Big Tunes In Small Rooms

This post was originally published before the pandemic consumed our entire industry. Already we have seen evidence of widespread unscrupulous activity from individuals and organisations who really ought to know better: West End theatres cutting orchestras by fifty per cent; stately homes seeking to recruit experienced, professional artists for a luxury event without any offer of appropriate payment. These are a couple of the highest profile incidents so far, but I feel all too certain that it's the tip of a very unfortunate iceberg. If I can make one fact ineluctably clear, no one in the industry has any need to go to work without proper payment to 'blow away the cobwebs' or whatever patronising turn of phrase you care to choose. Our industry has been paralysed for over a year, it would make more sense to pay us double what we were formerly used to. Fat chance of that ever happening of course. 

I was actually reminded of the following earlier post by the sudden schism that has erupted in British football, whereby a gilded, entitled elite seeks to free itself from being dragged down by the lower orders. This is entirely motivated by greed and a desire to monopolise available supporter revenue, which is finite, after all.

It's my view that we have had a similar situation in the music industry for some time, and that was uppermost in my mind when I first penned this.

Going out and supporting live music seems to be getting increasingly expensive. Maybe it's my age, then again maybe not, and just like runaway house price inflation putting property ownership beyond the reach of all but a fortunate few, the ticket prices of certain major events have risen to quite absurd levels.

A very small amount of research quickly uncovered a good example of this. Beyoncé and Jay Z, London Stadium June 15th. Prices range from £114 to £7696. Yes, you read that correctly. For seven grand do you still have to drink out of a plastic glass and queue for twenty minutes for a wee wee?

Absolutely ludicrous. Even more so when you consider that for somewhere between £1000 and £1600 I could book a Beyoncé tribute act, quite possibly significantly less. I drive a hard bargain.  Even better value is a trip over to Amazon where I can have my pick of Beyoncé live concert DVDs from as little as 1p plus postage, (averaging about two quid) so I still get to see Beyoncé and am notionally £7693.99 in pocket. How, therefore, to spend the windfall?

One could splash out on an eight year old Mercedes E Class, a new three piece suite from DFS, some fish and chips, and still have enough left to see a Beyonce tribute show in your local theatre, but we'll get to that later.  And that's if you go on your own. One ticket. Factor in your significant other and you are staring down the thick end of sixteen large.

If you can afford it and that is how you wish to spend your money then so be it. If you are a division or two below the oligarch-buys-star-for-private-party brigade this is a perfectly good opportunity to flash that cash and make a splash. Good, fine, knock yourself out. However, take a look for a moment at the other end of the scale, or to put it another way, the worst seats in the house, priced at £114.
The ineluctable truth about money is that you can only spend it once, and if that's how you want to spend your money, once again, so be it. Big but. Across the UK there are all kinds of great, professional live shows where tickets are priced at less than £50 each.  Frequently a lot less: often good seats in good venues can be acquired for under £20. Artists and performers who are not multi millionaires are no less talented, don't forget. The key difference is that they need your support just a little bit more.  Anyway, back to Beyoncé.....

The venue for Beyoncé's show is a sports stadium. That's right, a sports stadium. Sports stadia are really, really good at the thing for which they were designed, i.e. hosting sporting events. You know the deal; twenty two players covering the length and breadth of the hallowed turf, so irrespective of where you sit, at some point the action will come close to you. Beyoncé however will not be changing ends at half time nor is she likely to be taking a free kick on the edge of the penalty area.  Imagine if you will a premiership football match being played on the stage of the Hammersmith Apollo and the absurdity is complete. Performances have taken place in amphitheatres since the early civilisations, but it was slightly more recently, August 15th 1965 to be precise, when the cult of playing to the biggest crowd in the biggest space really took hold. That was, of course, The Beatles' famous appearance at Shea Stadium and whilst it is well documented that the Fabs couldn't hear a damned thing, it is with hindsight an opportunity missed that the seldomly reticent J W Lennon didn't make more of his apparent displeasure at having to play under such adverse conditions. A year later the Beatles were finished as a live act, and having to play massive outdoor venues was quite possibly the biggest contributory factor behind their retreat to London NW8 for the remainder of their life as a band.
Before you say anything I haven't overlooked the obvious. PA systems have become wildly more powerful in similar proportion to the NASA computer VS smartphone cliché. Music has got a lot louder too. Neither of these are good developments. Playing loud and playing outdoors spell the death of dynamics, detail and finesse. Musical instruments respond at their best in rooms where there are plenty of wooden surfaces. I'm known for carrying three pieces of hardwood floor to put under my snare drum stand, and that is why.  My personal favourite instruments are those that still produce a sound if there's a power outage.

