Last November, I succumbed to the primeval tug that draws young women out of their beds and into the fatherless orbit of touring musicians. My fiancé’s band, Fickle Friends, needed somebody to join their short run of shows and sell their merch. That is where I came in.
I came to selling merch how I imagine one might be called to the clergy. I donned the cloth – in my case, vestments of tight, tiny tops that accentuated my chest and which my fiancé reverently called ‘scraps.’ It was me handing out sacrament (free stickers) and committing to memory my most dedicated parishioners (the band’s lesbian fans). I was holding space for silent meditation, where people mulled over whether they wanted that shirt in black or off-white. I delivered ‘Anything else?’ with the easy warmth of a priest taking confession, and people felt divinely compelled to buy more.
I met Sam five years ago, when I wrote about his band for a now-defunct university magazine. Once I’d interviewed the lead singer, I followed the others on Instagram, like any scrupulous journalist would. My intentions, messaging the gorgeous drummer covered in tattoos, were solely for fact-checking purposes. Since then, I’ve gone to watch him perform countless times. At the beginning, convinced I’d stepped into a teenage fantasy, I would carefully peel off each ‘AAA’ pass from my jeans and save them in a shoebox. The entire thing was – and still is – surreal: my fiancé’s verve onstage, watching him sign vinyls post-show for fans who confess the band’s music saved their life. Even by proxy, that sort of validation feels heady.
But since COVID-19 and Brexit, touring has become economically viable only for acts that occupy the extremes of the industry. Taylor Swift’s Eras tour grossed over £1.6 billion in ticket sales alone. At the other end of the scale, callow musicians still cutting their teeth can lug their guitar cases into a local pub, play a terrible set to an apathetic cluster of patrons, pack up, collect a few quid in petrol money and leave marginally poorer than when they arrived. Between them is a yawning chasm. This is where most artists, including many household names, dangle precariously. In late 2024, Kate Nash encouraged followers to support the costs of her tour by subscribing to her OnlyFans.
Fickle Friends (henceforth referred to as ‘Fickle’) belong squarely in this treacherous middle. A decade ago, they signed a six-figure record deal with Polydor, along with a separate six-figure publishing deal with Universal, for a debut album that entered the UK charts at #9. After management commission, legal fees, accounting fees, corporation tax, then split evenly across five band members, the take-home pay was nominal. Like the vast majority of new signings, they were neglected, shelved, then mercifully dropped.
The tour I joined was part of the campaign for their third studio album, which was produced independently. For musical artists operating at this level, a certain, rather costly, standard of live performance is expected of you. In fact, you can be a moderately well-known band with a fiercely loyal fanbase and still be required to take time off from your paid job – the front woman is a songwriter and yoga teacher, the bassist is a carpenter – in order to go out on tour. You can be credited on songs that have a cumulative total of 115 million streams and get a sincere payment of five pence from Spotify for the entirety of Q3. You can sell out most of the shows on a headline tour, and hope desperately to financially recover from it.
In the interest of upholding the sanctity of mates rates (the egregious discounts sometimes offered to Fickle due to their clout, vibe and tenure), the following figures are pulled from official fees. Before getting on the road, the band booked out five days at a rehearsal studio in Brighton, which costs £1,050 to hire. Their session guitarist, the only non-member of Fickle, and therefore on a daily rate, costs about £3,600 for rehearsals and all ten days of tour. We rented a splitter bus and shared the driving which, with fuel, came to £2,300. Accommodation, even with people sharing rooms, was £1,500. In this instance, the front-of-house engineer doubled as the tour manager, but the two distinct roles come with their own fees plus VAT that go for about £6,500. He also provided the audio package, which is the sprawling network of blinking gadgetry musicians are completely unperturbed by: starting with the mixing desk, a complicated contraption on which I counted 12 faders, 12 knobs and at least 40 mysterious buttons; also microphones; microphone stands; bundles of cables ringed with fluorescent tape to make them visible under stage lights; and SAT boxes and transmitters for £8,500. A backline technician, also on a day rate, cost £3,000. Two professional photographers, for the London and Manchester dates, £500.
On top of all this, everyone was paid per diem, which is £25 a day to cover meals, so about £2,050. When I asked Sam how much the band intended to pay themselves, he started laughing.
