Putting On a Show in London

I recently played a show with Not Like This at the Signature Brew Haggerston in London. This was the first show for the band and I arranged it all myself, mainly because we wanted to play and promoters weren't responding to my messages. Although it's frustrating to be ghosted by people who were actively asking bands to reach out, I felt that I knew enough about the London music scene to be able to do it myself. This turned out to be a great decision because there was a surprisingly large turnout and all the bands, mine own included, had a great time!

It was a lot of work but I'm happy with the result so I thought I'd document what goes into putting on a show.

The Planning

The first order of business was setting a date and finding an available venue. I was only targeting venues with a max capacity of 50-100 as I didn't think I'd be able to even fill half the space and since I had spent the last few years going to underground shows I knew of a handful of venues to reach out to. I originally planned to do the show in December, but when I reached out to venues in September they were pretty much all booked up so I moved the date to the next year and ended up with a Wednesday in February at Signature Brew Haggerston. I had hoped for a Friday or Saturday show, but seeing as we were an unproven artist they didn't want to block off one of their more active days for us. Frustrating, but of course I understand.

Now there was just the question of who would be joining us on stage, as a show with a single—completely unknown—band isn't an appealing prospect. Underground shows in London tend to have between three and five acts, but seeing as this was in the middle of the week I chose to split the difference and have four. More bands will attract a bigger audience, but of course you don't want to play too late so that everyone leaves before the headliner.

Again I was fortunate to have been such an active and supportive concert-goer so I had a handful of people I could contact directly. All the bands I asked said yes and it was satisfying to know that they were willing to trust me with arranging this. I was completely up-front about the fact that this was uncharted territory for me and tried my best to be transparent with everyone the whole time. Joining us was Chaos Reigns, Compounds, and Nymphic.

The date was confirmed with the venue and now the real work began.

The Lead Up

How much do you charge for a show like this? It's a bit of a difficult question as these aren't large acts who can demand a lot, but we want it to be worth it for the bands who are playing. As this was being done for my benefit we had made the arrangement that I will pay for renting the venue and the bands will split the money from the ticket sales evenly between them. I was originally going to make the show free, but a friend of mine suggested that charging a bit will make people feel like they should go once they've bought tickets, as they had already psychologically invested in the show. It also allowed me to pay the bands, which is surprisingly rare when you're playing an underground show. In the end the price was £5 for an advance ticket and £7 if you paid on the door.

Some non-musicians I know find it strange that we have to pay the venue when we're the ones playing, but that's just the nature of how things are nowadays. Live music doesn't pull in a crowd like it may have done decades ago and the venue, which is in case was a pub with a stage, has to close its doors to non-paying customers and may end up losing out on revenue. They also usually provide equipment and a sound engineer who needs to get paid for their work. It really sucks to pay to play given how much money it takes to just make music, but it's the reality and I've learned to navigate it. In return, venues that aren't douchebags don't take a cut of the ticket sales and we keep all the money from merch sales, so there is a chance of ending up making money off the night. I didn't, of course, not just because the bands got all the ticket money but because we didn't sell enough to cover the cost even if I had kept the money.

To actually sell the tickets I needed to setup an event in some ticketing system and such, but first I needed one of the most important assets for any live show: the poster.

I got the logos of all the bands and spent a good few hours putting together a poster using a picture of me playing with my other band. I had arranged the order of the bands based on their popularity—estimated from Spotify listeners and Instagram followers—but this wasn't a show with a strict headliner, so I wanted to give it a name so it wasn't just "the X show". As it was a Wednesday and there were some aggressive bands I ended on the name "Midweek Moshpit" which I felt was really cheesy but several people told me during the show that they loved it. Throwing it all together in an image program with the band logos, add some dirt and noise, and you had a fresh poster.

With a poster in hand I could make a ticket link and add the event to Bandsintown. Adding it to that service and tagging the participating artists means that it shows up in their Spotify profiles and other places around the web, including in an embed we have on our website. All the bands got the ticket link so that they could share it with their fans and followers when the time was right.

