London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

A risky business

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Last night I had a very good gig with The String Project (and Got my Jo-Mo working and Jim Telford, and the Local Supercluster – but I wasn’t part of those elements). I say very good because the music went well, the organisation held together, the audience were appreciative and there were no serious technical, logistical or musical balls-ups. And when (sadly it’s not always) a String Project / Local Supercluster event comes together like that, it really is something out of the ordinary. But it certainly helped that we got enough cash on the door to pay for the room hire and most of the other expenses, so we didn’t end up at a loss out of it I don’t think.

The sort of people that write and speak about change in the economics of the music industry tend to be the sort of people that are enthusiastic about the new, particularly the technological new. And so they often emphasise the advantages of artists being able to communicate and interact directly with their audiences / followers/ fans / parasocial friends (depending how far you take the social media / apparent personal contact aspect of post-Facebook marketing, Katy Perry) without going through big corporate mediators who formerly controlled recording, print, marketing, broadcasting and even live performance spaces. And fair enough, it is nice to be able to make recordings and publish or sell them directly, and keep the take, to set up your own website and mailing list and communicate to people without getting a marketing budget and buying space from a magazine, to have control and to be able to do things without getting the backing of corporate managers who may have very different priorities and perceptions of value from both you, the musician, and the audience(s). And it’s certainly nice in principle to not have to pay their profit margin out of your work.

But, with taking over the vast majority of control and, in several areas, profit (where charging for music is still working or people have found ways of monetising it indirectly) comes taking over the vast majority of the risk as well. Sure, you can record to pro standard without a record label – but you still need studio time, a pro engineer paid by the day, duplication services if you want hard-copy, promotional activity of one sort or another. Under the ‘old system’, this was probably more expensive but was also paid for by a record label, paid back out of the profits when things sold. And you’d get an advance if you were trusted by the label to deliver financially. Now, you can do it yourself, do what you want, costs have come down a lot it’s true, but the artists pays them upfront and hopes to get enough sales / paid downloads / streams / live bookings out of it to make it back with interest. At the least you’re kind of lending the relatively newly liberalised music market the money and hoping to profit on the investment, in a very volatile environment.

Same for booking your own gigs – no management control, no being put on a bill with totally unsuitable other acts, no daft restrictions or requirements to put x number of people on the guest list just to demonstrate there are people coming because of you, no cuts going to organisers, promoters and full-time marketeers. But, you’ve paid for the room (maybe the PA as well) in advance, and almost certainly for the promotion (probably worked on it quite a lot as well) – and if you don’t make it back in ticket sales, tough luck. (If you’ve rented out the room, the odds of you getting a look in at the bar tab are minimal – although healthy bar takings can be key to getting return invitations from venues that pay their acts.) Again, financial risk sits with the artist.

Gigs paid by ticket sale split are increasingly common, and the organisers tend to be quite self-righteous about them because they do offer financial reward – they’re not simply unpaid or pay-to-play, and at least the musicians don’t have to buy a wodge of tickets and be out of pocket unless they sell them. But of course the musicians get more or less according to their ability, not chiefly to perform well, but to pull in an audience. The marketing efforts of organisers are very frequently somewhat perfunctory – and if you’ve just halved your financial risk by splitting it with the performers, that seems like sensible business.

So if you wonder why barely-semi-pro musicians seem desperately up themselves, only contacting you when they have a gig to promote and that seems to be every other week, then using all contact channels from Facebook events to texts and forcing flyers into your hands to convince that this gig is unique and special and you’ll forever regret not going – it’s because our prospects of continuing to be able to afford a celebratory pint afterwards depend on our success in the very un-English activity of blowing our own trumpets. Really loudly.

Struggles

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I got paid yesterday (as it turns out, I didn’t see it on my online bank statement till today) for an orchestral dep gig. Which is good.

