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Our guitarist Aaron had an interesting
conversation with a young band at UWE who had been trying to get a
gig at The Fleece in Bristol. They were most put out that they
hadn’t been offered and immediate headline spot, despite the fact
they had never performed a gig in their lives.
Aaron asked them how they thought the Fleece’s
management would be reassured that they would pull a crowd as they
had not as yet ‘proved’ themselves.
The response, cutting out most of the
profanity, basically stated that they didn’t need to think about
pulling a crowd as they were amazing and that the Fleece would be
honoured to have them.
Ah the arrogance of youth.
Now this article certainly isn’t about bashing
young bands, far from it. However, if you are just starting out in
this business, and you think that the venues and music pubs are
going to be falling over themselves to book you just because you are
‘the next big thing’, think again.
It’s a fact of life. The music venues are
businesses. They make money when the customer either pays at the
door or buy drinks from the bar, preferably both of these things. It
doesn’t matter if you are the new Kaiser Chiefs, if people don’t
come to see you, then the venue loses money. However, you could play
the Birdie Song on a Peruvian nose flute, get a crowd, the venue
makes money. You see how it works.
So how do you go about pulling in a HUGE
crowd?
The first thing you don’t do is make
assumptions. Don’t assume that, as mentioned in Wayne’s Word 2, just
because you build it they will come.
Do not assume that the venue will take care of
all the advertising. Don’t assume that all your mates will
automatically know the gig’s on. In fact, don’t assume that anybody
will know that you are playing at all.
The secret is promotion. Promote, promote
promote and when you think you have promoted enough, promote some
more.
So let’s do a gig promotion together.
Your band has been booked to play at a city
centre venue, and you want to make a good impression.
Posters
The first thing you need to do is get some
posters printed up for the venue itself. And don’t leave it until
two days before the gig itself (yes it does happen). Make the poster
eye grabbing, with the relevant detail on it. Try not to offend
anybody with it, and remember that it is meant to be a selling tool
for the band as opposed to some existential statement.
You can also take the time to put the posters
up in local shops and businesses. Bear in mind your intended
audience. Student areas like Cotham, Redland and Clifton are always
a good place. However, be aware than many of these shops have
cottoned on to this and will make a small charge for the use of
their window. Again, make sure your poster stands out and demands
attention as it will not be the only one there.
One again, bear in mind who your target
audience are. If you are a hardened thrash metal band then putting
up a poster in the local Age Concern window probably won’t solicit
much of a response. However, maybe putting them up in a few tattoo
parlours and motor bike shops?……..I’m struggling here, where do
thrash metal fans usual hang out???? You get my point. If you’re an
old New Romantic band from Downend, or a Ska band from Speedwell,
find out where the lovers of this kind of music hang out and blat
it!!
Local Press and Media.
If you have internet access, most of this is
pretty straight forwards, and as a band we have found that the three
main publications to get your listings into is The Bristol
Evening Post, The Metro and of course Venue. It’s
also fantastic for the ego to get listed in the NME. However,
be creative, there are plenty more out there, you just have to find
them. As with the posters, don’t leave it till the last minute. Most
papers like their copy in several weeks in advance. And again, don’t
assume that because you sent the date in a couple of months ago that
it will get printed. Send it again a couple of weeks before the
gig.
Local radio will often list gigs. You will
have to do your home work and find them as there are a fair few in
Bristol. It’s a good idea to send in a copy of your nicely packaged
demo with the listing as you never know. We have been lucky on
several occasions and had a track played at the same time as the
radio mentioned the gig.
The Internet
Then it’s time to hit the internet. There are
literally dozens and dozens of sites dedicated to gig listings, the
biggest being sites like Ent24 and of course our very own Bristol
Rocks.
The easiest way of finding these, is to Google
names of local bands that you know play regularly…..you could always
try The Mudheads (that’s if I have been on top of things of
course).
By doing this regularly I managed to get The
Mudheads to fill the first top ten of the Google search engine
(great for the ego).
Be warned, it is VERY time consuming, so don’t
do what I did, but share the responsibility amongst your fellow band
members (if you can drag them out of the pub). I am I know coming
from the perspective of a band member. If you are a soloist, it
would be a good idea for your own personal sanity to find helpful
people who can aid you in your publicity efforts (you’ll probably
find them more reliable that band mates anyway….and less
argumentative).
Flyers
You will then need to print off a large pile of
flyers. You’ll need these in particular if you are playing at a
venue where you get paid by the number of punters who have turned up
with your flyers.
We have found that giving everybody a flyer as
opposed to just telling them about the gig does make it stick in
their minds a little better.
Leave a pile in the venue where you are
playing.
Try and leave some in local shops and takeaways
in the area to where you are playing (ask first……some traders get a
bit iffy if they get what they see as rubbish dumped in their
shops).
Make sure that every band member has a
pocketful on them at all times weeks before the gig. The prize goes
to the one that keeps asking for more.
Be creative
I knew a band called The Gutter Brothers,
and whenever they played in a new town for the first time they would
go and busk in the city centre, with some of their girlfriends
handing out flyers for the gig. I remember their first gig at The
Fleece, it was rammed, and they were initially an unsigned band from
the East End of London.
