On Glastonbury Festival Gusto Gusto are going to Glastonbury Festival. Yeeeeeep. This little band that came out of 2021’s lockdown bubble and played our first gig in May of 2022 is getting ready to jet overseas next month and play arguably the biggest festival in the world. It’s truly absurd that in 2 short years we’ve gone from our first gig at Thornbury’s Café Gummo to playing Glastonbury. I start to write our Grammy’s acceptance speech… “Gusto, from Gummo to Glasto…” Then I remind myself that we’re still going to be the smallest band at Glastonbury – we’re no Elton John or Arctic Monkeys or Rolling Stones. We’re not playing the main stages. We’ll be down the bottom end of the official poster (if they remember to put us on at all lol). BUT we’ll be there. And we’ll play a bunch of shows. And we’ll play our arses off, because we’ve been working hard. In the last 24 months we’ve played 76 shows. Released two EPs. Toured the country three times. We’ve sold out shows in a handful of places, and in the process had a lot of fun and met a lot of people. … I’ve had many people ask me how we got the offer for Glastonbury. It was this time last year that I started thinking about it. I knew we were going to have a new album to promote, and had decent plans for touring the heck out of it, but I’d decided we needed to set our sights a little higher than just another East Coast run. I’ve held the idea of heading overseas in my mind pretty much since I started Gusto. In the fifteen years I’ve spent playing around Australia I’ve seen the inevitable rise and fall of every project. There’s a pretty finite ceiling on what you’re able to achieve here purely based on how big the market is. There’s a handful of capital cities, loosely linked by a much bigger handful of regional cities, and once you’re on the ‘touring circuit’ you realise just how small Australia’s population is. Sure we’ve got land aplenty, but the population is small and really spread out. Bands either fizzle out because everyone’s played Katoomba three or four times and can’t be bothered any more, or get big enough that they can only tour when there’s a new album to release and can only release an album every three years. By that point all the band members have side projects that are on the same touring circuit and it’s a never ending cycle. I started reaching out to Europe contacts in June of 2023. I’ve got a decent number of friends who’ve done the Europe thing, and everyone kept saying ‘just get yourselves over there and it’ll be easy’. Cue problem number one – getting seven people over to Europe. It feels like a particularly inauspicious time to launch our international ambitions – the world is in an economic decline, the Australian live music sector is being gutted, government funding is spread thin and festivals everywhere are being cancelled. Fortunately I’m an optimist. I knew I needed SOMETHING to pin the tour around. Simply getting seven people to Europe and playing a bunch of $100 bar gigs wasn’t going to be worth it – in terms of money or experiences. We’d be actively losing money while simultaneously having a terrible time playing shows to no-one, and it probably wouldn’t even be good for our profile. I started researching Glastonbury. I sort of knew it was a big festival, but didn’t realise quite how big. In 2023 they had 62 stages, 3000 bands and 200,000 punters. They have 2.5 million people apply for the 200,000 tickets available and consistently sell out eight months in advance. It’s absurdly big. I pulled together a list of possible stages and started scouring the internet for booker’s names and email addresses, then in August I started cold emailing. In October I got the first ‘positive’ response, which wasn’t a ‘we’ll have you’ email, but more of ‘oh this sounds kind of cool, hit us back in January’ email. I got a bunch of those emails and by and large they all wound up being negative, but I hung on to the first one as a positive sign and started looking at dates for a tour around the festival. It’s a fine line for a band this big – the longer I can keep us on the road the more money we can feasibly make, but also the more downtime we need to plan in between shows. The more days off we have, the more money we’re burning through. I’ve been in bands that have played seven shows a week (including one tour where we played fifteen shows in fourteen days), but it’s pretty gruelling. I figured we could do a couple of weeks with five shows a week, as long as we could have days off on Mondays and Tuesdays. Tie that into a week of Glastonbury and we’d have a pretty solid three week itinerary. By this point I’d emailed 33 stages at Glastonbury. I had positive responses from five of them. One finally confirmed. This was enough for me to start looking at flights, and then everything else started to fall into place (more on that here if you’re interested). Once we had one stage at Glastonbury confirmed, others started to get interested. Right now we’ve got five shows over the week, with a few other tentatives. The hope is that we’ll get a little momentum over the course of the festival, enough to promote the rest of the shows for the tour, enough to make the whole trip a success. We’ve got ten other venue shows across the UK, then I’m taking three weeks off to recover on a beach in Eastern Europe. I’m excited and nervous and more than a little tired already – one big problem with trying to organise shows in the UK is that timezone differences mean people start to respond to my emails around midnight Australian time. I wake up a lot at 3 am, send off a bunch of emails and fall back asleep. I’m sure it’s not healthy, but it’s effective. Over the last ten months I’ve sent (low guesstimate) 1,400 emails to organise this tour. We jet off in six weeks. … We’re running a fundraising gig this Saturday to offset some of the costs of the tour. It’s a combined single launch, video shoot, and fundraising gig in Northcote. It’s a chance to let off some pre-tour nerves, show off some of the new music from our upcoming debut full-length album, and have a party with our closest friends to celebrate this opportunity we’ve been given. If you’re interested in coming along you can snap up a ticket, and come find me on the dance floor. I’ll be the one looking a little stressed, checking my emails.