The thing is, the gig was over three months ago, and even with an unusually long invoice payment period (30 working days) payment was about two months overdue. I had written emails, attempted to phone, and eventually left an answerphone message (my second) saying I would take action to recover the money if it didn’t appear. I don’t think it’s coincidence that the transfer finally showed up shortly after that. Before I found I’d been paid, I’d actually rung the Citizens’ Advice Bureau about small claims court proceedings, looked up the processes and fees on the government web hub, and decided I would explicitly threaten that in a hardcopy letter as the next step.

But why make it that hard? For that matter, if you’re hoping to get away without paying up to some of your musicians, why have a very elaborate contractual and payment papertrail that would make it impossible to make out you didn’t owe the money if some awkward sod did actually stick it all the way to court (and I would have if it came to it, since the amount I was owed was about 5 times the court fee). Isn’t everyone’s life too short for that kind of pratting around?

What I suppose this does demonstrate is life isn’t too short to kick up a fuss for your rights as a contractor or freelance, even over perhaps relatively insignificant things. And it suggests to me I should stick to insisting on work that turns a bit of a profit, declining voluntary / ‘for charity’ / expenses-only / ‘exposure / experience’ jobs. If only there were more of them though …

The Llewyn Davies effect

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A few years back, the Police’s guitarist wrote an autobiography called One Train Later. Apparently, had he been on a different Tube train one day, he wouldn’t have bumped into someone, wouldn’t have ended up joining the band, and wouldn’t have had a music career.

The Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davies is about kind of the reverse phenomenon: a Greenwich Village folk singer/guitarist who played the Gaslight the night Bob Dylan emerged out of nowhere and got talent-spotted, but didn’t get picked up and never got anywhere. The film covers the week of that event, and shows Davies homeless, incomeless, playing the odd folk club night, recording session and unsuccessful audition, staying on friends’ and fellow musicians’ sofas and owning little more than a guitar and a box full of remaindered records of his unprofitable album. By the end, he turns out not to have the money to renew the mandatory union membership for going back to his ‘day job’ as a merchant sailor – a particularly cruel irony.

I wonder how long it takes to reach the Llewyn Davies state. It’s all very gradual of course. You don’t just wake up one day having got kicked out fo non-payment of rent, sold all your valuable belongings and exhausted the patience of your friends in the space of the previous weekend. But it’s a slippery slope, and every time you fail to get a financial foundation out of something creative/artistic/independent, the temptation is always to throw a bit more of your resources into it because you can’t be trying hard enough, rather than to maintain your other options and be sure you have a safety net.

Now I’m still making the rent, have a route back to a full-time desk job (and I’m only part-time out of it), haven’t yet gone overdrawn or started selling things (apart from when I ended up with four guitars briefly. I decided two was plenty, it wasn’t about needing the money). But is it bad of me to feel like I’m somewhere near the top of that slope? And I might start sliding down and up hopelessly entangled – but I also have to invest, and not just financially, to stand any chance of return as a sole trader.

Ho hum. It must be coming on winter. Time to plug in the SAD lamp and try to cut back on caffeine (again).

 

Libertinism is not liberation

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Typically, I’ve lost the link to the report that prompted this post. But it’s basically about Keira Knightley’s recent insistence on unedited appearance in print – for the photos themselves, here; for an overview of the situation, here will do as well as any.

The version of the story I can’t find (and so you’ll have to take this on trust, sorry), included some more of Knightley’s comments, most notably on the flesh-revealing and sex-faking expected of female film actors, even quite mainstream or even personally conservative ones, along the lines of:

it’s knowing what to say yes and no to … you want to be liberated but not that liberated, you know?

This in the context of complaining (I believe rightly) about heavily gender-skewed oversexualisation and lack of choice over that.

The idea that sexualising women always constitutes freeing them from the asexualising / repressive / infantilising forces of Victorian patriarchal chauvinism has been a convenient and much-used pretext for (often male) offstage media decision-makers to push for more flesh, more Photoshop, more double entendre, more importing of the subtler end of pornography’s repertoire of devices into the mainstream. Chiefly where women are concerned because of the assumption (prevalent and ultimately damaging to both genders) that women are never really interested in being titillated and men always are.

