When some of the Gig Crowd Gets a little TOO Roused...

A lot of bands like to get an audience involved and maybe get one or two of them up on the stage from time to time when they play - I know we do.

As I've written about elsewhere, the audience generally love this, particularly if the "additional band member" has what you might call strong visual appeal while they shout some backing vocals or bash away on a tambourine.

The venue management are usually pretty keen on this kind of involvement, as long as it doesn’t descend into a free for all.

Sometimes if you have to coax a person up onto the stage you can tell they don’t feel comfortable while they’re up there. You’ll need to whisper reassurances to them if this is the case. Other times some customers can be only too at home up on there with you.

We’ve had some pretty close shaves with guys falling over and almost into our gear but last weekend was a first for us.

We invited a girl up so we could sing a ballad to/at her. She didn’t stay there long. She clearly found the attention hard to bear. We carried the song on for a minute or so before another guest arrived up uninvited. She danced around and tried to sing a little which was met with great approval from the (mostly male) bar audience.

At the end of the number I thanked her for her "input" and she left.

Fast forward to the end of the night when she appeared back up again (uninvited) for the first of our 3 encore numbers and stayed there right through to the bitter end.

In these circumstances generally, after one song one of us would whisper to our "guest" that they’d probably better leave the stage in case the management started to object. This normally does the trick. In this case though, we suggested she confine her vocals to singing backing with me when I came in and that she concentrate on her dancing.

Seemed to go down a treat all round. Sometimes you just have to roll with these things I suppose....

Gig-Getter at Amazon (?)

Apologies to anyone who's been trying to order the new A5 "gig-bag size" manual from Amazon since they listed it there this month.

As you might have found, they've been selling out as soon as deliveries arrived. I've had a few people emailing me about this so I contacted Amazon and they've upped their stockholding significantly.

Hopefully this will sort it...

Is Getting Band Gigs a Numbers Game?

Well, I've always thought so.

Here's a quote from someone who has their numbers well understood:

"From 1995 to 2000, I played about 140 shows a year," she said. "It was hard work. I had to make about 20 phone calls to get each gig, and I needed 20 gigs a month to make a living."

The full post is here


And if you scroll down this Harmony Central post to the comment from "Sickman", you can see his simple formula for getting as much work as you want outside your home town.

Neither of these two tell you how to do it of course, but you have to admire the the clarity of thinking. It's all about knowing your what your gigging goals are isn't it?

One Perfect time to Get a Band Booking

I got an email off Ted, a very excited new gig-getter this week. He´d just put down the phone after booking two gigs for his band at different venues in the space of 5 minutes.



The gigs were at venues Ted´s band have never played at before. Venues in fact they´d never even visited. What excited him so much was the fact that instead of punching the air and coming off the phone when he´d got the first booking (like he´d done in the past) he pushed on past that. He used his own momentum, the positive feelings he felt after that first booking to get a second booking somewhere else.



I´ve often thought over the years that in any kind of selling or marketing, one great time to pitch whatever you´re talking about is when you´re on the "crest of a wave". When you don´t need the booking so much , because you´ve just got another one somewhere else.

The great buzz you can get for short while when you´ve just booked a gig somewhere new can be harnessed. You can use it to achieve even more at that time.

You might want to try this if you haven´t already done so.



Anyhow, Ted didn´t say why he chose not to push on past two bookings on that selling session. Hopefully it wasn´t blind panic about the impending need to rehearse.

Which reminds me....

Rousing the Crowd in the unlikeliest places

Two examples over the last couple of days of the difference crowd interaction can make to any gig.

Firstly, I stumbled (almost literally), into a cheesey bar where a solo artist was crooning along to some backing tracks in front of a largely disinterested audience.

Cue the appearance at the side of the stage of someone´s daughter - a cute little toddler. She started swaying and gyrating a little to the noise the singer was making. He made a couple of comments about his "new fan".

Suddenly the room was paying attention to what was happening on and around the stage.

When the number finished he got the biggest round of applause he`d had. The only applause he´d had up to that stage actually I think.

His "fan" wandered away but did return a couple more times to dance along. The mood had turned with that one incident though. In ackowledging the little girl he´d shown he was human, his crowd had warmed to him and were on his side -paying attention.

I´ve always been enthusiastic in recommending audience participation and here was a perfect example from the most unlikely direction


The second example comes from a visit to another bar where this time a Karaoke provided the "entertainment".

We watched a string of the good, very good and shockingly bad get up and sing or shout their way through various numbers. Mostly, they stood with their backs to the audience reading the words.

If they were obviously good singers they would get enthusiastic applause at the end of their performance. One guy was given a big build up as someone who´d sung there before on a number of occasions and had a "sensatiobnal" voice. He got up to loud applause and his crystal clear, very pure voice was momentarily met by almost stunned silince as he started a ballad the name of which I´ve forgotten.

Within 60 seconds though, peoople had turned away from the back of his head and were chatting as before.

Contrast this with the last performer we watched there.

He sang "Need u tonight" and in between sentences would turn round to beam a smile at someone at the back of the room. Soon people were turning to see who he was smiling at and then singing and clapping along.

He made a mistake with some of the words and turned to the crowsd grimmacing and got a big laugh.

Then, at the end, he held onto the mic, faced the crowd and announced the song was for his wife as they had now been married for 10 years. It brought the house down.

No rocket science, just showing he was human and breaking down barriers between the crowd and himself.

A lesson or two there for all of us who are playing gigs methinks....