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One gig our bassist was very late, arrived pretty much as we were due to go on. He'd clocked the name of the pub but not the town it was in. So had driven twenty miles in the wrong direction and was wandering around a pub of the same name wondering where the rest of us were until he rechecked his emails.
Battling through Friday traffic, in Nottingham, when we're travelling from Peterborough, without enough notice to book an afternoon off work.
Promoters' expectations are often...unrealistic, and they rarely consider that if four bands are playing then that's ~16-20 people who have to book the afternoon off work to be able to meet their schedule. I sometimes wonder if they even realise that people in bands actually have jobs, in order to support playing gigs that promoters don't pay them for.
I'm somewhat thankful that it was cancelled, although not for the reasons it was (our drummer's son, my nephew, has symptomatic COVID, and then a member of the headline band had severe appendicitis which needed immediate surgery).
Well I say luckily, there's no luck it's just experience that made me create the easiest solution to setting up at different venues.
We can actually virtual soundcheck the keys, bass, and all vocals is someone is going to be very late, as can anyone using a digital desk with some kind of multi tracking. Just record one show and then if need be you can send any channel back out an aux send.
There was no warning about the earliness of it until a few days before. That's patently unreasonable, unless you think it's reasonable to expect us to be telepathic and/or clairvoyant.
Or...could it be that being "professional" might be telling us the start times would be different to the standard arrangement when we were booked (which is when the times were apparently known)?
To be clear: I'm not complaining about the start time. I'm complaining about the late notice of it, which was honestly pretty damn rude given that we weren't being paid for it. So not only were we paying to get there (which we already knew), he expected us to contribute half a day's wages each in annual leave to the cause of making his show work too.
Honestly not sure how you'd come to the conclusion that we're the ones who were unprofessional in this case.
i make no judgements about anyone who posts on here so I assume a certain degree of professionalism from everyone, and assume playing music live,or facilitating this, or the production of music, is the single most important thing to them.
cover nad gigs in a pub are very different though.
We go out of our way to be professional when it comes to gigs - we're always there on time (usually early), our setup/breakdown time is practiced and on the order of 2-3 minutes, we have stage plans and set list notes for the sound engineer sent well ahead of time (which they almost always lose or ignore, and complain that they haven't seen on the night), we're usually the ones sorting out kit share between the bands because nobody else bothers and we generally go out of our way to make our involvement in the proceedings to be as frictionless as possible for everybody.
I'd say those things are by far the most important parts of "being professional" when it comes to gigs on the circuit.
Yet, because we a bit miffed at the expectation that we cancel our jobs and rearrange childcare to account for an unannounced late change (we didn't even find out until we happened to see the timings on a Facebook post!), you're saying we're "unprofessional".
It's a bit insulting, that.
If I was promoting an event, I'd want to be sure that all parties involved in delivering it were fully up to speed on timings and expectations, not just trust to fate.
You can get flaky bands, caterers, sound engineers and ... promoters.