Liberating women means just that. Liberating people means just that. Replacing one form of pervasive social pressure (to be the innocent child-wife angel in the house) with another (to be the slightly sublimated whore) is not liberation – pressure, including effectively leveraging the desire or need for an ongoing career and income, to be libertine even in performance persona is in no way liberating.

If there was a genuine presence of gender equality and the liberation of the much more generally historically oppressed gender, then there would not be pressure from one gender to another, especially not mixed up with power, influence and money, to be more or less libertine. If women wanted to be extremely publicly sexual, they could (though I suspect in most cases they underestimate the degree to which they are being used by others cashing in on such behaviour, and leaving themselves open to career downfall as they cease to conform to industry notions of ‘young’ and ‘attractive’ – which is another story entirely). If, equally, they wanted to keep their sexuality out of the public eye, they could do so – I mean you obviously would be unlikely to get cast as Moll Flanders in that case, but that’s a career choice; you would probably be more likely to be allowed to tour in the Dominican Republic.

This is essentially another post not about music, but the visualisation and the sexualisation of music is in fact prevalent. It’s a little less gender skewed, possibly, than some visual media, but still heavily so. Musical success, in certain particular strands, is heavily tied up with music videos, photo shoots, red carpet appearances, photostory-worthy tours, the media spotlight in between and alongside actual musical activity. That’s the price of social media. And the result is all of the above applies just as much to musicians (often under just as much pressure from producers, record labels, management, etc. as screen stars are from directors) as to actresses.

Deflowering

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No poppy this year. And I know that puts me in a bit of a trend (albeit one I haven’t been really watching), but I want to write about why.

I used to be a quite dependable wearer of a poppy (and even a replacement if, as often happened, I lost one), and even observer of the two minutes’ silence. It seemed an acceptable and non-aggressive, but noticeable, way of declaring that war in general is horrible, there has been an awful lot of it especially in the last 150 years, and we as a species should try and avoid increasing the suffering and the war whenever we make decisions.

So from here on in, you need to bear in mind that I’m essentially pacifist (though not to the point of believing my country is always necessarily obligated to stand on the sidelines while other parts of the world engage in de facto war that could be effectively stopped or shortened), and my reasons for previously wearing a poppy were essentially pacifist.

The thing is, I’ve felt for a while that Britain and British culture – everything from tabloid papers to artsy theatre – overemphasises the two world wars and the atrocities of our opponents in them. Usually particularly Nazi Germany actually, though that only halfway lines up with my argument. The problem with this is that leads towards only thinking about the suffering of ‘our side’, and conveniently forgetting the problems and atrocities of other wars: Korea (yes, the UK got involved in messy Cold War proxy conflicts. Just because we weren’t in Vietnam doesn’t mean our hands were clean). The Boer War (where ‘we’ invented the concentration camp, opposed self-determination and sowed the seeds for the reaction that would be apartheid). The Spanish Civil War (more self-interested proxy shadiness, and the warm-up to WWII to boot). It also leads towards forgetting the atrocities committed by ‘our side’: the fire-bombing of Dresden. Flooding countless civilian homes with the Dambuster raids. The only actual uses of nuclear weapons in war.

As we land in the centenary of the first world war, this trend has reached massive new heights. I passed a sign painted on a trailer in a field by a motorway the other day: ‘British and Commonwealth deaths in World War I: [however many]’. But I don’t want to remember just the British and Commonwealth deaths. I want to remember the French, Belgian, Russian deaths. The Italian and Japanese ones no one talks about. Even the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman ones. And I want to remember all of them together as the victims of the war. Because otherwise we’re still engaged in trying to cast blame and paint the other side as the villains, rather than saying ‘never again’.

