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- Ask the indie professor: How many musicians does it take to plan a tour?
None. Bands just need a great booking agent and they'll go far. And a few musician jokes along the way won't go amiss either ...
How does a band plan their tour schedule? Besides the obvious answer of whatever venues will book them, how do they plan the route? Which cities take preference? How many nights in each city? I'm very curious!
Samantha Hayden, via email
Tour dates are organised by one of the most essential roles in the music industry, the booking agent. Great agents, by helping artists play the right dates of the right size at the right times, can make the difference in a band's success or failure. It's the booking agent who translates a band and management's assumptions and aspirations into a concrete tour itinerary. A great booking agent knows the size of their artists' audiences at each stage in their career and plans a tour accordingly. For a newer band with a little buzz, they will be booked into "major markets". In the UK, the major markets are London, Glasgow, Leeds, Brighton, Bristol, and Manchester. There are some newer bands that want to play everywhere. This is a huge amount of work for agent and band who, if they are lucky, might break even. However, playing live helps cement an intimate relationship with artists and audiences, particularly in areas that rarely have bands come and play. More established bands branch out into secondary market cities and have longer tours in bigger venues.
The major factor in routing is minimising travel time and days off. Every day on the road has a huge overhead, even tours without crews. Agents tend to plan dates in a circle around the country to avoid doubling back. Then, there is a question of which venue to play. Some venues have club nights with built-in audiences so a band gets paid very little but is assured of a full crowd (soft tickets). At other venues, the band is the draw and then it's a matter of making sure the venue is not too big. It's always better to have a sold-out small show than a half-full big one.
The timing of tours is organised around release dates and key events on the international touring calendar such as SXSW and festivals. Agents are essential for creating a tour that brings a band to key events. The importance of a booking agent is even more crucial for festivals. Promoters start by choosing festival headliners and then work on a deal with the agent. Part of what the agent negotiates is not just a good wage for the headliners, but also leveraging the band's clout for good slots on the festival bill for other acts on the agent's roster. Now, this might seem like trading on the cachet of the premier band, but remember, this is exactly how the premier band got the exposure, breaks, and festival positions on their way to becoming headliners.
What's your favourite musician joke?
BH, via email
I can't say my favourite musician joke because it's taboo, but I can tell you my second favourite one.
Two guys are standing on the side of the road. One's a musician and the other one doesn't have any money either.
Nothing makes a joke less funny than analysing it, but as most of these aren't very funny to begin with I don't feel too bad. Denigrating jokes allow the expression of hostility in a culturally acceptable form and also illustrate cultural stereotypes. The musician joke cycle serves both these functions allowing the teller to feel superior to the butt of the joke and express the negative stereotype of an occupational class. The stereotype of musicians is that they are juvenile wastrels who can't support themselves. Here are some examples from the musician joke cycle:
What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.
How many musicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 20: one to hold the lightbulb and 19 others to drink until the room spins.
What is the difference between a musician and a mutual fund? A mutual fund eventually matures and earns money.
A child says to his mother, when I grow up I want to be a musician. His mother replies, now I already told you, you can only do one or the other.
General musician jokes are especially productive as they can be used to ridicule any performer. These jokes are often told on tours, helping professionals deal with the interpersonal conflicts that arise from touring. So if someone is bothering them, being arrogant, or if they are just agitated by boredom, the touring professional can use a ready repertoire of musician jokes to, as Freud would say it, "have catharsis through articulation". In layman's speech, this means to relieve stress and conflict by having a laugh at someone else's expense.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - New music: The Concretes – All Day (Alt version)
Victoria Bergsman may have left, but it takes more than the lead singer departing to stop these Swedish pop favourites
Losing your lead singer to a solo project, a ubiquitous hit and the theme tune to a John Lewis advert would have signalled the end of lesser bands, but not everyone's favourite eight-headed Swedish pop purveyors, The Concretes. Victoria Bergsman may have gone, but with drummer Lisa Milberg now on vocal duties, the band are set to release their fourth studio album, WYWH, in October. Their current single All Day is a typically lovely slice of slinky guitar pop bettered only by this exclusive stripped-back alternate version (hands up if the intro reminded you of the theme tune to Last of the Summer Wine). As autumn takes hold, the chorus of "we wanna stay in bed / all day, all day, all day" seems more and more appealing.(Here's the original version of All Day.)
