Support your local venue

I’ve never pulled a pint.

I don’t think I have anyway. I’ve used wee home tap kits and I’m sure at some point I have drunkenly been behind a bar during a lock-in during some random forgotten night in some random forgotten country, but I have never worked a bar….

The most unrealistic thing about this AI is the tameness of my teenage hair

My Saturday job at 16 was trolleys and checkouts at Tesco. It treated me well, so I stayed till I was 21. Double time on Sundays and Triple time on bank holiday Mondays. In 5th and sixth year I’d go there instead of school because my hourly rate was higher than some of my teachers. By 22 my next job was £5k a month, then I packed it all in at 30 to be a poor creative for the rest of my life.

I missed out on that integral part of so many people’s lives - bar work.

It’s strange watching other people work behind a bar. Almost everyone I’ve known who’s worked in one believes their bar has a certain cool factor that outsiders just wouldn’t understand. I’m not sure if they’re fooling themselves or trying to convince everyone else that their minimum-wage job—enduring 12-hour shifts at unsociable hours, on sore feet, dealing with drunk punters—somehow holds an unspoken prestige that actually matters to anyone old enough to drink.

At no point after a long shift pushing trolleys at Tesco did I ever think that I’d come off shift and hang about the trolleys while the next guy does his work.

For this reason, I’ve always found bars and venues a bit strange. They’re often my work place as a gig photographer, videographer, musician and live sound engineer. After 30 years of working at these venues but not being staff at these venues, I’ve yet to find the magic pixie dust that makes them unique or special*.

Live music is a vehicle for selling beer in the same way as soup is a vehicle for eating bread and butter. Anyone who suspects differently is lying to themselve - especially about the soup.

Nearly every business model for a live entertainment has “wet sales” at their core. It’s the reason people let you play gigs in your freeform Norwegian prog metal octet. I’m sorry if you thought it was your lyrics.

Some venues make this ridiculously explicit. There used to be a big venue in Glasgow who charged the extortionate rate of £4.80 for a pint of Fosters during gigs. They would then close their doors at 11pm and then re-open at 11:30pm for the student crowd and the same staff would charge £2.20 for the same pint of fosters. It was a while ago - you can tell because this practice is now illegal and it was in the bygone days when £4.80 was extortionate for a pint…. but yeah - support your local venue.

The people who bridge the gap between the bar staff and the people working in the music industry are the venue managers, the event managers and the promotors. The titles are used interchangeably. This is where it gets fun…. cos they are working in a field not famed for its professionalism, workers rights or honesty…. but just remember they’ve got the magic pixie dust and you haven’t.

There are two routes to becoming these go-betweens facilitating the relationship between your creativity and fermented hops. They are generally either promoted bar staff or they have a degree in creativity and need a stop-gap job while they wait for commissions, funding or the Turner prize. Thankfully there are now degrees in Event Management, but in many many cases your still looking at the longest running and/or most popular bar staff or someone with a prestigious arts degree doing the work(I have a degree in print making from the Glasgow School of Art - I must be good at spreadsheets!!) .…. and that’s where it gets interesting

A local venue is a labour of love - I don’t think anyone starts or buys one as a money making venture. It’s much more simple to make money elsewhere. Many people buy bars for money and then hire managers who try and enter the entertainment industry, but no one thinks… I know what would make loads of money… lets get some really ropey bands to try and convince their skint pals to come to our venue and buy expensive beer and thats how we’ll make our money…. no. Stick up a telly. Put on the football. Sell beer….

So what we have is a series of ill informed decisions which means that the whole local venue economy is a case of lots of characters trying to bang a square peg into a round hole and call it a career - I include myself in several of these roles.

I’ll avoid all my sound engineer stories of turning up for work and the venue manager having forgot to tell you that the show has been cancelled and so has your shift. You can find all that here

Instead I bring you a number of stories from the coalface of dealing with venues.

Communication breakdown

AI struggles with hands, eyes and realistically sized trumpets

So I got asked to put together a horn section for an album launch. The horns were coming on for the last 5 songs to give the whole thing a bit of a finale. I scored the songs for the section. We went to two practices. We dutifully arrived for load-in at the venue at 4pm. We waited around til the show started. We watched the supports. Then 10pm arrived. 6 hours after arriving at the venue we were all ready to go up and play for half an hour. We got announced. We walked on stage. The singer was having a conversation with one of the bar staff. He was showing her his phone. Three security guards had sidled over to my side of the stage to have a discussion about what they were going to do if the large beardy man with the trumpet kicked off.