The Flanders poppies sprang up where war had been, and they did so regardless of whose the territory had been during the fighting. They thrived wherever the ground had been churned up by trench-digging, by tanks and trucks and artillery being moved, by shellfire and explosions. I have worn a poppy in that spirit. But the poppies flooding the moat of the Tower of London seem to move the flower to a nation-based declaration that UK dead were cruelly murdered by foreigners. And I will never wear a poppy in that spirit.

Coming soon to a small screen near you …

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… hopefully very soon in fact, is this:

http://youtu.be/FdaqSitX5e8

Yes, after, like all professional film-making, taking a startlingly long time in post-production, the video showreel is finally here! Previously unrecorded music (and some existing stuff with The String Project), ceilidh dancing by my very good (well, they’re very good to me, anyway) friends Julie, Juliet, Ben and Mike, some seriously stylish audio production by Cooz’s, and suitably fleet-footed video from Oxford Media Solutions – and perhaps some sides of me you didn’t know. Please watch, like, share, comment, repost, watch again, pester your friends about it, spam your enemies with it (no, maybe that’s going too far – everything else then … ) and let’s see if I can get some work out of it!

Another musician’s economics rant

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Consider all the ambiguities of the title to be deliberate …

There’s a new economic game in Tin Pan Town. We’ve all come across ‘no fee but you can promote yourselves’, ‘chance to play to a great crowd’, ‘you get to keep the take from tickets you sell’ (with or without the sting in the tail ‘once you pass such and such a deposit threshold’), the oldies ‘exposure’ and experience’, the often genuine but about as often hypocritical (depending on whether other staff are volunteers or getting a wage) ‘it’s a charity event’ and the fair enough ‘we hope to play paying gigs soon but there’s no money yet’ (fair enough as I say, provided you’re upfront about it, which varies).

Here’s the new one: ‘We’re a new venue, so although we hope to pay musicians soon we can’t yet.’ I’ve seen it several times in the last few weeks. Now, let’s look at this. If you do play now, unpaid, and wait for there to be fees, there’s no particular motivation for the venue to hire you back. When they have a music budget, they might choose to get acts sufficiently good or sufficiently popular that they never have to play for free, because on average those acts will be likely to bring in more of a fanbase and so more return than acts which can’t (or don’t) insist on being paid every time. But, maybe it’s genuine, or maybe you buy into the argument that musicians need to help out rising venues so that there can be good venues in the future and the whole sector doesn’t collapse, leaving us all back stacking shelves.

But there’s more to it than this. If you genuinely hope to pay for musicians in the future, you acknowledge that live music gets more people through the doors and raises your bar / kitchen takings. At a more basic level, you acknowledge that if you own a place and people play there in a performance-not-open-mic type way, then the musicians are providing the venue with a service. That’s important because a surprising number of advertisers try to present it as the other way round – the venue is providing a service by letting the musicians play!

But, if you should pay for live music, why aren’t you now? ‘We’ve just started up, we can’t afford it yet.’ Now I appreciate times are really quite hard for the pub / bar / venue / entertainment / hospitality sector. Supermarket booze, cable telly, broadband and undernourished wallets make it difficult to coax people out, let alone to get them to spend much when they are out. But, times aren’t exactly easy for music either. It’s around more than ever before, but no one’s willing to pay for it, at any stage of the chain.

Let’s look at what might happen if you tried the ‘we’ll pay when the business is secure’ approach in other sectors. So, waiting staff: can’t afford to pay you right now, but you can keep all your tips and when the place takes off we’ll pay wages. This used to happen – George Orwell describes this sort of setup in Paris between the wars. But it’s, erm, illegal under employment law now, and I haven’t heard of anyone getting away with it for generations. Alcohol supplier: you give credit don’t you? We’ll take the beer and vodka now, and pay up in a couple of months when we’ve sold some so we can pay you. Er, no, says supplier, we only provide credit accounts to clients who’ve bought from us repeatedly and whose creditworthiness we trust – that would not be new businesses without secure financial foundation. First you pay, then you get booze, then maybe later we let you have the booze before you pay.

