of hours but in reality it takes about a week. It’s never quick. I think the worst process I’ve been in was 11 stages. And I needed a job yesterday. A process can easily take months from initial call to offer. Startups can be easier and quicker to get into. But they’re also riskier.
During these periods of uncertainty, I don’t like the idea of gigging or getting too much on the scene. It’s too hard. I need to focus, and spend my time doing work related things instead until I am able to find any stability.
This takes the better part of a year.
Let’s turn the speed up here just a little. So, layoffs happen in October 2023 with a whole bunch of interview processes until I get and start a new job in December. This company doesn’t work out and neither does the next one. In June 2024 I finally finish another recruitment process to begin my fourth job in London in less than a year.
Think about that, “fourth job in a year.” The combined fear of being unemployed and motivation to do good work have kept my whole being busy for the year. It’s been extremely stressful with real consequences to my health and obviously the loss of time and energy to do the things I want to do. To do The Diaries. To have fun. To write silly music and sing and dance and laugh and be fearless. Like I usually am. Like I want to be. Like I want to remain.
So in June 2024 I finally manage to get a job I feel genuinely good about. And that means things are finally able to settle into a better flow. I can feel how the fear slowly starts to melt away. I managed to get through all of this. I am on the other side now. Hopefully. And the longer the time goes, the more comfortable I get in my position. I even got a promotion. This means that I am able more and more to leave work at work. Where it belongs. And get myself back. As fearless as I am supposed to be. And I can feel happiness seeping back into my body again.
All of this time, around two years in London. And I have finally settled. Which means that Mark can too.
I feel like we’re starting the next chapter now. Don’t you?
Mark:
That new chapter sees the Madrid trip in Autumn 2024, followed by the Tenerife trip, followed by Christmas, followed by Maja to Sweden for a while, followed by us both getting proper sick for a few weeks. All this brings us somewhere into March 2025 and thoughts of how we can now look at this whole thing again and see about finally getting some real momentum going. You may have realised we’re now beyond the date of this actual entry and there are some cool things to talk about. Before that, let’s stay here a little while longer and explore that London momentum thing.
The problem is this. In our two years here, we’ve discovered it’s practically impossible to get any.
But come on. This is London. Home of the Swinging 60s, the boom of 80s pop, singlehandedly started by one nightclub, The Blitz and the resulting Blitzkids. And then of course Britpop which exploded out of Camden in the mid 90s. We’re regulars – customers that is – at a whole bunch of venues made famous by Britpop, and venues famous for earlier movements with London also being at the centre of UK punk. As for being the first, that would have been New York with CBGB, but you get the picture. Oh, and where we are in London now.
Go left out of our apartment and just a few minutes walk down there a road crosses our street. Oasis lived on that road in the early fame years. The peak fame years one could argue. Across the road from us, I believe behind the apartment block we can actually see, and that was where one of the Blur guys used to live. Amy Winehouse lived in two properties almost directly behind us for a time during her early fame years. We can see one of her streets out of our back window. Then, go to the right of us a little way and you come to the apartment estate that was the childhood home of Dua Lipa. So yeah. Right in the middle of all that, and many more stomping grounds of the stars I’m sure, you have us, The Diaries.
So we’ve come up to date and a little beyond. There’s one glaring omission in our whole London experience. The lack of conventional gigging. You know, that thing where there’s a lineup of bands on a bill, your band features in there somewhere, a whole bunch of promotion happens, excitement builds, and audiences follow.
Except no. It isn’t like that at all. As a result, we’ve more or less stayed away from the more organised aspects of things and have developed our own plans which we will get to. Basically, the word on the street is that trying to make it in music now, trying to emerge out of a scene and get on top of it and move on from there, is all but impossible. Who says so? Richard Osman, brother of Suede bass player Mat Osman says so. Suede was one of Britpop’s big four with Oasis, Blur and Pulp. Richard, who became a big entertainment name in his own right, was surrounded by it. Today he hosts The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with Marina Hyde and surveys the whole landscape from the perspective of over 30 years in the biz. He knows.
