Rousing the Arena - Last Night's Gig Crowd Interaction

An interesting example of a band not needing to interact verbally with an audience last night at the M.E.N arena in Manchester. It's a few years since I've seen AC/DC live and great though they are, they got me thinking about how bands make their impact on audiences and fans.

I can still remember the impact seeing Angus Young for the first time in NME in his school uniform and satchel on his back. I was still at school myself and was blown away that a "Rock Star" could look this way. Decades on and and I found myself before the gig last night wondering how the band would have fared over the years without that innovative image...

Back to to the show though, and probably because of recently completing a manual for musicians about how to get great crowd reactions, I was particularly interested in any verbal interaction. What there was came from Brian Johnson the lead singer. It was solely to introduce the odd song or to grunt. It must be great to be able to get away with this and go down well. I'm not knocking them. They were brilliant fun. The light show fantastic and Angus puts most guitarists to shame. And who cares what they say in between songs when you're a fan and buying the tee-shirts etc?

What about the rest of our bands though? I'm pretty sure an unknown band playing to a new crowd would never have got away with it. So, in the absence of a school uniform that fits, I better rehearse a few well chosen lines and learn how to interact with the crowd I guess...

How to Get Gigs where gigs aren't normally played

Here's an interesting tip which is working well for my band in terms of getting new gigs. The techniques for how to get gigs I talk about in Gig-Getter involve trying to get your band on at venues where other bands normally play.

But you can aslo exploit opportunities in places that aren't so obvious. We approached a local venue which was under new management. Although it was in an area with a decent "catchment area" of potential customers/drinkers it was struggling with the recession to get people in through the door.

We suggested he try a live band night as a special to give potential customers a good reason to get off their backsides and pay a visit.

By helping out with advertsing (low cost stuff like posters and a press release to the local paper), we were able to pack the place out with people who wouldn't normally visit his bar.

The result was a night of record takings for him at the bar and us being asked back immediately.

In truth, he wanted soooner than would have been sensible (you need to build an audiences' appetitie back up). However, we agreed another 3 gigs across the rest of 2009.

If you do the math(s) on this, you can work out that with 4 of these venues who don't normally have bands on, you can get yourself an extra gig every month.

The beauty of course with venues where bands don't normally play is that you're not being compared with other acts and you don't have the competition of other bands for the gigs. In reality, your gigs may be so successful there that the bar owner wants to make regular night of it and starts looking for additional acts.

If that's the case, maybe you can offer to source his other bands from the contacts you have (networking other bands anyone?) and take a percentage if that's your thing....

Free Tips about how to get gigs