Advice on Gigs.

[paulbass]

Thanks BCer's for all your ideas and advice. There plenty to think about and some valid comments....food for thought!
I have been spoilt, in some of the bands i have been in the gigs came to them....although we played some really cheesy stuff,cheese sells! The band i'm in now is different from anything else i've been in and the thought of changing direction in music just to get gigs seems to be defeating the object of being in a rock band, although i can see why some bands do it. I guess that one of the biggest changes over the years is that there are many more bands about now and fewer pubs providing alteranative music.
Anyway chaps i'm off to make some phonecalls and knock on some doors to try and get some gigs....may even have a crafty pint or 10!
Thanks for all your comments.

[JTUK]

Reviewing your set can be a good thing or bad thing. It is true there are too many classic rocks bands
around here but maybe some of them are pretty popular and therein lies the catch 22...
In some ways, I admire bands sticking to their guns...and I wish more would do that but maybe
the best way around all this is to just make the band a band that pubs can't afford not to book.
At the end of the day, a very good turnout is what most venues want, and then the genre becomes
less important...the LL will work round that IF he knows the beers are being sold.
But..taking the risk in the first place is their problem....so unless you can knock out one of the bands
on his rosta, he will likely stick with what he knows..

I'd mirror band's venues that do the same sort of stuff..and if that isn't good enough for you, you might have
to rethink your MO..

[Mark Dyer]

We have 2-3 variations on a set depending on the venue, if we know that a particular pub/club has a rock audience then that's the kind of set we play. But more often than not pubs tend to have a mixed audience, so we drop in stuff like a U2, Train, The Feeling or INXS song, enough of that stuff to keep everybody happy basically. Although, it never ceases to amaze when people are up and enjoying say 'Drops of Jupiter' then stay up for 'Killing in the Name of'

How you play the songs can also get you noticed, living in Merseyside we often get requests for Beatles songs but we're not interested in doing straight renditions so, we approached a song like 'Day Tripper' from the starting point of 'what would it sound like if say Muse had written it'? Ok, that makes it sound a lot better than it is, lol, but you get the point. People often come up to us when we arrive at venues and say "oh, you're that band who plays Enter Sandman a weird way" they probably don't remember the band name but they remember the way we play the songs.

If you're playing similar venues I think you may need to adopt the same policy.

As people have said here, getting your foot in the door of the popular venues can be hard. If the venue is fully booked for the year with established bands, a good way to get a gig at these places is to offer yourselves as a cancellation band, it has worked successfully for us a number of times and then lead to repeat bookings, but you must be available at short notice when the venue call.

[scalpy]

Hi paulbass, another Herefordian here. A while back I was playing in a originals rock band this way and we had some great gigs from using the Broad Sheep magazines venue guide. Several of the welsh venues up near us often have parties of bikers booked in if they're a hotel to, because the guys are all out going nuts on the welsh roads! Might be worth looking into, this was up towards Brecon and Powys.