Six months ago Richard spoke on the podcast about the complete disappearance of bands in the UK charts, calling it utterly extraordinary. He’d looked into this himself and set his argument by first framing us as having covered the first half of the decade of the twenties. Looking back, he said that in the first half of the 1980s, there were 146 weeks when bands were number one in the singles charts. The first half of the nineties saw 141 weeks of bands at the top. So essentially the same. In the first five years of this decade, you want to guess? Go on. I’ll leave a few lines before the reveal. Go on. Have a think.
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Three weeks.
Now let’s break down those three weeks, or rather, let’s write about how Richard broke down those three weeks. One was a song from the Radio One All stars, so all solo artists anyway. One was The Beatles with the lost and subsequently finished song Now And Then. The third band of the three that enjoyed a single week at the top of the charts in the first half of the decade was Little Mix and they’re a girl group of singers who came out of the X Factor so I’m not sure they even count much more than the All Stars. So, my words now. The charts have been topped by a band once in the first decade of the 2020s. They managed it for one week. And it was The Beatles with a recovered lost song first partially recorded in the 70s.
Subsequently, speaking about the chances of forming a band and trying to make it now, Richard said, forget it. It’s impossible.
Before we even came to London from Ireland and started doing this thing here, I knew we weren’t going to get anywhere by trying to jump onto conventional bills and working our way up from there, even though the listings show loads of such gigs going on all the time everywhere. You look at that and you think, oh wow. So much activity. Let’s get involved and let’s get this going. No.
But before we get into that, I’m going to talk a little about how this should and actually does work on a healthy, functional and real music scene. I have no idea what it is like now, but we’re going back to early 2000s and the music scene of Cork city, Ireland. There, kind of by default, I became one of the city’s leading music writers from my position of senior features writer on the Evening Echo, the daily evening newspaper of the city. I also became the founding editor of colour glossy magazine Backstage Traffic which was dedicated to the same scene. Also during my nine years in Cork, I played in more original bands than I could possibly hope to count, including my own Fly The Wall. Conflict of interests, what with me being a music journalist? Yeah, that could be argued but that’s what happened and I like to think I always behaved ethically and fairly. In fact, if you knew me at the time, or if I was in your band, or involved in your band, or really good friends with you or your band, your chances of getting coverage actually decreased. Oh, I also ran the city’s leading weekly open mic for the better part of two years at Fred Zeppelins, the torch being passed onto me by Ronan Leonard who had made it the success it was. So yes. I was deeply embedded.
Somewhat more or less, it worked like this.
People just went out to venues randomly, knowing live original music would be on, often with no idea of who or maybe even what it would be. Yeah. Smallish city. Population of around 200,000, but with a ridiculously disproportionate amount of bars and clubs. But not quite big enough to host a bunch of different scenes all operating out of different venues, so the same place would host jazz one night, metal the other, and a singer songwriter event the next. Or sometimes the whole lot on the same night. And across the road, the same thing could be going on. And both events would be packed, or at least respectfully attended. And with people who didn’t know anyone in any of the acts. You just went out. There you were in a bar, and you would discover a live thing was about to start upstairs and everyone would pile up out of pure curiosity, and quite a bit of excitement. Basically, venues had audiences. Casual goers. Who would just be there. The venue just had to make sure they obtained, and then maintained a decent reputation for putting decent acts on and the whole thing would continue. Into this, a new band could get a slot on the bottom of a bill at one of the smaller venues. There, they would work their way up and after a while, would have their own headlining events there. During this period they would have been able to get themselves at the bottom of the bills in slightly larger venues, and then start headlining them, and so on and so on. A total path of tangible traction until they were headlining the biggest and most prestigious places to a packed audience, each member of which had paid to see them. Once you had that kind of thing on your CV, you had a springboard. Unfortunately, no-one quite broke through to the international mainstream from this, although my one time good acquaintance Gavin Dunne has made some great shakes with his studio project Miracle of Sound becoming quite the major player in video game music.
Oh, there were even a few nightclubs that would have a live room and people would just wander through and see what was on. Some of my most memorable nights as a punter in Cork happened in such places. And one of my first ever gigs was in a band who just happened to be playing in the main room where a conventional nightclub was also going on. DJs happened, then bands happened for a while, then DJs happened again. All in the same room on the same night. You just…Had…An…Audience. And in those audiences would be all kinds of scene people including other venue owners and people responsible for all types of music programming. DJs would be there and they would feature local bands on their shows, and there were journalists. I know. I was one of them. And I would know who all the other various media adjacent people in the rooms would be and we would chat and share our own news of new bands we’d seen or had heard about. And of course bands who were doing well could go up and play in Dublin and become part of what was going on there, and Dublin bands would make the journey the other way. Just a huge pot of cross pollination, exposure and opportunity.