The last example points in a useful direction though. You may not be able to get credit from a supplier when you’ve just opened up, but everyone knows you have to spend money to make money. When you start up, you take out business loans and raise capital for whatever renovations are needed to open, and to buy initial stocks of consumables, and to pay wages for the first little while. In other words, you pay for the first period of operation with debt, and count on making enough profit to, over a period of time, not only cover costs but also service, reduce and ultimately clear the debt. That, more or less, is how any business startup or expansion works.

Which means, sorry folks, but if you expect me to play, to provide a service, then I expect to be paid. And if you have no money then you should have taken out a bigger loan. No money, no music. The most I might budge to, in the era of crowdfunding, is I might accept deferred payment (unlike the drinks manufacturers, who are in a better economic position than most musicians right now): if you’ll pay acts when you’re more established, then I’m loaning you the cost of my performance. I’ll play, you don’t pay right now, but you do sign a contract establishing debt to me of a set amount, interest payable, etc. etc., and if you fail to conform to the terms (which will probably include a set date to pay the balance unless you’re continuing to pay off all the interest), then so help me Mammon I will chase you through whatever courts and get you to file for bankruptcy if that’s what it takes to get my money.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what the venues that say ‘We can’t pay yet as we are a new venue, but we hope to pay musicians in the future’ are thinking of.

The triangle is complete …

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… you can now hear all three tracks of The Filthy Spectacula‘s initial EP here. Photos of us already exist (if they haven’t melted the sensor) and will be released imminently. Soon we will have a website and then no promoter in all England will be safe from shambolic gypsy-pirate steamgothpunk darkness … and no audience …

Self-fulfilling prophecies

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There’s a pair of signs on my route to work which say ‘cyclists in road’. They’re self-supporting A-frame type ones, positioned neatly in the part of the road nearest the pavement – i.e. the bike lane. While there is some scaffolding going up to the edge of pavement, I’m convinced there wouldn’t be any cyclists in the road (in so far as the bike lane is not ‘in the road’) if it wasn’t for the signs warning drivers about them being there.

Any creative sector abounds with this sort of essentially unjustified causality loop – from artists who create for the benefit of critics not publics because prizes are more remunerative than audiences, to musicians playing for free because gigs are run that only offer free drinks and ‘exposure’ and people organising gigs with no pay because musicians will play for free (by way of illustration that this isn’t inevitable, while it’s very widespread in the UK and I think the US as well, it’s apparently rare at the least in continental Europe, where the circle has evidently never got started).

The thing is that creative workers are by nature small players in very large games, and rarely players that can be successfully organised into coherent groupings of any size. So railing about these illogical fixtures is rarely worthwhile – you simply can’t create enough momentum to, for instance, produce a national boycott of pay-to-play gigs leading to the model becoming unviable. Instead, you just have to choose whether to personally go with the trends where they can work for you or buck them where they clearly don’t work to your advantage, and accept the situation more or less as you find it even if you believe it to be unjust.

This is not behaviour very thoroughly in character for me! I find it frustrating to light a candle and live in the general darkness – but not as frustrating as trying to slow down the spinning of the world with my shoulder so that it stays light for longer.

Allow me to introduce myself:

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No, it’s not ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (I’m a man of taste I like to think, but certainly not wealth).

Rather, I’m going to be making my BBC Introducing début on 6 December – not under my own name, but in session with the rather remarkable Sebastian Vale – who you should take a listen to.

If you win some and you lose some, this hopefully balances out the gig I lost the other day because a player from ‘out of town’ (meaning not near Islington apparently) was ‘too much of a risk’ for the project management team. Ho hum, looking to BBC Introducing (in Brighton) and doing some suitably dark photos with The Filthy Spectacula on Monday. The website and gig bookings are so near we can almost touch them …