Category: Rants & Campaigns

A recent Instagram post highlighted the increasing trend for gig-goers to buy tickets for performances at the very last minute. It was one of several cries from the heart I’ve seen recently both from the musicians and the venues where they play. Most survive on a financial knife edge, so here are a few reasons why lovers of live music should take note and buy in advance. Some of these are painfully obvious. Others less so.

The Venues:

Nearly 800 late night music venues have closed in the UK since 2020. That represents more than 26%. We are losing too many vital community assets.

In January, a BBC investigation found that half of remaining grassroots venues never make a profit.

Although the rate of closure has slowed this year, you have to ask yourself ‘from what level?’. This insanely creative country has lost so many venues there aren’t too many left to lose.

All of these venues understand that no business has a right to survive, or even make a profit, but all of them try, and all of them carry common cost burdens.

Grassroots music venues lost approximately 6,000 staff in 2025. That’s around 20% of the total. Venues have had to cut staff numbers in order to survive.

Many venues have changed their focus in order to survive, with music now just part of their offer.

Advance ticket sales enable venues to do a whole range of things, from being able to pay touring artists a fair rate, to employing more staff, publicising events, ensuring a profit, and having a greater degree of certainty that they can sustain their business.

The Musicians:

Up to 50% of musicians earn less than £14,000 a year from their creations, so most need to support their craft with other work.

The necessary ‘other work’ means that touring is often restricted to weekends, holidays, close to home or occasional live streams. 

Full time touring musicians need to cover their costs, so they require a performance fee. Many don’t get near the £189.55 Musicians Union rate for an evening performance.

Some costs are obvious (accommodation, travel, subsistence), some less so (insurance, equipment maintenance, the cost of creating merchandise, and of course, time)

The number of venues is declining, and that means fewer opportunities to perform. Venues provide the performers. Performers bring in the punters.

An additional threat is the increasing number of tribute bands, taking up spaces that were once dedicated solely to original music. I have mixed feelings about this. Punters like tribute acts so why not? Playing in a tribute or covers band keeps musicians in practise. So any objection I have is more with the rising numbers than with the existence of tribute acts.

The Essential Support of Gig-Goers:

The Covid pandemic accelerated the changing ways in which we consume music and attend music events. Many of the points raised above have been impacted by lower sales, streaming rather than buying, watching live streams rather than attending the local venue, punters seeming to prefer to see expensive arena gigs and other ‘I was there’ events.

Setting aside the idiocy of paying thousands to see one of the world’s  stellar bands these days, an average arena gig ticket is likely to cost around £100. You can see ten high quality acts for that same amount of money. In attending an arena gig, it’s more likely that you will know the performer’s music, and I get that. In attending a local venue means that is less likely, but it does carry a sense of added anticipation and discovery.  

Music is consumed mainly via the streaming services, which means that sales of CDs, vinyl and other merchandise are at best sporadic. If a musician knows they will be paid £200.00 for a performance and there’s a likelihood of £50 of merchandise sales, it helps them to keep on touring, and to keep creating music. Too many great songwriters and musicians have given up altogether because they can’t make music pay.

Absolutely none of this is rocket science. So with apologies to the already long-converted, please support venues and musicians in the following ways:

• Book tickets in advance of a show
• Support individual crowdfunding and (eg) Patreon campaigns
• Buy music as well as streaming it
• Buy merchandise
• Buy food and drink at the venue

Many of us do some of that that when we see an arena gig, so what stops us doing the same at local grassroots venues? Food for thought, but please go beyond holding the thought and support grassroots music in any way you can afford to do so.

Peace.

John

It used to be mainly settees. There’d be an unmissable sale where stock that wasn’t ‘This Year’s Model’ was offered at a hefty discount. The idea was for businesses to make way for new stock in a new year. I understand that. Then there was the annual Boxing Day family joke about holiday adverts starting at one minute past midnight, but you could rely on it every year, like clockwork. These days, there’s a perpetual settee sale, with deadlines you mustn’t miss followed by more deadlines you mustn’t miss. Holiday adverts have moved their starting blocks from Boxing Day to some time in August, so too has the whole Christmas thing.

‘Less is more’ is a principle of life that helps to keep events special, commercial or otherwise. If each of our birthdays lasted for many months, we wouldn’t have much of a special day. Whether you practise or not, Christmas and Easter are Christian religious events, Diwali is the start of the Hindu new year, and Ramadan is the Muslim month of fasting and communal prayer. The timing of Easter, Diwali and Ramadan are anciently linked to the cycle of the moon. Christmas is the only one of these events to fall on the same day every year. Each of these human celebrations merge into others, the physical evidence for which lies in our supermarket shelves, but being human we’ve added another, and one has to ask oneself ‘for the benefit of whom?’