I forgot to mention this next bit in that above paragraph preci-ing my musical involvement, but this actually seems an appropriate place to put it. In Cork I became a promoter myself, putting on bi-weekly lineup gigs of original bands with a paying in audience and with no band ever being obliged to bring their own fee paying people. If a night was unsuccessful, I felt terrible about it and apologised to the bands. I was the promoter. It was on me to promote and generally make the thing happen. Although I should say that on a few of the more woefully attended nights, I went out onto the streets to see what was going on and would see that actually nothing was going on. Silent, motionless streets. Still, sad, but it did make me realise in the moment that it wasn’t just my place. No-one was going to anyone’s places on those nights for whatever reason. So yeah. I’ve been a promoter. A real one.
Now let’s have a look at London. Some of what you’re going to read here I wrote about on Day 335, Tuesday June 4 of last year. But it’s very likely you didn’t see that. Also, as I revisit the theme I’m going to reinforce it with what I’ve learned since. This is because I recently came across a few different accounts of people trying to play in London and they absolutely hit the nail on the head of what my own experiences had been and how I saw things were. It’s also fair to say that previously I didn’t quite feel confident enough in what I’d surmised to commit it to writing. I also had another much voiced opinion confirmed recently when speaking to someone who has been on the London scene for around 15 years. There are no managers around. Or certainly no would-be managers looking around the scene for a good music management/ investment opportunity. He said that today, managers generally come in once a band has secured a record deal and there is now something tangible to manage. Because, take a grassroots band, what do you do with them? No-one knows.
Not even people in the industry and certainly not the record companies themselves. As far as I can see, this is the precise reason we’re seeing so many ‘comeback’ albums and tours. Record companies have absolutely no idea of how to break a new band and so are bringing back all the old ones with established careers and audiences which they know they’re going to be able to sell directly to with almost zero effort and absolute minimal to zero risk. Damn, they’re even assured of reams of press coverage and interviews, not to mention radio play of new and old songs kickstarting whole back catalogues and ensuring success of the new one. Sure, now and again acts would always come back together organically or otherwise. Maybe out of nostalgia. Maybe they’d patched up differences. And of course for the money. Many would happily admit it at the time. The Sex Pistols even called one of their comebacks the Filthy Lucre tour. There are exceptions. Bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Springsteen, U2 and The Rolling Stones get a pass because they never really stopped. But now? The record companies have nothing else. Go have a look. It is just one big remake after remake of Get Him To The Greek. That movie follows just this story and playbook. A record company boss played by Sean Combs, yes, P Diddy, holds a meeting with his executives telling them that the bubble has popped and that the very music industry itself is failing. He asks them to come up with innovative ideas that could help the company to move forwards. One of the executives, played by Jonah Hill, suggests a comeback concert of a once great but now washed up rock star Aldous Snow played by Russel Brand. One comeback concert, he says, could reignite Snow’s career and back catalogue and save the record company.
It started out as a joke. A comedy. A fun Hollywood romp through rock’n’roll excess. And I do love that film. But it is now the music industry’s entire business model. Damn, Get Him To The Greek might as well be relabeled as an educational documentary.
But the record companies are still breaking new bands, I hear you say.
Are they? Really.
How? By signing the latest TikTok or YouTube sensation for them to blow up on their one big song before disappearing again for the record company to then go looking for the next big viral sensation to rise and drop? Repeat repeat.
Even for many of the credible acts they do sign, they often insist on that artist creating their own viral moment before any product can be released. Who’s doing the work here? What, really, is the record company actually doing?
If what we’re looking at is numbers before anything can happen, sorry today’s A&Rs if you’re even out there, but a monkey could do your job. Seriously. It could. Train it to just look for really long numbers under a video or music stream, and then press a button when it sees them. If all you’re capable of doing is looking at numbers under a video before you say yes, we’ll go with this one, what worth are you possibly offering? And then there’s the numbers themselves. They can be bought or created or simply generated by bots. Anyone with a big enough family or support group can get the numbers seriously up, getting the attention of whatever algorithms you need to get the attention of. And you can buy numbers. Likes, fans, play figures, subscriber numbers. Just buy them. And again, numbers look good, people go to them, algorithm happy, rewards exponential. But to do it yourself? Organically?