I have no idea what the capacity is for a show like Beyoncé's is, but it's not an exaggeration to estimate it at about 75,000. After all, the Beatles drew roughly 55,000 at Shea.
That's 75 one thousand seat venues sold out, or 150 five hundred seat halls. Higher mathematics this isn't but you get my point; one big gig equals perhaps a hundred small ones. In the style of Amazon and Google are the big players starving out lower profile artists and small, independent promoters? 75,000 people all in one place, a great many of whom have blown their disposable, gig-attending cash on one single event, who could have gone elsewhere. Elsewhere four or five times even. As smaller venues fall by the wayside this option will undoubtedly diminish. Having done a fair bit of concert promoting myself, one of the most important first steps is to try to establish that your chosen date is not going to put you up against events that potentially attract the same audience that you are targeting. Choice, and the ability to make it are critical to our cultural well-being.

I've been to very few arena shows, the NEC, Birmingham, the Point Depot, Dublin and twice to the O2. I once did something called 'deep background' on Ron Howard's movie, 'Rush'. This involved dressing up as a mechanic and being a speck on the horizon in the scenes set at the Italian and Japanese grand prix. Both of which were actually Blackbush aerodrome. When you do 'deep background' you are scarcely a dot on the horizon, just part of a huge crowd needed to make up the numbers. Arena gigs make me feel the same way, not really part of anything and ultimately futile. But, you say, "I was there!". So were 74,999 other people, which makes it a bit akin to saying "I've got a Ford Fiesta". (Nothing wrong with owning a Fiesta. Other cars are available), and if you are not careful all you'll have to show for it are some mobile phone pictures and mounting credit card debt. Think about that for a moment, the correlation between pop star's designer wardrobe and your threatening letter from MasterCard.

Incidentally, in 2017, the year for which most recent stats are available, 59,380 new Fiestas were registered, so that actually makes a new one more exclusive than a Beyoncé ticket. (Source, SMMT).

I've read much on the subject of abundance, and do believe that there is an infinite supply of money, but as we see so often that supply gets concentrated in certain areas while others struggle to survive. I'm no economist but even I can figure out that a night out costing £200 a head is the same as five nights out at £40 a head. You might want to consider going to lower priced events more frequently. If this happened enough there would be a small but nonetheless noticeable adjustment in the entertainment industry economy. The fact that a one-nighter in a provincial theatre is paying people like me the same or even less than twenty five years ago is all tied up in this.

I should point out just for the record that I have no issues with Beyoncé and admire much of her work, but in researching this piece my quest for super expensive concert tickets in the near future close to where I live, her shows were way out in front on all web searches and I am fully expecting to have my data harvested any time soon. It could be said that any one of us as performers, if given the chance to get away with charging those kinds of admission prices might well be inclined to do so. Hay and sunshine, etc, etc.