Yes, I’m talking about Black Friday. The use of the word ‘black’ to describe a day would normally infer a negative context. For example, there’s a book called Black Friday about a shipping disaster in October 1881 just up the coast from here in Eyemouth. A total of 189 men and boys perished that day, many of them from the same families, leaving 93 widows and 267 children without their father. Black Wednesday referred to the sterling crisis of September 1992. Then Black Monday was the name given to the global stock market crash of 1987. Yet somehow, one of the biggest businesses on the planet has appropriated ‘Black Friday’ as another annual commercial event, without any religious or cultural meaning, or any link whatsoever to the cycle of the moon. The term ‘Black Friday’ was first used by US police in the 1960s to describe retail chaos on the day after Thanksgiving every year. Fast forward 60 years, and it has embedded itself as a time of year where people around the world once again lose their shit in an apparent bargain-buying frenzy…only there are few bargains. 

The whole thing is a massive con. Following Amazon’s appropriation of the term, Black Friday became ‘Black Friday Weekend’, then ‘Black Friday   Week’, and onwards to ‘Black Friday Month’, the con just got bigger. Almost every high street business now claims a Black Friday discount, and because many items are cheaper to buy on Amazon, people seem to prefer to patronise this global gargantuan than buy from their local retail store, or their local business. Many independent businesses simply don’t have the profit margins to compete with this insanity and some, like my daughter and son-in-law’s business spend their lives hand crafting custom-made, high quality products whose value should not be diminished. These aren’t products made en masse in a Far East sweat shop. Black Fox products have a personal touch that makes them special, and they are made to last. It is the profit from those products that sustains their family.

I completely understand why people would look around for bargains in the current cost of living crisis, if indeed they are bargains, but do me a favour. Before you lurch headlong into buying bargains most of which aren’t bargains, read Jenny’s blog and further check out their website at https://blackfoxmetalcraft.co.uk/blogs/black-fox-metalcraft-blog/why-black-fox-metalcraft-does-not-have-a-black-friday-sale to understand why their business cannot afford to become embroiled in the annual apparent mass discounting of everything. If the world continues to not support local businesses and local high street shops, their number will be further diminished with many closing down altogether, and the control of everything we buy will be only in the hands of multibillionaires like Jeff Bezos and their extremely well-paid accountants and lawyers.

Peace.

John

When global climate conferences involve politicians and scientists all jetting off to a distant part of the planet to make promises they don’t seem to intend to keep, one has to wonder if they have any understanding at all of the existential crisis that faces humanity. If COP30 were to be the last conference of its kind, and all those scientists and politicians could bear to stage a series of smaller, interconnected conferences online rather than polluting an already polluted atmosphere with yet more emissions from jets, then I might give the initiative some credibility. Just now, it’s a joke.

An estimated 50,000 people have flown to Brazil for COP30, and yes, it would be impossible to stage an online conference for 50,000 people, but surely there has to be some form of reset? Increasingly, the COP conferences are attracting fossil fuel lobbyists, intent on hamstringing moves to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. This isn’t a new thing. Fossil fuel lobbyists seem to show up everywhere to protect their own industry, sometimes spreading misinformation and using commercial and political muscle to delay or overturn decisions that would actually be beneficial for us all. It seems to be the way of this world that a few powerful rich men drag the rest of us along their misguided paths. That needs to change.

No, I’m not a Commie, nor am I ‘Hard Left’. Like most people, my views differ depending on the topic, and as you go through life some of those views shift with personal circumstances. However, if there is one thing that has been absolutely consistent in my life, it has been the clear knowledge that protecting our environment can sustain our race for many centuries to come. It’s also crystal clear that if we continue to abuse it, humans will become history, sooner rather than later. That isn’t scaremongering. It just happens to be true.

Whether it’s taking another foreign holiday, going on another cruise, or even something as simple as washing the car with a bucket of water rather than a power washer, each of those things can make a massive collective impact on our ability to steer our race away from calamity. Ideas such as these are frequently seized upon by Far Right groups as a massive intrusion on the right of people to do what the hell they want. All I’m calling for here is moderation: you don’t, for example, need three foreign holidays a year, have your wedding in Bali, or your stag do in Las Vegas. To me, these things just hammer more nails into the coffin. 

The media trend towards programmes such as racing around the world, getting people out of apparent jungles, finding holiday homes in sunnier climes, raffling massive houses in farmland and on cliff tops – none of it is helping. Yet it’s encouraging the wanderlust in us all, and normalising the pumping of more shit into our atmosphere. I realised exactly how much shit when we made our move from suburban Manchester to Berwick upon Tweed, because my asthma instantly improved. That means the majority of my fellow countryfolk are breathing in shit far more than they know.