We tried going down that route. The organic one. Really had a good go at it. Alright, we paid for a boost or two, which is making sure your link or thumbnail is actually seen by a few more people who will decide themselves what to do with it. But really, it was about the whole thing of consistency, making sure content was going up almost every day and across a bunch of platforms. Shorts, reels, whole videos, making sure all your wording and SEO stuff was as good as it could be for maximum algorithm tickling. Conclusion, no thanks.
The first realisation was that you do what we do so you don’t have to have a boss, right? Well guess what. To have any chance of success you have to release videos and content on Youtube and across other social media platforms every day two or three times a day like we were cos that’s what the algorithm says you have to do to be successful. Actually, it’s probably much more. But really, once you’re chasing numbers and doing whatever you have to do to keep them growing or to keep them up, then whoever owns Youtube or the other platforms is now your boss. You work for them now, doing whatever they want you to do. Or worse, your boss is now a robot in the form of an algorithm. No. Thank. You. The TV movie Make Me Famous had two characters talk about what it took to maintain their social media images and so keep up their fame and correlated income. Their conclusion, up to eight hours a day making and posting content. What, really, is the job here? Or ambition? Musician, or social media monster poster?
‘Promoters’ on the grassroots scene count the numbers the same as all of the above. From day one in London we decided we wanted nothing to do with, let’s not say any of them, but certainly a big element of them. Like many record companies, what do they even do? What is even the use of them that they can’t do their job until you’ve done it for them. If that’s the case and the act has done the job so the ‘promoters’ can now fill out venues that the act has already filled, seriously, what is the point of them?
The bottom line is, if you’re not bringing the people yourself, people are not going to be there. Chances are, if there’s 20 people at your gig, you know every single one of them. If you play a gig the following week, are they going to come again? Unlikely. Maybe one or two. There is a chance you might even have another success as the 20 people that didn’t come to the last one come to this one. OK. But after that? And after that one? A limit is going to come where, if you’re still having to rely on people you know, you’re not going to have an audience. Unless you play once every six months or so, and really, what is the point of that? Alright. Apart from the fun aspect. Totally valid, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here.
One of the most bizarre things I’ve found about grassroots original gigs in London is that for a massive percentage of shows, there is almost no walk in crowd. That, I think, is absolutely vital to the success of any scene. In my previous London life, I played gigs where the crowd looked really healthy and you were thinking, game on. A typical example would be the first band playing to a great audience. They finish and leave, and the audience leaves with them. We then play to the few people who were kind enough to come along for us, then the final act has whoever they’ve brought. It really is three nights with three separate audiences on one bill. The difference with the shows I’ve played being that I’ve insisted on my band and our friends – you really can’t call them fans at this stage – be there for all the acts. My exhortations have met to greater or lesser success in this, but hey, I tried. I’m sure other bands do try as well.
A common way a ‘promoter’ ‘works’ at grassroots level is to sign up bands for their shows and then sell, or maybe give, them tickets for them to sell on. They will also often tell acts they must commit to bringing a certain number of people, usually between ten and thirty. In this, they often state that if the act fails to deliver that number on the night they won’t be able to play. The thing is, even if you are able to bring thirty of your friends, how do you then play another show within even three months if this is the only criteria under which you can play? Even if they do come to your show three months later, you can’t bank on them at all for any show after that. They’ve done their bit. They’ve seen you play. Maybe satisfied their curiosity. But again and again? Not realistically. Not outside the most loyal friend or family member. And there’s more. Within this model, a promoter or venue will often stipulate that an act can’t play another gig within a certain radius of their venue two months before or after, or whatever other time frame they may decide. Moving cities now, but I once tried to book a gig for my blues band in Madrid. I actually managed to pitch an owner and we were on to talking about dates. Then he asked where else we were playing. I very proudly told him of a gig or two we had coming up and that was that. The conversation was over and he just walked away from me. I thought he’d gone to check something and would come back. But no. He’d walked away. Didn’t even say anything. Literally turned round and he was gone. All of which explains what I’ve observed anecdotally, which is that ‘promoters; would rather book grassroots bands from way out of town.