So it transpires that the bar manager and all the staff thought they were finishing at 10pm. The email from the venue’s event manager… i.e. the contract…. says that the music stops at 10:30 and the venue has to be cleared by 11pm. So rather than upscaling the band and the tunes for the finale. Instead the 150 strong crowd get to watch a singer argue with a bar manager.

The event was an album launch. Several hi-vis sporting security huckle the audience out as they protest that they wanted to buy a vinyl.

I didn’t get to perform the tunes I’d scored. The artist lost out in sales and paid for musicians that didn’t perform. The audience felt somewhat short changed. Why? Cos someone was shite at their job. If the artist had been quoted a 10pm finish the show would have been re-jigged accordingly. If the staff had been quoted an 11pm finish time, they would have got an hour more wages.

The artist didn’t take it as far as legal issues. The venue had offered a free venue hire because they were happy enough with the wet sales of 150 punters. I’m not a lawyer, but it’s possible there is no breach of contract because no money had changed hands, and he certainly can’t get a refund. A bigger artist or event will have event insurance, but gigs like this wouldn’t go ahead with costs like that in place, so you just have to take it on the nose.

If this venue goes bust or shuts down, or loses its license, social media will be awash with people decrying its demise like it’s an elderly relative. Support your local venue!!

I’ll just remember that they cut corners and hire unqualified people.

Fake it till you make it

The parasol attached to the boot doesn’t come as standard on all Mercs

So like most big music cities, Glasgow has a series of multi-venue festivals that happen at various points in the calendar.

I was playing in a band at the time that got an email from the event manager of a venue which is one of several owned by one of Scotland’s big promotors. Would we be interested in playing at the venue in a few months time? The fee wasn’t great, but it was part of one of the biggest and best known multi-venue festivals in Glasgow/Scotland and most importantly I’d worked at it as a videographer and a photographer over the years, but I’d never been in a band of the right genre at the right time to play it.

So we started the process of promoting the gig, inviting along supports. Making up posters and social media banners etc. I added the logo for the promotor and the festival that it would be part of and then got to work drumming up some ticket sales to pack the place out.

I got an angry message from the director of the multi-venue festival. Why was I claiming to be part of their festival? I sent him screenshots of the offer I’d been sent from the event manager of the venue. He came back again and asked me why I hadn’t taken down my posts or changed my ticket links. The event manager hadn’t got back to him. The event manager also hadn’t got back to me.

There were still posters in the venue that I had made with their logo on them. He wanted me to go to the venue and take them down. I was willing to make new social media branding, but as far as I was concerned, my contract was with the event manager of the venue and I wanted to highlight his scamming ways as much as possible. If the festival director wanted the posters removed, he should go to the venue himself and presumably take it up with the event manager’s employers. There’s a framed a version of the original poster on my wall. A testament and reminder of the arseholes of the industry.

Support your local venue!

After this debacle(and several others), the owner of this venue was incredibly vocal during lockdown about the struggle of small local venues and the importance of keeping them alive. Maybe start with a better hiring and firing procedure before you badger the government for help.

Our PR team will get behind it

Keep two hands on your laptop and a third to hold the phone to your ear.

Of the myriad untruths that event managers of venues will tell you- beyond the lies about rider and the equipment that will be available - the biggest one is “our PR team will get behind it”. I can picture bands of a younger pedigree imagining a room filled with people on the phone shouting “buy! Sell! Give me an advert for this gig in your paper ASAP”. Radio spots! TV advertising! Gig listings on bus shelters!

The reality is there is no team. There isn’t even any PR. If the event manager is new and enthusiastic, they might ask you for a photo of the band. They’ll put the venue logo on it via Canva so that they can list graphic design on their CV and send it back to you so that you can PR the gig. In my experience if you go to the bother of sending flyers and posters there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll make it past the back office.

In the worst cases the event manager describes themselves as a promotor. The event doesn’t get shared on their social media; They don’t accept tags and collaborations or invites to join your event when you share it on your social media. If you are lucky, they don’t act with surprise when you arrive at the venue and they find out there’s a show on.

