Blog
My First Attempt At Organising a Gig
Written by jesus
Around this time last year my friend Rory and I decided to organise a fundraising gig for our school’s choir tour around Australia. We ourselves were in a band called ‘Jesus and The Disciples’ and so we thought it would be good fun and that we would also get a gig out of it so we went on and started organising away. My friends Dad worked for a charity who had a special place close to Hampton Wick, a theatre. It was really big and it had a back stage all of which would only cost us £150 due to the handy contact.
So then we started trying to recruit artists who would be interested in playing for us, we went asking around. First we asked bands from my school such as The Memos and Paper Airplanes who all seemed pretty enthusiastic, then bands from other schools. We even tried to get a local band which played gypsy style music but they weren’t available. So we got a couple of other more acoustic groups which we thought would be a good opener. We set up for Friday the 8th of April. We got the thumbs up from our school in letting us use their PA, AMPs and multicore and so we were ready to rock away. What I did was design a poster and then make a facebook group and invited anyone I thought would come.
When the big day came we had 3 lots of cars helping to take over all the equipment and me and my mate got straight to setting up and putting into practise what we learnt from the techies from our school. That took a couple of hours and we then got to wait to see if anyone would actually turn up. The first act Malory Torr got started and started singing just by herself and with her guitar but no-one was still anywhere to be seen.
But luckily, towards the end of the first act, everyone started turning up and coming in. We were very surprised because it wasn’t only just people we knew but there was a large number of random people that must have just heard about it and decided to come. At this point there were at least over a hundred people but they were practically all outside. We tried to sway them to come inside but it looks like acoustic music wasn’t there cup of tea and there were still two more acoustic acts.
Then the music really got more up beat with a couple of bands, including ours, and people started coming back inside and it really felt like the gig had now got started, band after band went on and then finally it was us. It all went brilliantly and everyone was having a great time but it all felt a bit empty and I was wondering everyone was. I found out then that during the acoustic acts most of the people got impatient and simply left.
Then we got some really bad news that the last band was running late and as we were the second last band it was up to us to keep the audience in and buy time. This was scary. So we started off by playing a couple of our old songs which went quite well but still no sign of the last band. So we kept going trying to scrape through songs that often only half of us knew and when we thought that we couldnt anymore … they turned up and were ready to go.
At this point there were only about 20 people left half of which were performers but we didnt mind we all had a ball of a time with a massive hall just to ourselves. When the night finished and everyone went home we packed up and started getting ready to head home. We had a great time, although disappointed with the amount of people that came, we sold over 300 tickets!!!
Yes, most of them came in saw the empty hall and left.. but we didnt mind to much since they had left us about £600.
And that was what happened to the gig me and my friend organised.