Why? Because it becomes that act’s big gig in London and the whole family and all the rest go on the trip with them and make the venue all nice and full. And that makes up almost their entire audience. I get it from the venue’s point of view, I really do, especially in the current financial climate. But if this is your big gig in London and nearly all of your audience is made up of what you’ve brought from your home town or city, have you even played in London at all? Well, I suppose you categorically, geographically have. But played to London? Hardly at all. You might as well have just gathered all your home grown fans, friends and family, packed them into your house or local pub, brought that all the way here on a trailer and played in that.
Here’s one person’s experience I came across recently that covers a lot of what we just saw above. Unfortunately I didn’t keep the details of this person so I acknowledge I am taking a bit of a liberty in using their story. As a result, I’ve very much paraphrased rather than quoted. This was on a public forum though so I’m hardly betraying any confidences. However, if they happen to recognise themselves and want to get in touch for me to credit them, or remove what I’ve written here, or maybe to give more thoughts for possible inclusion in here, I’m good with all that.
Michael had the offer of a gig at what he said was a cool venue to be able to play in. His stage time would be 20 minutes. For this the ‘promoter’ wanted him to sign an exclusivity deal for two weeks before the gig and ten days after. This was to cover all London venues. Michael’s understanding of the deal was that he would have to aggressively sell tickets – messaging followers, family and friends – in addition to promotion and posts on all the usual social media. He says he was also told that if he had to cancel due to sickness he would need a doctor’s note. Tickets for the event, at which he would be playing for 20 minutes among other bands, were £10. His arithmetic – which he admitted could have been faulty – led him to conclude that if he sold 50 tickets, a number he deemed unlikely, he would make around £70. He said he couldn’t figure out their maths. This is me back in the room now. This last bit leads me to conclude it was quite a complicated equation based around what performer sold what on the night and probably minimum sales and maybe a sliding scale. And of course taking into account venue/sound costs and all the rest of it. Not to mention what the ‘promoter’ – NOT A PROMOTER!!! – would make out of it. And that ten quid figure. Would you pay that to see however good a friend or relative play for just 20 minutes on a bill featuring I have no idea how many other bands from I have no idea what genres? Not to mention how good any of them are going to be.
Michael turned down the ‘opportunity.’ He said the dealbreaker was the exclusivity clause. He also said the having to aggressively push tickets thing was a bit tough to swallow, as well as it all leading to just 20 minutes stage time.
I’m not saying all experiences are like Michael’s, but some are worse. In any case, it was stuff like this that led us to conclude right at the beginning, no thanks. Just not gonna go there.
Maja:
I can’t believe that I am also starting to have my own strong opinions about music promoters and the music scene in general. Me. Little miss science nerd that never was interested in even travelling to London five years ago. How life changes you.
Call me old fashioned but I think that the musician’s job is to make great music and perform. The promoter’s job is to put on shows that people come to. If the musician has to bring the people to the show for the promoter to put it on, what’s the point of a promoter? If I have 100 people coming to see me at any given time, I’ll just rent a stage, job done. Even the word “promoter.” Doesn’t that mean “someone to promote something they believe in so other people can discover it”? The music scene is broken.
We need to find our own audiences to play to, to break London.
How do we do that?
Mark:
Before we get into that, I think at this stage we also have to have a look at the general economy and state of play in London. A major factor is that the price of drinks has just gone so high that people aren’t casually going out to pubs, and therefore, gigs as they once would have done and so those very types of gigs have really tailed off. More than my own anecdotal experiences, I’ve seen this case stated a few times by venue owners with them saying that the very notion of a grassroots scene is close to being financially untenable. I know we’re a few years on now, but a lot of venues didn’t survive the pandemic. Even many of those that did only survived because they were bought up by multi-national bar companies who were able to ride out the situation until the bar could be reopened and become a viable business again. But of course, under such management, it wasn’t going to be an independent venue anymore. Sure the managers can still put on gigs if they want, but those gigs need to make the bar money and immediately. There’s no, ‘Oh, let’s put something on and see what happens,’ or, ‘Let’s see if we can build something here,’ or, ‘I really believe in this act, let’s give them a chance.’ No. It pretty much has to financially deliver on day one or not at all. So it means they do the not at all thing. Or bring in those bands from out of town that will bring a whole home grown posse with them for a guaranteed payday for the bar. That’s a totally understandable business model, but when it’s almost the only game in town, it means there almost isn’t a game in town.