The majority of the promotion for 90% of the gigs I play is carried out by the band. I’ll optimistically make the argument to the several bands that I am in that new venues and promoters could open up new markets and widen our reach, but the reality is it’s the band that are bringing the audience.

Inevitably when you get closer to the gig, the promotor messages you about ticket sales and encourages you to give it another push. Keep an eye on pronouns**:

You’ve only sold X tickets. Can you give it another push?

or

We’ve managed to sell X tickets, but we could sell even more if you gave it another push!

There is an opportunity for the band and the venue to have a symbiotic relationship where they each grow each others brand and ride on each others coat tails, but that would require a PR team and people in posts with transferable skills. These corners got cut a long time ago….. now the PR drive involves telling you to sell more tickets….. but yeah… support your local venue.

The smelly venue

Now your end of the deal is to show up and play a gig. If you want an audience then you probably had to promote a gig. If you want to make a noise then you maybe even had to provide backline(fancy industry speak for the guitar amps and some or all of a drum kit) to a venue with absolutely no feasible means of parking near it.

Even with the most jaded and pessimistic of weather worn musicians there are assumptions about what the venue is providing.

Yes, we know you are likely to lie about food and drink being laid on for the band. Load in will be scheduled for 3pm. The sound engineer will be told he’s to be in for 6pm… but I feel there is an unspoken agreement that the venue shouldn't smell of jobbies.

Now to be fair, I have played in some pretty smelly venues. Dead rats in pipes…. old meat or possibly dead humans in plumbing systems. We’ve already seen the venue owner’s liberal attitude to staffing the place, you can imagine what their position on essential maintenance is. This wasn’t that. This was jobbies.

I was on tour in the highlands playing various dates. We were going up quite high. For the non-scots - almost everyone lives in the bottom third of the country. This is called the central belt. It’s not very central. If we say we are going up north, we generally mean only about 50% of the way up the country. 50% of the way up the country is surprisingly equidistant with quite a lot of England if you go in the other direction. The population density of England(even in the north) is far larger but there’s a romance to driving three hours to play to 8 people in Inverness instead of driving 2 hours to play to 50 people in Newcastle.

Anyway… I digress. For reasons of romance and potentially Creative Scotland funding attractiveness…. we were doing a tour of the top 50% where your tinder can pick up some big strapping lads in Norway if your radius is set wrong.

We had driven to a town that was suitably in the middle of nowhere and we’d arrived in town quite early, so ever the clipboard wielder, I suggested we call in on the venue to give us an idea of what we were dealing with. It smelled of jobbies…. Not plumbing disaster jobbies, but smeared jobbies. I don’t know why there is a difference, but there is.

We got a tour of the venue and smeared jobbies were the least of the oddities. We were shown the male toilets…

This AI image gives an illusion of choice. There was only one urinal. It’s also created in a fantasy world with far superior grouting than the reality.

There was a CCTV camera pointing at the urinals. The bar manager assured us that we didn’t need to worry. They don’t turn it on until the evening. The local police asked them to install it to stop people taking drugs.

As unlikely as I think that the local constabulary have asked for this…. or if they did I’ll bet it’s not in writing… I’m just telling you what he told me.

He also assured us that if we wanted to take drugs, we should do so in the room to the left. He opened a door to a broom cupboard which was entirely empty except for one of those moulded orange seats facing away from the door. To this day, I still don’t know if the locality has a problem with cocaine or heroin or both, but what would be clear is that the male members of the band would have to pee at the bar across the road or fluff it up a bit before they went in.

It turned out that it was quite a good gig. The whole town gravitated to our gig from the bars they had been bothering prior to our arrival. After a few pints you felt much less self conscious about your “small part” in a local voyeuristic porno. There was no stage, so women of a certain vintage would slut drop in front of you and ask if you were going to be going to whatever the local nightclub was called later.

If I had infinite time on the planet or infinite money to get people to make things for me… there would be a documentary called “rural nightclubs in Scotland with exotic names they don’t deserve” They are just like nightclubs in rural Ireland but people don’t jovially offer to fight you in the toilet because of how big you are.

Support your local venue!!

Okay in this case I would argue that no matter the misdemeanours(and out right big boy crimes) occurring, these communities need everything we can give them and I’d tour there at the drop of a hat if anyone could make it worth my while. Plus if you are single, there are a lot of women of a certain vintage that are really lonely.