This was all ready in October of last year, but with the show being in February we didn't really start pushing it until January. The other bands were playing other London shows as well, so to avoid cannibalising one show in favour of the other it's customary to hold off on announcing that you're playing until after the previous show was done. The venue also advertised it on their social media accounts and on their website, which is a bit unreal.

I've played several shows before, but it's still a bit strange to see my band on a poster somewhere I didn't put it. The first time it happened, nearly 10 years ago with yet another band, I remember feeling like I'd "made it". Small victories and all that.

The Show

To play a show you need to show up early. It's hard to describe to people who have only been in the audience just how much boredom and waiting is involved. As someone who was also responsible for the whole show itself I made sure to show up as early as the venue would let me. The doors were opening at 18:30, but I was there three hours before to meet the manager, the sound engineer, and to ensure that I was there to greet the bands when they show up.

Another reason to show up early is for sound check, which is when the band is on stage and play their instruments one at a time so the sound engineer can figure out the EQ and levels of all the channels. I've done some live sound mixing for small concerts and it can be tricky to balance all the instruments with the acoustics of the room. The setup was a drum kit, which has a microphone in the kick drum, two guitar amps and a bass amp, all of them mic'ed up, and three vocal microphones. So the engineer has to deal with four instruments and three vocals, all of which need to be balanced in terms of volume and frequency and all of which can vary in terms of intensity based on the song being played.

If mixing one simple rock band wasn't bad enough, there are going to be four different ones playing that evening who all have slightly different setup. We have one guitar whereas Chaos Reigns have two, Compounds has a laptop with an audio track, and everyone has different instruments and vocal styles. It's a lot to keep track of and preferably we would all do isolated sound checks where we can go through all the instruments individually and then together to make sure the engineer has all the levels correctly before we play.

Various circumstances meant that this wasn't possible, so in the end my band got a sound check and the other bands just got a "line check" where everyone plugs in their instruments and plays through a bit of a song to check the levels. It's not ideal, but with smaller shows like this you do what you can with what you have. The engineer did a remarkable job on the night and I'm used to a little bit of chaos on every show, whether I'm playing or just watching.

Sound checked and ready it was just a manner of opening the doors and waiting on the audience. I had printed out the set times which I hung up around the venue and had a little bank box with cash and a card machine borrowed from my other band so I was ready to sit in the door. Finally, a friend of mine was there to relieve me when it was my time to play.

We had an amazing time.

The Aftermath

Putting on this show was one of the most stressful things I've done all year.. good thing we're only in February and who knows what fresh horrors the future will bring. Running a show is not too dissimilar to any other managerial project, with the feeling that you're wrangling unwilling bovines into a meat processing plant.

With chasing up the bands so I could get logos for the poster, promo shots for the social media posts, and tech spec sheets that the sound engineer needs was bad enough. But on top of that I felt responsible for the night turning out well and got extremely stressed when two weeks before the show we had sold a total of three tickets. I was dreading that we would end up playing to an empty room, which would be OK for my band's first show, but it would make me feel terrible for the bands who were essentially doing me a favour. Luckily the sales picked up and with the walk-ins on the day we sold a total of 33 tickets!

Together with the staff, photographers and journalists who were on the guest list, and the other bands we ended up playing our first show for around 50 people, beyond anything I could've hoped for! I know that it's a bit of an outlier to have such a successful weekday show, but I'm happy that I was able to provide such an audience not just for my bandmates but the other bands who joined us.

I paid £250 for the venue, and earned £186 in tickets, so this isn't sustainable as a business, but having spent an ungodly amount of money on my music career so far I am not expecting it to be. I was able to give the bands who played a bit of cash and everyone had a good time. Both the manager of the venue and several others who were there said that I needed to make Midweek Moshpit a regular thing, and I doubt I will, but I am at least not as scared of putting on my own show in the future.

This was fun. Stressful and tiring, but in the end it definitely felt worth it and I'm inspired to do it again. This is never going to be a way to make any money, but that's not the point. I can fuel an endeavour such as this with my tech job salary and in the process give the alternative music scene in London a promoter who isn't going to fuck over bands and who actually shows up. Also, when I'm booking the shows I get to put on bands that I want to see 💜