All of the above of course means there are fewer venues at all for bands to play in, and outside of London that becomes even starker. So not only are all the bands in London clamouring to play the same dwindling amount of venues, but now they’re competing with all the bands coming from outside of London to play those same dwindling amount of venues. And this city being what it is, that means you’re not just competing with UK acts, but international ones as well.
This isn’t at all to say London should be for the Londoners – we’re interlopers ourselves trying to take advantage of this great city like everyone else, so that would be massively hypocritical – but what it does mean is that more and more penguins are trying to fit onto the same ice floe, while at the same time, the ice floe is melting. Further afield, ice floes have dwindled to almost nothing or have gone altogether, so in come even yet more penguins. I should also add that there are events and people around who are trying to work for bands and for the music scene. But again, penguins.
So we’re one of the penguins. What are we doing about this? For a start, as I said right at the beginning, we’d decided to not even try to get onto the ice floe, or at least not the supposed main route onto it. But that left us with the problem of where we could go. Just floating around aimlessly in the ocean wasn’t going to achieve anything.
No. We had to make our own and it’s not the Now Hustle. That was prototype one. We’ve just created a whole new model.
We invented the Now Hustle quite a while ago and it’s served us really well. You may know about this, not least if you’ve read anything of our adventures across two European tours and then what we did all across Ireland. We haven’t done it so much in London and I said that was one aspect we had been lacking in, but we have dipped our toes back on that trail. A quick aside. Apart from many of the other stops and starts I’ve spoken about in here, I honestly think we also dropped ourselves through the cracks for quite a while after we first arrived. There were our thoughts on the whole conventional gigging thing, but there was also a resistance from us to try to Now Hustle London. So we did a kind of soft hustle that didn’t really work. You know, let us play in your bar next Thursday kind of thing. We had some encouraging chats but nothing really quite came to be. This is how we accidentally booked ourselves a gig in a restaurant, backed out of it as soon as we realised what we’d done and went Now Hustling just because we were out with all our gear and had expected to be playing somewhere. Which is how we got to meet the wonderful Mario and play in his Shoreditch bar, The Old Reliance.
A quick revisit on what the Now Hustle actually is if you’re not aware of it. This is where we just turn up at a random bar and ask to play there and then. We don’t seek out music bars specifically, but even if they do have music, they’re mostly bars that would feature cover acts. A massive proportion of Now Hustle gigs have happened in bars that have little to no regular live music happening in them at all. Apart from the benefits of not having to organise anything – PR, endless social media posts saying please come to our gig and the like – we also get to play to people who would never come to see us at a gig. Even better, people who very rarely, if ever, venture out onto the original scene at all and have probably never seen a grassroots show in their lives. There’s also the ‘you never know who could be there’ aspect, especially in London. And especially in a landscape where movers and shakers, and their friends and acquaintances, just don’t get out and about to random gigs in anything like the frequency they would once have done in excitement of trying to find the next new thing. That simply doesn’t happen anymore. The Now Hustle takes us direct to them. We used to do the pass the hat thing around Europe and Ireland. We don’t do that anymore. The opportunity for exposure this gives us is enough. That and the fact that we have the book now. More of that a little further down.
Of course there are knockbacks from bars, but there have also been so many managers who have been really up for this. Some have said yes hesitantly, and I’m sure others have said yes just for the curiosity of what will happen. But we have played around a hundred shows like this and some of them have been absolutely epic. In hustling, we’ve generally concluded that it feels impossible until it’s suddenly the easiest thing in the world. You know, five knockbacks in a row then bar six and the manager is just waiting for you to stop speaking so they can say yes. When that happens, their attitude tends to be something like, ‘Why would anyone say no to this?’
Now meet our next idea to smash through this barrier even harder.
The Now Residency.