So yes, there is something you can do about it. Don’t ever believe there isn’t. With freedom comes responsibility, so I’m fine with someone taking occasional flights abroad if their lives at home are respectful of the environment in which we live: minimising water use, minimising the use of energy, minimising the purchase of products online or wrapped in five layers of plastic, leaving plastic wrapping at the supermarket instead of bringing it home, re-using as much plastic packaging as you can…this really isn’t rocket science. We should stop laying all the blame on the big companies until we have our own houses in order. Then we can lay the blame firmly at their door.

Peace.

John

Throughout history, books have been written about historical events from the perspective and experience of the writer. They write from the perspective of what they have personally come to believe. However, throughout history, books have been written about the same event from different perspectives, leaving the reader with the opportunity to arrive at a balanced view. The reason that fascist regimes don’t like books is that they often give a perspective that doesn’t conform to their agenda, so they ban them and they burn them. The reason they don’t like art is because more often than not it voices opposition. That doesn’t make them strong, it makes them paranoid and fearful.

Fast forward now to the age of technology, and the foundation of the ‘World Wide Web’ by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s. The concept had been around for at least 20 years before then, but this was the first time the Internet became something the public could use. In a very short period of time, everyone’s opinion became fact, and they could peddle both truths and untruths to a global audience, knowing that people generally like to believe what they want to believe.

In the same way as people too often assume knowledge and fact from a deliberately erroneous newspaper headline, it became possible for anyone to deliberately mislead, from the clever to those who feel a need to be heard, from political manipulators to the downright criminal. Our world has been dominated by a public Internet ever since Berners-Lee’s eureka moment, and in that time, the speed at which information can be distributed has increased dramatically. The speed at which criminals have manipulated information and second-guessed the public’s use of the Internet is nothing short of frightening.

So that’s the background. In my professional life, I’ve been researching the Internet since its inception, and I’ve learned to be extremely cautious about the information it circulates. I’ve always had an unwritten rule to check any statistics at least three times from different, credible sources. In the early days, I started with country populations. At that time, the CIA World Factbook was seen as something of a bible for many in international trade, my profession for 35 years. So I spent some time checking its population figures for different countries, by comparing CIA figures with each of those country’s own statistics websites, and found huge disparities. So I looked further at The Economist, the United Nations, the World Bank and similar respected sites. This confirmed that the CIA Factbook was not the always the book of facts I expected it to be.

So I dug deeper, looking at the population share of each religion within specific countries in different parts of the world. I can’t recall which African country the CIA Factbook asserted was 80% Christian, but it took just a couple of minutes to absolutely disprove. In fact, more than half the population was Muslim, only 20% was Christian, and there were multiple indigenous beliefs being practised in different tribal areas. From that point on, which would have been about 2004, I disbelieved everything on the Internet until I’d seen the same (or very similar) information from three different credible sources. 

That should be the standard we all work to, but during seven years as a tutor in international trade, I found that even experienced business practitioners were submitting assignments that used websites such as Wikipedia and Investopedia as bibliography sources. They were also cherry picking sources from Page One on their Internet search results. So part of my tutoring involved some basic training on how to research on the Internet. My key point was to start your research at page ten or twenty (if the search pages go that far), and work forward to Page One. Page One of any search engine is where companies and governments have paid to be, and that’s where they deliver their version of fact. They are paying to deliver their version of the truth. Generally, the later pages yield information that is more accurate and independently verifiable.

Things have moved on a peg since I retired in January 2023, with multiple social media sites providing a platform for anyone with sinister intent, both to post their manipulative and dangerous agendas, and to organise public opinion and demonstration. Most of the main search engines now have an Artificial Intelligence (AI) summary at the top of Page One. The race to AI, its massive cost, and its servers’ insatiable use of water, is something we should all be fearful of, but because people like to believe what they want to believe, very few are talking about it. AI creates these summaries on the basis of existing information, and at this stage can be very easily manipulated. Shit in. Shit out. Some of the summaries are reasonably accurate, and some would be downright hilarious if it wasn’t for the fact that people actually believe this shit, and worse, knee-jerk react to some of it. There is absolutely zero regulation.

I’ll close with just one example. A few weeks ago, I typed “John Reed A Proliferation Of Pointlessness” into Google: the first of three searches, 30-minutes apart, then a final one two weeks later. “A Proliferation Of Pointlessness” is the title of my latest solo album. What came from AI is summarised in the screenshots in this article. I’ve added them in the order of search. Fourth time lucky, AI eventually got it more or less right, but most people would have believed it the first time. If AI can be this misleading for something so trivial, just imagine…just imagine…just imagine.

Peace.

John