The ticket split

Any resemblance to venues living or (un)dead is purely coincidental

Now this one is quite complicated. There’s a well known venue in Glasgow which is famous for offering an awful ticket split to young bands. I’ve not seen the contract in years so I can’t comment on what it is currently, but what’s important here is that there is a contract. It’s an offer. Remember you can turn it down!!

So a ticket split is basically when rather than paying a hire fee, (Sometimes it’s in addition to the hire fee) the venue send you 100 tickets. They suggest the tickets are £15. You keep £5 of that. They get £10. You bring them £1000 in cash when you are playing. If you’ve sold 100 tickets at £15, you’re getting £500 for the show. Now £500 for a show of original music in a 100 capacity venue isn’t bad. You’ve not hired a PA. You’ve not hired an engineer. The well known one in Glasgow does genuinely have show listings in the local press and posters up in bus stops, but if you’ve not sold 100 tickets you still bring the venue £1000 to play. Sometimes called ‘Pay to play’, so the risk is all on you and it rankles somewhat to see the capitalism being laid out so literally.

But….. many young bands want to play this venue. It’s seen as an important rung on the ladder and the company that owns it also runs bigger gigs and festivals, so rightly or wrongly there’s a feeling that if you attract their attention you could get on some bigger stages and get some interesting supports.

Now I don’t personally do ticket splits. I’m past the stage of wanting to play a venue that badly. The reality is that you end up giving a lot of the tickets away to fill the room which results in you paying the venue to serve your family and friends over priced beer.

I play the venue regularly as a hired hand who doesn’t need to sell tickets and I love it when I do. I’m treated well. It sounds great and when I play it it’s often sold out.

If you want to spend £1000 putting on a show that might make you £500 profit, it makes far more sense to hire a venue and put on your own show, but don’t expect the bells and whistles of what in my experience is a pretty well run venue. I can’t complain about being a sound engineer on a zero hours contract while also complaining about a venue with a setup that puts the engineer on a more legit contract. It’s really just a case of someone in the chain having to take the brunt of the round peg going into the square hole. We could also treat and pay everyone properly and keep the beer at a reasonable price and it would cost £50 a ticket to see a local band.

I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s complicated. This is a business model that has been employed for decades. I would urge bands to work out what they are paying for. For £1000(in my very very ballpark framing of the issue) you get to play an iconic venue. Take advantage of it! - press interviews, hire a photographer and a videographer and milk it as much as possible. You might not make much money, but in my experience you are less likely to be lied to by an event manager, have your winky filmed while processing beer into urine or have security remove you from the stage because the contract hasn’t been communicated to the staff.

In this case, if you want to support your local venue you are given a very clear and specific means of doing so.

When the whole place doesn’t know it’s arse from it’s elbow

“yeah. Whatever you do, make sure there is a big screen at the back with someone flying a copper soup pot through the air”

As shows get bigger, you would think that people further up the chain were better qualified. It’s not always the case.

My significant other was putting on some comedy shows for a multi-venue festival. She’d been asked to programme a week of events at a relatively well known venue who were meant to be used to putting on shows. She hadn’t went looking for the work, it had found her. 5 days. 4 shows a day. Or something like that. She met with the venue. Explained everything involved. She’s a TV producer and everything is planned to the nth degree and documented.

She’d had an agreement in place with the acts. If they didn’t sell 15% of their tickets by the day of the show, she reserved the right to cancel the show and charge an admin fee. The acts could however cancel the show before that with enough notice and not incur a fee. The venue were copied in on all these communications.

She put together guidelines for all the acts on promoting their shows themselves and she promoted the shit out of them. The venue didn’t promote the shows despite one of their job titles being promotor, but this was nothing unusual(see above).

About 5 days before the first show she sent out a group email to everyone involved to update them on ticket sales and remind them of various admin requirements. The event manager for the venue immediately phoned her….. thankfully it was on speakerphone cos that’s where the fan really came into contact with the excrement.

The venue manager informed her that they would need the ticket sales to be higher. Not an unusual request.

How high?

90%

Wow! So any show that’s not sold 90% is cancelled? When is the cut off point?