Alright, it doesn’t really have a proper name yet and we’re still working on it. And in a way, we’re even still working on what the concept actually is; we’re sure many, if not all, bar managers we manage to get on board will have their own ideas of how this could work for them. We’ll just take each case as it comes, but we want the general principle to be the same.
Let’s call what we have a working title. In fact, this is the first time I’ve even sat down to write about this and it’s how I’m going to refer to it in here until we come up with a better name. At which point I’ll come back in, change them all and then delete this paragraph. If you’re here for the first time and this paragraph isn’t here, then you’ll know we came up with a better name.
The Now Residency is a brand new concept for us. Indeed, we’ve never heard of anyone doing it before ever. The same goes for The Now Hustle, and now that’s morphed into this. If any acts out there like either idea and think they want to have a go for themselves, do it. Please.
The concept is this. To create a network of bars, our own circuit if you will, that we can turn up to pretty much whenever we want, or at least on an irregular basis – maybe three to five weeks between appearances – and play a ten to fifteen minute set to the people that just happen to be there on that day. People just sitting around minding their own business and in we walk. Walks and quacks exactly like a Now Hustle, except the manager knows to expect us and we have their pre permission to rock up and do this. Set up enough bars and you could be out two or three times a week. And like the Now Hustle, it’s not necessarily music bars we’re looking for, although of course we could still go in and ask. But we mildly suspect that music bars might have even more of a problem with the Now Residency than the Now Hustle because we’re kind of trying to insert ourselves into their programming. We have already experienced this a little bit. If they have a lot going on, especially round here, chances are they have an external person running that. Email that person they say. As with the phrase, ‘I have to run this past Head Office,’ this is where Hustles come to die. But speak to actual managers who are in charge of everything in their bar, and it’s a different story.
I once had a casual chat with a particular bar manager about the Now Hustle, and he couldn’t decide if it was one of the most stupid ideas he’d ever heard or one of the most genius. When I got to talk to him properly about the Now Residency, something in him suddenly lit up and he said, ‘You could do ten gigs a day with this thing.’ Yep. We could. Although, rather than maximising playing, our current thinking is to do our few songs then stick around and hopefully hang out with some of the people who just saw us. However, previously we have played, packed up, and been straight out of the door and on the look for the next place. We’ve managed five shows in a day in places we’ve never been to. Indeed, we could have even continued but chose to stop and stick with what we’d achieved. We were like, we’ve finished. Bar? Oh, and how did that conversation with the mildly sceptical bar manager conclude? Positively, but there is a to be continued there so that’s all I should say about that right now.
Oh, and yeah. A Now Hustle generally doesn’t work if the manager isn’t there, but one or two times a supervisor has been like, I don’t see the harm, the guys in the bar seem to want to see you, so yeah. Go ahead. A Now Hustle also tends to be a very quick pitch and conversation, sometimes taking place in a busy bar. But something like the new thing, where we want to set up something at least semi regular? No. Absolutely has to be an actual sit down meeting with a manager to discuss what we want to do. Then maybe take on board how he or she thinks it could possibly work for them, and then come to an actual agreement of how to begin.
Back to it and a ten to fifteen minute set boils down to two to three songs, with room for a fourth or fifth should encores be called. And more if the room really gets into it.
As for where this network of venues, or our circuit, will be, our first target is right on the doorstep of where we live. Camden Town. This will of course be Diaried as we get to it, but this entry is being written a little behind so I’ll say a few bits and pieces while we’re here, and indeed already have. The first thing I’ll say is that, despite what could possibly be called our early procrastination between deciding whether or not to Now Hustle or try conventional gigging, it was a very conscious decision to not Now Hustle Camden. Perhaps similar to why we never Now Hustled Clara, our hometown when we lived in Ireland, although we did mildly consider it. In the end, we decided not to because it was on our doorstep. That’s also true of Camden. But apart from that, we made the deliberate decision to kind of soft hustle the place. That is to just hang out and get to know the bars, the bar staff, get the local feel from the point of view of actually living here. Things here did kind of drag on a bit longer than we might have liked for a few of the reasons mentioned above, but we really did get a feel for the place we might not have got had we just bundled in and attempted to Now Hustle everywhere. And of course, not even two years into living in Camden, we’re still very much newcomers. A few weeks ago we got chatting to some guys in a bar in Camden and they were checking out our locals credentials. When I mentioned I used to live in Kentish Town, the place next door, so had been around here or hereabouts for just over ten years now, minus the just under two years we spent in Ireland, he was not remotely impressed. Not rude about it, but he made it very clear I was still a total new boy and knew nothing about the place. A bit harsh, but probably fair. He was a lifelong Camden Towner and was also a few more pints in than we were at the time. It’s really great to be getting out and about and to meet these kinds of people. And that’s the most effective thing we decided it would be to do in Camden. Just be out and about. Be seen. Get to know the area, and hopefully let the area get to know us. Soft hustle. Now we’re using what we’ve learned to decide where to approach for the Now Residency.
