Why Weren't We Asked Back.

[upside downer]

1 hour ago, Len_derby said:

Ouch, that’s a really dumb thing to do.

 

Yep. That was one of various reasons why the band didn't last much longer after that.

 

1 hour ago, Bluewine said:

In my opinion all bars and restaurants should comp food and certain drinks for the band. It's just the right thing to do as long as you don't have band members that would abuse it.

 

I know a drummer and vocalist who would 🥴

 

[Buddster]

We played O'Neils in Bristol a while back. We thought we did ok.

We asked how it went and for a rebooking. 

"yeah, the set list was great, but you weren't loud enough". 

We haven't been asked back. 

 

Bearing in mind that we have a 3k rig, in a smallish venue, and every time I've seen a band in there I've had to leave because my ears were bleeding. 

Seriously, if it was a work environment with HSE, you only be able to play for 15 mins. 

[chris_b]

39 minutes ago, Buddster said:

We played O'Neils in Bristol a while back. . . .

 

 We had  the same problem with O'Neil's in Richmond. We were very loud on stage and on the dance floor but because of the low ceiling the sound didn't travel to the other end of the pub. The management complained about the lack of volume and in the end put the pub music on in the bar area! We did get rebooked but O'Neil's moved out a year later.

 

O’Neil’s in Harrow was run by a nice woman. She always filled the place, but was fired, fingers in the till! The next guy didn't care and we played to half empty rooms. We got the blame for that and they dropped us.

 

O'Neil's had the right attitude in the beginning. They told us it was their job to get the punters in and it was our job to keep them there. Fair enough but that changed, and the pub managers started asking why we didn't bring a crowd!

[gjones]

The band I used to be in, played a regular, well paid gig, in the bar of a 5 star hotel, in Edinburgh. 

 

One night we were playing to a, very large and appreciative, crowd of Americans. They were on a trip over to Edinburgh, paid for by the bank they worked for.

 

At the end of the night the President of the bank came up and asked us to play 'one more song'. We told him that the management told us that the curfew was 11pm, for the sake of the residents staying at the hotel. Under no circumstances were we allowed to play after that cut off time.

 

He replied 'Goddarn it, we ARE the residents!!!!'. 

 

He had a point....

 

So we played one more song.

 

The next day we got an email from the management to advise our contract had been terminated 😢

Edited 3 hours ago by gjones

[Beedster]

16 hours ago, Lozz196 said:

In my old punk covers band The Daves we played a local venue where we went down amazingly. Unfortunately a lady and her husband that we knew had come to see us, she was very drunk and started a fight with him, yelling at him very loudly in the middle of the pub. When he left she started yelling at anyone who made eye contact she would fight them too. Her broad German accent made the behaviour even more noticeable in rural Watford. We could hardly say we didn’t know her as she had a Daves tee shirt on. No matter how many times we tried to get gigs they were always fully booked…..

Always be careful of your following, the amount of times I've realised at a gig that a band I've recently joined have a dodgy follower (singer's wife) or following (singer's entire family)........

[Leonard Smalls]

18 minutes ago, Beedster said:

Always be careful of your following

Back in the early 90s my old band had a bunch of followers called The Bromley Boys... They'd dress up like the Monty Python housewives and leap about in rather a crazed but generally peaceful fashion.

We'd played a couple of times at The Joshua Tavern in Oxford, one of them supporting Gaye Bykers On Acid, and were offered a headline there.

The Bromley Boys came as usual but just before we played there must have been some argy-bargy with locals - I saw the biggest of the BBs chasing this bloke with an iron bar shouting "we're from faackin Laaahnden!".

We played the gig and all was fine, but they never asked us back...

[Dan Dare]

15 hours ago, martin8708 said:

In my experience, Pub Landlords tend to favour particular styles of bands , so if they like Punk /Ska music , they will book those type of bands . If you play more non mainstream music  ( as we do ) , you tend to get the “ thanks for playing , here’s the money , goodnight “ treatment . I do sometimes wonder if we’re just cr@p , but we have over 200 years of combined musical experience, and lots of good feedback from the audience in general. 

 

This is very true. However, the guv'nor of one place my then band played in gave me an interesting slant on why he favoured certain styles of music. I had asked him for a return booking and he declined, saying he thought we were good, but not for his venue. I asked why and he explained that he tried to book bands that women liked and would come to see, his reasoning being that if the place was full of women, plenty of blokes would turn up. He had a point. We played tricky proggy stuff (this was quite a few years ago) that you couldn't exactly dance to and our audience was always predominantly blokes.

[PaulWarning]

17 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Usually It's calendar issues, or venues changing hands  

this is a problem and pubs change hands a lot, get a good crowd, management changes, don't like your style of music and don't book you, mind you that type of manager doesn't tend to last long, on the other hand we sometimes keep getting asked back when hardly anybody turns up, to the point where we make an excuse not to play there

Edited 1 hour ago by PaulWarning