Today! And it’s not any show that’s not sold 90%, it’s any day that features a show that’s not sold 90%

So it turns out if there was a day where 3 shows had sold out and one had sold 85%, all four should be cancelled because it wasn’t worth the venues while. Or more specifically, the management didn’t know how to make it worth their while. According to the events manager the shows were costing the venue £5000 in AV rental.(Posh industry speak for Audio Visual Equipment). Now these were relatively small comedy shows where a comedian speaks into a microphone. No laser shows. One or two of the shows needed a projector, but this had been outlined at the initial meetings 6 months previous. The venue told her they’d take all the sold out shows on the Saturday but that everything else was to go.

She was absolutely flabbergasted, but that wasn’t the only F word used when she came off the phone. She contacted the festival organisers. This festival was big enough that they did have a team of competent people in offices negotiating on phones. They gave her their full support to pull the other shows from the venue and not let them pick and choose which (sold out) shows they wanted to put on with 5 days notice.

I have no idea what bin fire of a venue they were running, but they clearly had internal problems. It could be idiocy. Like the idiocy involved in thinking you need to rent a PA for £5000 to put on a small comedy show when you could buy five PA’s outright that would do the job for that money. Maybe it was a communications issue and the event manager hadn’t noticed that there were several big sports games that week that they would rather have been involved in, or maybe someone had been promoted beyond their means.

Whatever the reason our household lost a day’s work phoning round venues and comedians and venue managers and festival managers to move 20 shows to venues which could not only accommodate them in terms of dates and times but that also met accessibility needs. I helped out when I wasn’t doing my own work while also writing a eulogy. Thankfully it happened on a day where the nursery had the toddler.

Many of the sold out shows ended up in larger venues which could sell more tickets. Many of the shows which were not selling well sold lots at the last minute, because thats how shows and especially festival shows work. She built better relationships with several people at different points across the chain. She learned and shared the news of a particularly useless venue and learned and shared the news of some venues and venue mangers that were really good at what they did. In the grander scheme of things it was a win, but it didn’t feel like that while she was in the trenches.

At the end of the day the venue owner called. I don’t know why he called. I think he maybe thought he was phoning to apologise or possibly it’s a regular after sales service where he phones up to find out how useless his staff are in the hope he can plumb new depths the next time round.

He asked what had happened. She explained it. He told her that that’s not how he would have done things and that he’d been very busy. He didn’t say his events manager was useless, but he implied it. He didn’t say “sorry, but I’ve been really busy”, he rattled off what companies he was running and tried to tell us how important he was. She pointed out that she was quite busy too. She didn’t feel the inadequacy required to read him her impressive CV. She didn’t need to point out that it was through his doing that she was busy. He told her that he was busier than she was and that she didn’t even understand busy. No one understands busy like him.

So I guess he aimed to apologise but instead fancied an explicit boast of how good he is at being busy. Implicitly he seemed to want to boast about how bad his time management skills are, how out of his depth he was and how chaotic the environment he worked in was. She hung up on him, confident that he’d told her everything she needed to know.

I find many of the people/men involved in venues and the events economy in general are toxic. They create toxic and chaotic work environments because they have never experienced anything else because of the career paths involved in this industry. Everything is slapdash and badly planned and there’s a circle jerk that tells everyone it’s the only way to create great events. They aspire to a vision of a pub landlord that they’ve misremembered from their youth or seen in a Guy Ritchie film. They know a change is coming because of how competent the young team are, and if there’s anything fragile masculinity hates - it’s change. Before they know it they are writing op ed pieces on sub stack telling everyone how great Trump is.

The truth is - well run venues which employ competent level headed people with a work life balance are the places where things get done. Creativity is chaotic enough already…. so just leave that bit to the creatives.

…..but yeah…. support your local venue.

The good guys

At time of writing, a higher proportion of the AI vision of “good guys in a music venue” have been to Turkey to have their teeth done than the actual reality.

So I’m painting it as if I hate venues and everyone who sail in them. It’s not my intention. Live music is my bread and butter and one of my favourite things to do. It’s for this reason that I feel so strongly about it. These places are the backbone of the local music economy and watching them being run badly is painful.

To the venues. You charge £6 a pint. Wetherspoons charges £2. I understand why they are able to do that and you aren’t, but I want to support my local venue and I have choices, so please try harder if you are guilty of any of the crimes listed above!!!

