The main band I play with – Russ Payne and the Shark Dentists - is fortunate. It’s been busy gigging regularly all this year and already has bookings scattered right through 2014. And yet we are still caught in the round of calling the people who book bands and begging them for work.
With a few exceptions, the people who book bands seem incapable of giving straight answers, incapable of calling back when they say they will, incapable of intelligible speech when they do call back, and often capable of double-booking you with someone else or forgetting to put dates in their diary.
When too many of these things happen at once, you begin to question why you are bothering. At these times, the lure of concentrating on recordings and videos rather than live performance becomes extremely attractive.
And we’re among the lucky ones. Goodness knows how many bands must have given up, beaten down by the seeming impossibility of getting a gig.