You never really know where our kind of approaches will work. We’ve had a lot of surprises regarding places where the Now Hustle has worked and where it very starkly hasn’t. Unfortunately, some bars you would think our new Now Residency would work in, or at least stand a chance of being pitched to, are now corporate owned. The pandemic has a lot to answer to for that. With those kinds of bars, which you head into with all optimism, it’s crushing to have what you feel is a nice chat with a kindred spirit, only to then hear them say something like, ‘We’ll have to see what Head Office thinks about this.’ Damn. We thought this place was independent and you were the boss. We don’t say that last bit out loud, just thank them for their time and say we’ll see how it goes. OK. We know Head Office will say no. Maybe they won’t, but we just know they will. So yeah. There isn’t quite as much independence of body or spirit as there once was here. This being Camden, many now corporate owned bars retain their original look; to the punter, which often also means us, they still feel as cool and independent and, well, Camden, as they ever did. However, try to get round the curtain like we are and you quickly discover the corporate reality. But we’ll keep knocking and hustling and we’re confident we’ll find the places where that independence of body and spirit still live, and sometimes it still can be within corporate owned bars. We will find the managers with autonomy and vision and who are willing to go outside the envelope. Even then, we still have to be fortunate enough for those individuals to be like, yeah, let’s have a look. But if we don’t manage to rustle up enough in Camden, there’s the whole rest of London to aim at. So we can just keep rolling on and out with this thing if we need or want to.
I did allude to this earlier, but apart from our kind of gigging putting us in front of people who would never come to an actual arranged and advertised gig of ours, it also possibly puts us in front of music industry people at any level who are just out for a casual drink. And then into a chat and a pint with them if any kind of rapport has been established. Apart from blind coincidence, there’s no other way we would have met them otherwise. And even if we did, we wouldn’t have just played in front of them. The same goes for any other person in the bar.
And now we have a whole other layer. The debut book of the first three ridiculously eventful months of these Diaries – Music, Love and Impossibilities. And of course, we plan on putting out books of the rest of The Diaries, building it into a series.
With that, now it’s not just music people we could meet who might just want to talk to us about something. We’ve opened up the whole literary sphere as well. Agents, publishers. Journalists, bloggers, reviewers. Why not? We are going out and just taking spaces. Making them ours. And putting the mechanism in place for us to do it again and again. More or less whenever we want. And with the book, we even have something to sell to actually start to make money out of this thing. We also take a few out wherever we go and are at the stage now where we can just go out for a drink and sell a few books to people we get talking to. Which in a few cases has covered the price of our drinks that night. Or we give people a book and they buy us drinks which has the same result. Or, as we’ve seen in here many times, we’re just able to give the book away to people as one would give a business card. You run a music bar? Or any type of bar really. Have a book. What better way to introduce yourself and have the opportunity for people to really see where you come from, what your story is and what you’re all about? You work in a bar? Have a book. Same. This is a way of getting ourselves and our story right into the centre of things. Because who’s more in the centre of things than someone who works in a bar?
So often you hear people say, if you want to make it in music, you need a story. Something people can hang onto and get interested, involved and invested in.
Well, two years into London, here’s ours. The end of the beginning?
Maja:
I am glad I work on this with Mark, because all of this is a jungle that’s impossible to navigate. With crocodiles ready to eat you at every corner and no-one ever makes it out alive. I mean really. How do you do it? How do we do it? How are we going to do it?
It is impossible.
So. One step at a time. Enjoy the little things as we go along. It’s our road. It’s our impossibility. We’ll do it together. It’ll be fun.
Here we go, Camden Town!