It’s also not that easy to say “this venue is amazing” because they chop and change so often and unless you are experiencing every facet of them constantly, it’s hard to give a recommendation. That’s why I don’t name any of the above venues. In some places it’s systemic problems, but who am I to say that a case study from 6 years ago or even 6 months ago hasn’t been ironed out….

….but here goes… apologies if anyone disagrees, I’ve had some wonderful gigs at Saint Lukes in Glasgow and it’s a perfect size for seeing a band in a medium sized venue which is atmospheric but still intimate. It’s a pleasure to play it when it’s packed. They seem to retain staff as well, which is always a good sign.

David Blair at Room 2 in Glasgow has quietly solved some real ball aches behind the scene for me over the years. I’ve been involved in a wide variety of music, comedy and film nights there and it knocks it out the park every time. The venue is accessible and central. Top marks.

McChuills in Glasgow is also fantastic. Friendly(and consistant) staff. Quality sound engineers. Great atmosphere when it’s packed. Guinness 0.0 in the green room.

The Bungalow in Paisley wins awards and for good reason. It sounds good. The equipment is good. The staff are relaxed and friendly and the bands are treated well. If every town with Paisley’s demographic had a Bungalow then Scotland’s music economy would be in a far better place. This really is a case of “support your local venue”. A venue like this in Kilmarnock, Greenock or [insert working class Scottish town] could make a huge difference to the economy in these towns.

If Glasgow or Edinburgh lose a venue they will still have tourist foot fall. The small towns really need stuff like this, so it’s even more important that you support them(and give them the benefit of the doubt). The more remote you go for gigs the better the welcome. Stray from the beaten track! Go see something outside the main cities!

okay…. thats enough positivity…. here’s one last adventure from the coal face - and the only image in the article that’s not AI

Send in the clowns

So the band in question was a 9 piece band made up of people who spend the rest of their week playing functions and weddings for £150-£250 a pop. I was doing everything I could to release original material with a decent release schedule to try and push water up the hill and build some traction and momentum. You would think that with 8 other members I’d have a bit of backing on this, but more band members does not a PR army make.

One thing I did achieve was to start attracting the attention of the wonderful “promotors” of the local music venues. I would be offered deals like this. I’m guessing that the person in question hadn’t checked all my carefully curated live videos and PR photos. All the content saying “look at us. this is what we are offering. This is what we look like!!” They couldn't possibly have thought £6.66 and a burger per head was a suitable rate to offer us… and if that wasn't interesting enough, we could bring along all our family and friends to buy overpriced beer and instead of getting £6 each we could keep some of the ticket money.

The venue and promotor in question wouldn’t build a suitable bill around you. They would ask you a few weeks before the show if you had anyone in mind. You can only suggest people you know who you have already tried to chin for tickets, so you get some mates along to support you and sell even less tickets.

The promotor is unlikely to promote the gig given that their social media is awash with music from an unrelated genre which tries to paint the promotor as some sort of master music mogul who is lying on beds of cash in 5 star hotels. They definitely didn’t graduate from handing out flyers for the venue to checking Facebook for bands that are actively marketing their new release and sending them copy and paste messages without checking who the band are or what the likelihood is that the members are pretty aware of how shite this deal sounds. They definitely aren’t just finding a stop gap solution for their time between scadging seats and drugs in cars going to the summer festivals.

Oh Ehm gee!!! You’ll let us headline??!?!?!?!? Next you’ll be telling us that the venue isn’t under investigation from environmental health and that it doesn’t have a terrible history of treating it’s staff badly!!

…..but yeah….. support your local venue!!

Hi! I’ll be your promotor for the evening. I’m a huge fan of [insert genre]. I’m a free spirit who believes in free love, tie die, sticking it to the man and if someone is paying me minimum wage to send bands shitty deals - capitalism. Yeah - the sound eningeer will be here in about 3 hours. No rider? Aww there should have been. I’ll go and see if I can do something about that and do drugs in the back office and forget. You’ll next see me dancing late morning and still going from the night before in an empty tent in the summer.

*I hope everyone that has ever worked in a music venue appreciates that I didn’t take the cheap shot of pointing out that cocaine use by staff is rife in music venues across the UK - especially the shit ones

** ™ Burky