Can a band stay afloat on tour around Britain? In this economy?
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.
On day three, we loaded into Village Underground, a venue in Shoreditch that came with an unexpected set of small-print fees. Fickle wanted to film a live music video for a single – already costing £700 for a couple of videographers, £300 for a lighting engineer and £175 to courier the lights to the back door – but a representative pointed them in the direction of a ‘filming fee’.
The only crowd control available at the venue was a pedestrian barrier, which is the kind of flimsy thing that can cordon off a smoking area outside a local club, not a sold-out concert. So they had to hire a Mojo barrier. The total came to about £1,000. It could have been more, but the barricade was already at the venue. A higher-up told me that they have it rented out ‘pretty much permanently,’ but they pass that cost on to the promoters, who, in turn, pass it on to artists. After the show, we were humbled by a ‘disco load out’: the frantic, sweaty pack-down that’s required when a venue has booked a club night shortly after a gig. We were playing van Tetris, slotting Peli cases and stage trunks into the cargo bay of the car, while a scraggly line of girls in bandage dresses and boys in crossbody bags looked on anaemically.
Other than show fees, ranging from three to four figures on this tour, with bonuses for having sold out, the main way artists earn any money playing live now is by selling merch. Fickle had a couple of boxes of merch left over from previous tours that could be touted as vintage, but the freshly screen-printed T-shirts, hoodies and tote bags set them back £7,000. Luckily, I was a natural. I brought in over £13,000. Bosh.
The band were most excited for their final gig at the beloved Glasgow venue King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. Fickle had rarely made it up to Scotland, and their fans were so starved that it sold out almost immediately. But shortly after the first support act unplugged their guitars, people in hi-vis jackets raced up and down the stairs with a grim look. The promoter made a gesture of slashing her throat. We had to be evacuated. Hundreds of people were stranded in the bar underneath the venue because a toilet had exploded and splashed sewage everywhere. Fans were crying. The lead singer was crying. Those who lingered insisted on buying merchandise to show their unwavering support, and then I, too, was crying. When I asked the King Tut’s staff if this was unprecedented, they told me glibly that it happened all the time. ‘Old Scottish plumbing,’ one of them explained. It was a shitshow, we joked on the long and mostly morose ride home, headlined by ‘Faecal Friends’.
Ultimately, the fans were refunded, the band received the show fee, although they lost out on projected merch sales, and the promoter took the hit. The venue made nothing, but it seldom does. Despite the recurring issue, modernising the plumbing may be the least of their concerns. King Tut’s has faced an onslaught of planning applications in recent years from developers seeking to convert the neighbouring buildings into luxury flats. This is an existential threat – if approved, tenants would likely file noise complaints and the 35-year-old venue would have to shutter. And objecting to such applications is an expensive, drawn-out process requiring robust legal advice that, without the Music Venue Trust’s pro bono work, would cost ten to 20 grand for every case.
In the time since Fickle first started out, the music industry has undergone huge changes: first, due to the pandemic, then TikTok, now the sinister proliferation of AI. Climbing costs and the British government’s refusal to support its largest cultural export raise the question of why musicians continue to tour at all.
It is a difficult thing to answer. Except, of course, when the lights dip, and the track starts, and the crowd chants lyrics with their hands outstretched. I am in that crowd often, having temporarily escaped Merch Jail, when that question of why? begins to sound ludicrous. My eyes slide, as always, to the spectacle of him. Arms flailing, feet akimbo, his head tipped all the way back.
For an animal moment, we in the crowd concede that we are mere mortals, and those on stage are small gods. I know I shouldn’t, but I remove my moulded earplugs so that the drums are piercing, so I can feel them in my ribs. For now, I let the cymbals grind my brain into a pleasant pulp. Later, we will laugh that I have made more money from writing about this tour than my fiancé has made from playing it. But not yet. For now, we dance.
