Cruel Folk's Blog

Or: advice to promoters, from two people who have now been gigging for at least thirty years each...

It's easy to find public-spirited places on the web, in magazines and elsewhere that give advice, often very good advice at that, to unsigned bands. Well, we've been doing this for thirty plus years now, including a long stint of being in a signed rock band with considerable Radio One airplay, and we thought it was about time that we published some of our own friendly advice.

However: this isn't for other bands; it's advice for people who want to run clubs, promote gigs, arrange festivals, or do anything else that involves inviting people like us to carry heavy objects half way across the country to do what we love.

I'll be posting these one at a time on MySpace and collecting them on Cruel Folk's web site at www.cruelfolk.com. Nothing will be invented; everything you read will be something that has actually happened to us at least once, and often many times. We'll start with one that I suspect many readers will be all too familiar with...

Advice to promoters, part 1

"The fact that some guy is your mate does not make him/her a sound engineer"

I suspect every act on earth has on quite a few occasions been asked to deal with a sound engineer who can best be described as well-meaning and enthusiastic, but who quickly makes it obvious that they don't know how to use EQ, they over-apply reverb, and if they have a compressor in their rack then they have no idea what it does. We've met some great sound engineers, and we always go out of our way to be professional in dealing with them. But we've had some dire ones inflicted on us as well, and often in playing the bigger festivals the difference is so abundantly clear it's painful.

Learning to be a good sound engineer takes years, and it's not just a case of being able to lift loudspeakers. Find somebody who knows what they're doing! (If they can't tell you why it's a bad idea to use an omnidirectional condenser for a vocal mike, show them the door!)

Advice to promoters, part 2

"Get somebody to stage manage, and make sure they know what they're doing"

Basically, the job of a stage manager is 90 percent composed of an ability to get people off the stage on time. Experienced acts won't give you a problem here, but less experienced acts will assume that if they have a 40 minute slot, that's 40 minutes in addition to the time it takes them to amble on stage, borrow leads from the other bands, go to the bar, perform a long soundcheck because the nervous singer has to have her monitors exactly right, find the bass player who turns out to be smoking herbal cigarettes outside etc etc etc...

It's death to a gig to let this happen: you need someone willing to kill the PA after the 40 minutes is up. That way they'll learn to get their act together, and your gig will finish on time without the main act, who you're probably paying the most and who most people have come to see, having to cut their set short before the health and safety police turn up and complain about the noise.

And yes, we have both stage-managed, and we have both slung people off the stage despite their protests!

Advice, part 2(b)

Just a little, related extra...

You as the promoter can help matters as well in this respect. Here are the rules:

1. Don't leave deciding the running order until 30 seconds before the gig starts.

2. Tell the acts, and the stage manager, at least a week beforehand. And make sure they know they need to be there an hour in advance.

3. Do not FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY start trying to make room for your mates to do "just 15 minutes" in the middle of the performance.

Advice to promoters, part 3

"If the stage you've booked someone to play on has been condemned, then tell them"

Yes indeed, we once travelled from Norfolk to North Yorkshire to play a festival. It was raining. A lot. We eventually found the organiser (who incidently had our mobile number). He looked a bit confused before saying "um, er, oh yeah man, I think that stage might not be operating...".

We eventually found the stage in the middle of an empty field. As a rehearsal is a rehearsal we played anyway, to four people in torrential rain, with a break in the set to empty the water out of the roof of the stage, which was about to split and drench us.

Then we drove home.

Advice to promoters, part 4

I shall have to moderate my language for this one, as it makes me absolutely apoplectic when I think about it:

"Don't make smart arsed remarks about contracts when it's blindingly obvious you don't know what you're talking about. And don't joke about confiscating bits of our gear. REALLY. You won't make that mistake twice..."

If you've asked a band to play, and they've very kindly agreed to help you out by doing four sets without being payed, without getting any expenses despite the fact it's half way across the country, and have even supplied their own PA, it is not in any way funny to joke about this kind of thing when the singer/mandocellist wakes up the morning after the first two sets with no voice because of a throat infection, and a forearm that's twice its usual size due to tendonitus and consequently has to pull out of the second two sets.

Seriously, you need to learn some contract law, and you'll be prying our gear from our cold dead fingers (or more likely, going to casualty to have it extracted from your person) before you take it anywhere!

Advice to promoters, part 5

"Advertise"

The fact that you've done a lot of work to arrange a gig does not mean that people will come to it. It matters not a jot how brilliant the bands are - assuming they're not well-known enough to fill the venue with their own following - and it doesn't matter that the event is free.

The fact is that most people are not interested in finding new music when it's much easier for them to sit on their arse at home and watch The X-Factor. Yeeeuuch, having typed that I feel like I need a shower...

We've lost count of the number of times we've seen a promoter shoot themselves in the foot by putting on a brilliant gig, but just assuming that the entire town will know about it and turn up despite the fact that they haven't done any advertising at all. The resulting empty room is no fun for anybody, not to mention expensive for the promoter, who is sometimes, curiously, surprised that all the acts still expect to get paid.

It helps to have a headline act that's a known quantity. But even then, no advertising = no punters. You need to hit the local papers, local radio and everything else that will get the message out there. Your acts can help as they will have their own mailing lists and so on, but ultimately it's up to you to make yourself enough of a pain in the neck that people want to take notice.

Advice to promoters, part 6

"If we give you stuff for free, don't take the p**s!!!!!"

We send out a lot of free merchandise, mostly CDs. This is a fact of life for any act who wants to be heard, and we don't have the slightest problem with doing it. We've been in the business long enough to know that sending a CD is no guarantee of a gig, radio play, an interview or anything else. We're perfectly aware of the fact that it might not even be listened to. All of this is perfectly fine.

However occasionally – and luckily it is a very rare thing – somebody goes beyond the expected and into the realms of the purely offensive. I am referring in particular to whoever the cretin is that not only couldn't be bothered to take off the shrink rap but put the CD up for sale on Ebay.

Let me explain, just in case the numbskull is reading this, why this is not on. We don't make a living from this, and we do everything ourselves. Sean has long since lost count of how much money he's spent setting up a studio. It takes at least a year to write and record the songs. We have a professional involved in producing the artwork. We then pay to have the CD pressed and manufactured, and the minimum quantity is 1000 when you want to have this done. So: the CD might well be free to you, because we're nice people, but in real terms it has cost us several thousand pounds to create – and again this is our own money, not a record company advance.

If you don't want to listen to it that's fine. We have very thick skins. Send it back, give it to somebody who might want to hear it, even use it as a nice mat for your coffee mug – we really couldn't give a monkeys.

But trying to make money out of it? That's very naughty...