My personal dislike for vast venues is a matter of record, and was reinforced again the other day by spending an evening at Ronnie Scott's, arguably the best jazz venue on this or any other planet. I am by no means a regular there, and visits tend to be when I'm on stage rather than in the audience so it was interesting to be on the other side of the fence, so to speak, for the first time in a long time. The seats we had were by no means the best in the house but I could hear every detail of what was being played in near perfect clarity and I could see the artists more than adequately. As in my previous outing on this subject no video screens were necessary to confirm that the headliner was the person I had paid to see and not an imposter. Happily the artist in question has such an individual sound and style that the chances of him 'being tributed' by anyone else are as slim as they are pointless. It wasn't a great seat but it was good enough, and reminded me of sitting in the gods in Birmingham Town Hall watching the Oscar Peterson trio in 1978. Back in the pre-internet days we had to go and stand in a queue at the venue a few months in advance in order to guarantee the best seats. However the Peterson concert had been on sale for months when it was announced that Louie Bellson was on drums. Last minute tickets were hastily acquired, and even up at the back of the auditorium we could clearly see and hear Louie bring the house down. Many who were there thought he stole the show, but he was much too nice a man to do that!

One of my regular gigs that gives me the greatest pleasure involves travelling the length and breadth of the UK playing big band music in small to medium sized theatres and concert halls. The band plays almost acoustically and I can hear what everyone is playing without recourse to monitoring, much less the ghastly fashion for something called 'in ears'. Turn it down and listen to what the other players are doing. Match their dynamics.

Anyway, on a recent visit to Epsom playhouse I was looking through their forthcoming events and they were almost without exception stand up comedy or tribute shows.

Historically I was of the opinion that tribute shows exemplified a shared laziness on the part of performers and audiences, and I spent much of my 30s and early 40s recording and performing big band music that wasn't based upon any other band's repertoire. So there I sat, polishing my halo and wallowing in my integrity as other big bands got more work on account of selling shows based on the tribute formula, be it Miller, Ellington, Basie, assorted Packs of frequently random Rats, or whoever deemed most likely to perform at the box office. 12 years ago I made a pragmatic decision, and let's face it, if you are a drummer or follow the UK drum scene, 12 years ago you almost certainly had never heard of me. Taking on a 'tribute' formula' (a fun challenge in itself) doubled the audience for our band overnight.

Owning up to changes to a long held viewpoint is liberating, and I have come to see the benefits in tribute acts. There are a lot of really talented performers out there who through no fault of their own are unable to forge careers as 'themselves'. The reasons for this are many and probably best left for another day. One of the things that convinced me to follow this path was that it gave audiences a unique opportunity to hear certain repertoire played live in the original context. Identical musical arrangements programmed in a similar sequence to the original artist rather than one or two selections included in a 'best of' big band show.
In some ways the tribute show is a modern day equivalent of the Top of the Pops LPs that were so popular in the 70s. These were hits of the day covered by session musicians. It was cheaper than buying all the singles and sometimes the cover versions were remarkably accurate.



Also good to know is that medium sized theatres still play host to original artists of the 70s and 80s who don't have the pulling power to fill a vast arena. Many of my younger colleagues are happily regularly employed by Mr Sayer, Mr Kershaw, Ms Wilde and the like. Long may it continue. Also popular bands of the era with only one or two original members provide gigs for musicians and can still pull a crowd. A generation ago we were 'backing' the stars of the 50s and 60s.  The one-hit-wonders would sing their one hit (at the end of their spot) and the rest of their time on stage would be filled with covers of other (better-known, more successful) artists' material. A tribute show in other words. Also don't forget that the single biggest advantage of the smaller venue is that during the interval you could leave the auditorium and have a drink in a real pub from a real glass (even if it is Wetherspoons) and don't even get me started about the transport issues. A great venue should be no more than five minutes from the tube or a cab, or for the socialists among you, the bus stop.


In conclusion a note of optimism, in that a few months ago MTV announced the resurrection of their highly successful 'Unplugged' format, and I can't help thinking how happy I would be if we all got back to the days of the Royal Albert Hall being as big as it gets.

PS: Just to pick up the football parallel for one final moment; it's perfectly possible for a journeyman League Two player to earn £150,000 a year. I know plenty of world class musicians who manage to get by on about fifteen per cent of that amount.

Any professional enquiries regarding live appearances, master classes, session work, tuition or anything else please contact me via my website, www.petecater.org