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - No Age – Everything in Between: exclusive album stream
Your chance to listen to the third album by the LA noise-pop duo
It's been about five years since LA duo Randy Randall and Dean Spunt formed No Age, the noise-pop band carved in the wake of hardcore trio Wives. The marriage of drone, fuzz and feedback, with occasional rays of melody shining through the cracks was a revelation on their 2007 debut Weirdo Rippers and provided a soundtrack for the nascent, self-sustaining group of bands and fans centred around all-ages venue the Smell.
No Age's 2008 follow-up, Nouns, continued certain recognisable traditions: songs clocked in at less than two and a half minutes; hazy sounds were thickened by shout-along choruses; seductively incomprehensible lyrics fought to be heard. Fans are likely to greet the arrival of their third album, Everything in Between, with the happy sentiment that it's more of the same. It's an album which veers between all-out punk and delicate sentiments ("I want you back underneath my skin"), a collection of songs that the band describe as "a culmination of reflecting upon life's ruptures and triumphs ... the process of moving through these moments banged and bruised". Typical No Age, but in the best possible way. Let us know what you think on the space below.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - How I climbed inside an enormous organ
As the Southbank Centre launches an appeal for the restoration of the Royal Festival Hall organ, I took a tour inside the bowels of the beast
It's not every day that someone invites you to clamber inside his or her organ, and yet this was the unexpectedly intriguing start to my Monday morning. I was at the Southbank Centre in London, attending the launch of a fundraising campaign to restore the Royal Festival Hall's organ to its former glory. Only a third of it is in action at the moment; the rest has been in bits in a Durham warehouse since before the hall was reopened in 2007 after its refurbishment. The campaign has £1.35m to raise, which it hopes to do so over the next three years. The focus of the campaign is to invite music lovers to sponsor an organ pipe, from the petite 1ft ones (£30) to the vast 32ft numbers (£10,000). (I wrote a piece about all this for our news pages.)
Anyway, the most exciting part of the morning (aside from hearing what there is of the organ played by its curator William McVicker) was being invited to step inside the instrument itself, an offer one could barely refuse even though it involved clambering, unsuitably shod, up two steep ladders with my notebook in my teeth and then being subjected to a precipitous view from the top of the organ way down to the stage (all this and one was urged by the delightful Andrew Scott, who works as the organ tuner for a number of London's most famous organs, not to touch any of the pipes or even to knock them with a jacket, since they can go out of tune so easily).
From up here, I was right among the pipes. Scott picked up and blew into the tiniest, which was as slender as a reed and just a centimetre long. A noise as of a dog whistle came out: this note was eight octaves above middle C. Not far away was the largest pipe, 32 ft long. That's four octaves below middle C, an octave lower than a piano can play. The scale of the instrument is just extraordinary.
Here McVicker and Scott went into Top Gear mode and told me that organs are like cars. "There are some really glitzy Ferraris that can go round a track sideways," said Scott, "but the organ at Westminster Abbey is like a Rolls Royce – a refined, rich sound." The RFH organ is like, said McVicker, "a Bentley Turbo R" – you can feel the power when you edge your foot on to the accelerator, but it's a power to be used with care and discretion.
I had never really thought about how you tune an organ before. Now I know. Each pipe has a retractable section that can be minutely adjusted to increase or decrease its total length, and thus pitch. The RFH organ, with its 7,866 pipes, takes an entire working week to tune as each pipe is adjusted in turn.
Scott offered to take me to the precise spot way up high among the pipes of Westminster Cathedral from where an organist once plunged to his death while tuning the instrument. Weirdly enough, I'm tempted to take him up on his offer one of these days...
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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