The post Life without live music sucks, but what are we going to do about it? appeared first on Pretend.
]]>There have been a few things that I’ve enjoyed about the pandemic, the newly optional nature of showers, day-long tea breaks, and it being illegal for men to sit next to me on public transport. But overall, it’s been a bit crap.
I, like everyone else at Pretend, have missed live music the most. Who’d have thought? When lockdown first started, I drowned my sorrows in the livestreams of my favourite artists whose shows were being cancelled left, right, and center. Staying up until ungodly hours to cry along to Phoebe Bridgers singing in her bathtub and dreaming about what might have been. However, I can’t help but miss gigs: the hopelessness of waiting for a pint when the band might start any minute, accidentally going to the loo during your favourite song, and the corduroy trousers of soft boys everywhere blowing in the heavenly breeze of the sluggish wind machine.
6 months down the line, we’ve seen so many excellent albums released. But the majority of money artists earn from new music these days is through live performances and touring. In the age of streaming, it’s more difficult than ever to cut through the fray to solidify your acclaim and fanbase. Without live shows, for many this will be impossible. Spotify pays artists a whopping £0.0034 per play, meaning a song garnering about half a million streams earns the rights holder about £1700. Not exactly the big time and definitely not enough to record an album off the back of a successful first indie single. Especially, if you’re a nu-wave jazz soul fusion band with 16 members.
One of the best ways around this is just to have an incredible album with a hugely successful and well-funded marketing strategy behind it, I know my fellow Dua Lipa stans will feel me here. But how are artists without the multimillion-pound recording contracts and invites to late-night american talk shows supposed to climb that golden rope and make their music heard?
One of the unforecasted consequences of this whole crisis is that collaboration is now easier than ever, doing a session with someone on another continent is about as easy as somebody on the other end of the Northern Line, due to nobody really having any plans anymore anyway. Artists like Soccer Mommy have used this opportunity to create memorable engaging singles series that showcase other artists, as well as to raise money for organisations supporting people in the music industry who are struggling at this time.
Ticket apps, like DICE, are also adapting to the vacuum that live shows have left. Showing a huge range of live streams that artists big and small are doing, both in and out of the city. Not fitting enough cliches into this article, the saying ‘location, location, location’ still rings true. In a quid pro quo deal, some artists are working in partnerships with local businesses (see the Pretend session at Mondo Brewing in Battersea with John Myrtle for an excellent and affiliated example of this), giving artists a safe and socially distanced location to perform, whilst acting as much-needed publicity for independent businesses.
Finally, the thing we’ve all heard about, but few have actually attended yet: socially distanced gigs. We all lived through the pain of dates being postponed, rescheduled, postponed again, rescheduled again, and so on ad infinitum. But, one of these days the date will actually stick and we actually will be able to go. Yes, we all saw those cursed Sam Fender gig pics and cringed to death, but it did show that there is a place for safe live music in venues with sufficient outdoor space. Costa del Tottenham has done an excellent job of showcasing the potential of particular venues to host events, but there are few locations that are capable of that level of adaptation (read more about that here). What about venues without that amount of space, that have garnered adoration for their intimacy and innate pokiness? Take The Lexington, for example, my own personal favourite venue, how are tiny attic stages like that supposed to feasibly put on financially viable gigs? For now indoor gigs will continue to be restricted and drastically more expensive than before. The more affluent fans among us might be desperate enough to pay £94.50 to go to a socially distanced The Comet is Coming show at Alexandra Palace (22nd Nov), but I fear I am not. It may be that middle-tier artists are the most at risk, not having a fan base large enough to fill arenas, but having too many fans to have one of the accidentally (albeit ahead-of-their-time) socially distanced gigs that many low-level indie bands have put on in the back room of Cafe 1001.
This is all conjecture on my part really, no one knows how the music industry is going to adapt long-term to the pandemic. I realise I’ve also raised more questions than I’ve given answers. There will definitely be the do-gooders, like Bandcamp running days where they waive their own fees, meaning millions go directly to artists. As well as do-badders of which there are too many to name here.
We’re all quite scared. We will likely lose many treasured small venues that the industry relies on for the development of new talent, if we and the government don’t support them now. But in the end, music will have to survive, because everyone loves it. Even the rich, and it’s what the rich want that really matters at the end of the day, isn’t it? All I know is I’m not sure if I can cope if Nadine Coyle’s tour is permanently cancelled.
My picks for upcoming live streams:
- Gary Numan is doing a live Q&A with Jude Rogers on Monday 19th October in anticipation of the release of his new autobiography. Yes: it’s unbelievably expensive at £24 and yes: I’m probably quite uncool for liking Gary Numan, but that’s my business.
- Katy J Pearson is doing a Rough Trade Transmissions session on Friday 13th November in anticipation of her dreamy new album ‘Return’ and it’s FREE.
- Casting our minds forward into January and February, Bjork is doing four concerts with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at Reykjavik’s Harpa Hall. Definitely worth cooking up a nice mushroom risotto with the boys and having a watch.
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]]>The post Sit-Down-Dancing through lockdown: The view from the Costa Del Tottenham appeared first on Pretend.
]]>It’s been a surreal experience being told to not socialise in large groups while simultaneously heading to spaces where I know I’ll be interacting with large groups of people every day in order to pay my rent. It’s a disconnect between what I should do, what I know how to do and what I have to do to get by that I feel is shared by thousands of people around the country.
We know that the best thing we can do to stop the spread of this virus is to limit our social interactions but as financial support is removed (or was never available to us in the first place as freelancers) we find ourselves looking at the skills and knowledge we’ve developed thinking “well what’s the point in all this?”
This anxiety becomes particularly acute when we’re being told by ministers to get a “better job” or that “your business is not viable.” When all is said and done, people still need to socialise now and they will need to socialise when this is all done. People will still need creative outlets and they will pay for those things and in so doing pay the wages of real people in viable, secure and at times brilliant jobs. Reducing this to a simple question of “do the jobs pay x amount of money or not” would be to miss the point of what else these jobs can provide. There is more that makes a job worthwhile than what it pays, it can be the friends you make working in a bar, the skills you gain helping to do sound at a local venue or the sense of pride in having built something creative for your community. Not everyone is built for the nine to five grind or the Amazon warehouse but it feels like these are the only types of jobs that will be considered “viable” and worthy of support by this government.
One of the jobs I have been working on has been with the “Costa Del Tottenham,” the name given to the outdoor extension of The Cause that has allowed them to host socially distant events all summer. As good as it is the Costa Del Tottenham is not a symbol that things are okay, the sight only exists now because a planned development was postponed at the start of the year and while it is a “viable business” for now it’s not a model that can be replicated in every space or for all creative events.
Every time I’ve wanted to share a photo that I’ve taken at the Costa Del Tottenham where people are having a good time I’ve worried that it might create the impression that we’re on the path back to normal, we’re not. Normal won’t return and there may be positives as many spaces will be forced to become more accessible but before we get there we will see irreparable damage done to our creative communities through a loss of spaces, a loss of skills and a loss of people if nothing is done to support them.
With that said, the Costa Del Tottenham is a beacon of hope in dark times managing to maintain a fun and safe environment in which to enjoy music even as the summer fades away.
Words and photos by James Ward (@Jammy_Randoms)
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