Glasgow Roots Revue 2019

For years I’ve tried to put my finger the music genre that covers Blues, Country and Americana rootsy stuff. Most of my favourite bands and colleagues play that music.

You can’t call it Blues because then you end up with lots of men of a certain age playing long solos and sounding like 80’s Eric Clapton.

If you call it Country you end up with people in gingham shirts and comedy cowboy hats singing songs about pickups.

I don’t know what Americana is.

While I like elements of all three of the above genres, it didn't quite cut it. If we could work out what the name of a genre was that could take in 70’s Stones, Bob Dylan, Back porch blues, and Neil Young but where Ray Charles and Otis Redding weren’t out of place then I was confident we could put on a festival.

I felt that we easily had 20 bands in Glasgow with a following who fit into the Venn diagram. We could bring folk together from out the woodwork instead of all our bands playing on lineups with Oasis-wannabe bands and the flavours of the month.

It was just beer chat. I’d said it to loads of folk, but I wasn't a promotor and I already had enough projects on the go. I think I was sub-consciously hoping that someone would run with the ball and just create it for me. For some friends it became an ongoing conversation. We’d discuss venues, and lineups and whether it was doable or not. I was against putting on a “night” in one of the venues on Sauchiehall street. It was the safe option, but it would also mean that the brand would sink without trace. It would get paired down to being just another event with three bands playing to 20 people on a Tuesday night. We’d all done it multiple times and it was hard to get excited about the return versus the effort. I wanted to think bigger.

At some point out the blue, Anton asked me if I was busy Wednesday lunchtime. We had a meeting at Saint Luke’s.

Saint Luke’s is in the East end in a re-purposed church. It was “custom re-purposed” as a venue and burger and wings bar. It’s next to The Barrowlands, so it’s creation created a kind of arts and music hub in that area of Glasgow. Several venues have cropped up since its creation. Chae from Tenement TV was the events manager at the time and Dirty Diamond & The Gunslinger were the first band to play the venue, so I’d been involved in loads of stuff there over the years. Most importantly it looked amazing and it was a pretty good size for what we were looking to do.

After talks with Chae and Alex from the bar, we decided to setup a second stage in the bar area and chose a date a few months in advance.

Done! We were now concert promotors. Being an advocate of worshipping Dionysus and living a life of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll I immediately made a spreadsheet.

Margins were tight. We needed about 80 people through the door just to break even. We had 18 band slots to fill between the two stages. We made a shortlist and a longlist of who we wanted to play and then worked out how much we could pay them. We sent out offers to all the bands. We were up front how little we could pay them, but thankfully they got behind the idea.

We knew early on that we were going to ask Phil Campbell from Temperance Movement to headline. He was in the midst of kicking off the Byson family. We’d also made mates with Matt Owens from Noah and the Whale at Glastonbury which handled the “drawing talent from out of town” bit. The event was going to be an excuse to do a big 10 piece band show with Al & The Bad Decisions. With a the overlap in musicians, we were able to convince Charlotte Marshall to do the same. With that core we were confident that we could use the rest of the slots to both sell more tickets and introduce the crowd to bands we liked.

Back in the day sponsorship wasn’t somewhere you jumped to when you were planning a gig. It’s now a key element of making a gig break even. The trick is trying to find the right brand’s for your event, and then trying to get them to give you cash instead of product. By the time we put the gig on the gig we had sponsorship from Coors, American Eagle Bourbon, Dead mans Finger’s rum, Guitar Guitar, Findlayson guitars and Holy Smokes Records. This gave us some gravitas and let us raffle off a Findlayson Guitar as part of the event.

Once everything was planned, we sat down with Kenneth and created some branding and artwork.

During the promotion stage, we managed to get HMV on board who let us put on a wee Sunday morning teaser gig in the store. Disaster struck when they got flooded and it had to be postponed. When we did finally do it, we sold a few extra tickets.

By the time the actual day came, the spreadsheet was looking relatively healthy. There was no ambition to get a holiday in the Bahamas out of the gig, but we had crossed the threshold of the event costing Anton and I several thousand pounds each to put on which was the main worry.

We were starting strong. Matt Owens was one of our few ‘out-of-towners’ and he was doing us a solid by opening the Winged Ox stage for us early afternoon and then heading off to Manchester for another gig later in the day. Our two biggest bands also had members with evening commitments so Al & The Bad Decisions and Charlotte Marshall were getting the main stage going nice and early. Once that hurdle was passed, the bands went on turn about on the two stages.

We had managed to get plenty bodies through the door and by mid afternoon I was running out of space to fit a disaster. I was able to relax into it and stand back and marvel at what we’d achieved.

The music flip flopped from stage to stage, so it never stopped, and I was trying to get photo and video of all the bands in lew of better payment, so I was running about like a mad man trying to capture it all. I dream of putting one of these things on when we are successful enough to hire staff :)

The back stage area had become as much fun as the gigs with the bands milling around and enjoying themselves. One day we’ll also be successful enough to capture wee acoustic sessions and colabs here, but that could be a bit of a mistake given the amount of free drink that was flowing :)

By the end of the night it was getting raucous with Blue Milk and then Jack Richardson. The Winged Ox was pretty full running up to Phil Campbell on the main stage. Phil has brought a sizeable following, and while there had been a great crowd milling around during the day, the show ended with the main room full.

Phil was spell binding and the held everyone in his thrall. The audience loved it. It was a great end to a great first event.

What next?

Me and Anton sat down a couple of weeks later over a beer. Me with my spreadsheet and him with his optimism and we thrashed out a plan for the following year. We decided to expand it to a two day event. We also decided that it needed to come forward in the year to be closer to the end of the summer.

The plan was to put on a show on the Friday night which would close with an all-star band covering an entire album. My vote was for Sticky Fingers. Saturday would then be the same. There was day tickets and weekend tickets.

Our line up aims involved more people from out of town. Some great bands. It was all coming together and then WHAM! Covid-19. We hummed and hawed and tried to work out if there was an online activity that we could use to keep the plate spinning, but we were both really busy with lockdown projects and the internet was awash with online events that were bigger and better.

So we now own a mothballed festival brand which worked in the proof of concept. Despite year 1 breaking even, I don’t think either of us have the time or the financial clout to surf the risks of event management in 2021, but maybe you’ll see GRR in 2022!!