If you are a musician and play in a band or
perform alone, you should by your very nature be creative. So try
using some of that creativity to raise awareness for your act and
your up and coming gigs.
Probably best to keep it legal. Bungee jumping
off of the top of the old Bristol & West building might get you much
needed publicity, but the gig will be hopeless if half the band is
still banged up by the old bill.
I once got sent a carrot by a company. Just a
carrot and nothing else. Of course I just HAD to phone the company
to find out what the carrot was all about…..job done!
Run a competition in the local press with the
winner receiving free merchandise and free beer all night at the gig
(I won one of those myself once….and as the beer was a rather fizzy
Dutch lager it didn’t cost the band very much at all…..but it got
people to the gig).
Why don’t we start getting our creative heads
on at start having some fun with this old promotion game?
The Mailing list
There ain’t no getting away from it…your
friends WILL get bored of you sooner or later, especially if you
like to play regularly. So unless you are fortunate to have the
ability to constantly travel, you are going to have to be working on
building a new fan base as soon as possible.
It’s easier today than it has ever been, thanks
to the internet. Building a mailing list I assume has already gone
hand in hand with making a web page with every band and singer
reading this article (You have got a web page haven’t you?)
The best way we found of getting people’s
e-mail addresses is to print off a HUGE pile of your demos onto
CDR’s that has your website, e-mail address or Myspace page on it.
Then you tell people that they can have one of these CDR’s for free
if they give you their e-mail address. Make sure somebody else
writes down the address for them, preferably somebody that has
legible handwriting (it’s a pain in the backside the following
morning trying to read some drunks scribble).
Sure you’ll get a few bogus ones, but we
started off getting four hundred local addresses in our first few
months. After that, we tried badges, but that wasn’t as popular as
the CDR’s.
Then you can send out a regular newsletter,
with news, information etc AND gig dates.
Remember to keep these interesting and to the
point. Encourage people to read them, not leave them for later as
you have written more text than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Also, and this very important, don’t add
attachments and limit the number you send at a time. The trick is
not to get caught up in people’s spam filters (if anybody has
figured out how to do this effectively PLEASE let me know).
If somebody requests that you remove them from
your mailer (i.e., they have sobered up and can’t remember who the
hell you are, and beside they don’t allow Death Metal in the
Convent). Be polite, wish them well, and strike their name from the
list.
Also, be a tad careful adding people to your
mailing list that haven’t asked to be on there. Some people get a
bit upset about unsolicited mail, and I have known bands that have
had their internet provider threatened with legal action, which
didn’t go down too well.
Put on a show
In my research for this article (yes, I did
read a few articles and I even talked to a few people…..I didn’t
just make it up…honest), I discovered two things. Firstly, major gig
attendance, especially in the larger cities is on the up whilst
local gigs are down, and secondly people are finding local gigs
boring.
Putting together these two facts, what have the
major bands got over the local bands? (apart from a record deal).
Normally a huge light show, video screens, visual effects, guitars
that are in tune with each other, and songs that flow into each
other.
It amazes me that many of the local bands out
there spend as much time pratting about in between each song as they
do actually performing.
We figured out at one of our early gigs at the
Louis, that if we didn’t draw breath and bled each song into each
other we could add another three songs into our set (I mean you are
only on for 30 minutes). We went for it. The other two bands got in
about seven songs in each, we got eleven (and we didn’t go over
time) and the crowd loved it.
The point is, a little bit of professionalism
goes a long way. If you are going to banter with the crowd keep it
short and to the point. Watch what you are saying (I get a drum
stick thrown at me each time I say thank you at the end of a
song…..that’s my own insecurity kicking in there).
You’ll have to work out what works for you in
terms of your performance, but at least think about it. Talk about
it, discuss it. Be creative. Have some fun.
Bottom line, if you have 30 minutes to make an
impression, what can you add to your music that will make you stick
in people’s minds, long after you have packed up and gone home.
Oasis and the Manchester sound have already
done ‘standing there and looking bored’; here in the West Country it
would appear that the time has come for something different.
Something exciting and dynamic. Something that will grab your
audience by the wot nots and yell “stop talking to your mates and
LOOK at me”. Something so amazing that it will demand your audiences
to go back to work and say “You really have to go and see this band,
they were flippin amazing”.
What do you think?
I feel that to some extent I am writing this
article under false pretences, as I am no expert (‘Ex’ being an
unknown quantity and ‘Spurt’ is a drip under pressure), and The
Mudheads are finding pulling in a crowd as difficult as
everybody else.
However, maybe we can inspire each other to
pull out all the stops and start getting people back into local gigs
again.
What we need now is a REAL response from all of
you.
Bristol Rocks gets over 28,000 hits in a single
weekend, and yet we only had about 10 or so responses to the first
part of this article. That probably means that there are a huge
numbers of local bands out there who are pulling in massive crowds
and didn’t feel the need to write in.
So go on, spare ten minutes and share the
secrets of your success with the rest of us.
In all seriousness, every band has something
that works for them. Why not write in a let us know what that
something is.
Write either to me at Mudheads@gmail.com or to
the Editor at Bristol Rocks.
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