On Moving Parts

I dream of emails.

I dream of emails with signed contracts, with confirmed itineraries, with tentative set-times, with the tag line ‘yep, lock it in’.

For the last eight months I’ve been working on one of the biggest juggling acts of my career – lining up a fifteen show, seven person Gusto tour of the UK. I’ll do a bigger post in the near future, once the full tour dates have been announced, once the real big thing I’ve been working on can be put out in to the world, but for now I talk about moving parts.

Organising a tour of this scale is a series of ever-increasing hurdles. First there’s the band availability – figuring out exactly when seven people are available to tour, how to juggle everyone’s calendars to minimise time off work, how much imposition I can put on the band’s day to day life.

Then, into that ever-shrinking window where everyone says they’re free, I sketch out a rough itinerary – where do we want to go? where can we afford to go? what actually makes sense for a seven piece band from Melbourne to do on their debut Europe tour?

I reach out to festivals (on a side note, I have an ever-expanding spreadsheet of festivals that spans literally the entire world – its such a sporadic document, including hundreds of options in Australia, one possibility in Cairo, a dream list for the US, most of mainland Europe, a strange selection in South East Asia – any time I see something interesting it gets thrown into the spreadsheet).

I reach out to more festivals.

I give up on getting any festival bookings and start compiling a list of possible venues.

I spend an inordinate amount of time googling ‘distance between Bristol and Bath (36 minutes), ‘distance between Bath and Glasgow’ (6 hours and 33 minutes), ‘time in UK now’ (9 hours behind us).

I schedule all my emails for 8 am London time, and preface them with ‘Good morning folks’.

We get offered a festival in Wales. A festival run by a railway society. Featuring over 100 barrels of ale. The email subject line is ‘Wales Rail Ale Festival’, or Cwrw ar y Cledrau in Welsh.

I chuckle to myself as I decline it. If we accept it we have to move the entire tour a month earlier, and at this stage I’ve sent over a hundred emails to try and organise venue dates. I can’t stomach the idea of trying to shift anything around, even for Welsh Ale.

The first round of despair sets in. I’ve been working on this tour for three months and we have three dates booked in. Hardly enough to call it a Europe tour. Hardly enough for it to make sense to try and send seven people across to the other side of the world.

I send a round of follow-up emails. A couple more dates fall into place.

I start toying with a tentative budget – $21,000 just to get seven people return flights from Melbourne to London.

I compare my budget to my list of confirmed dates. I give myself a hard cut-off date – if I haven’t organised most of the tour by the end of January then I’m cancelling the whole thing.

I run into a friend who toured the UK last year. He tells me that the majority of their June tour was booked and confirmed in April and May of that year.

I get an email with a festival offer. It’s not a great offer, but it’s a better offer than anything else on the table.

A couple more venue dates fall into place, but there’s some big holes in the itinerary. I tinker with my budget. I search for cheap flights. I discover a loophole that might just make the whole trip viable (more to come on this in another post).

I reduce the scope of the tour. I cut Germany off the itinerary. I cut France off the itinerary. With some sadness I cut Iceland off the itinerary (I tell myself that was never going to happen). Eventually, just like Brexit, I cut all of mainland Europe off the itinerary and focus all my efforts on the UK.

We get another festival offer through a friend. It’s a decent offer, including the free use of an eight person yurt. I say yes to the yurt.

It’s early March and I’ve steamrolled through all of my self-imposed deadlines, neatly missing every single one. I’ve kind of got two thirds of an itinerary planned, and that’s maybe enough to start tinkering with the budget and figure out a way to make it work. The band starts asking when we can announce the tour.

We schedule a Melbourne fundraising gig to raise some money.

That’s where we are right now.

I’ve got a UK tour with three (I hope) festivals, ten venue dates and a couple of small holes. I’m reducing costs everywhere possible by hopefully sleeping the band in a yurt in a field in Cornwall for a couple of days. I’ve started organising visas. I’ve looked in to buying a van in the UK and selling it three weeks later. I’ve booked everyone a one way flight from Melbourne to London. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping we can afford to book everyone a flight home.

I send another round of three am follow-up emails.

On the fifth try a venue gets back to me with a ‘yep, lock it in’.

…

If you want to support this tour of moving parts, would you buy a ticket to our fundraising gig and promise you’ll drink at least two beers while there and maybe buy a t-shirt too? The band’s bottom line (and my own bank account) would greatly appreciate it!