Why Starting a Band Is Trickier Than It Looks

The band I am a part of was started by our singer Joey and our bassist Luke in an empty room of Fazakerley High School. They then wandered their way into the common room where I was sat, probably staring at a wall, and asked me to join. We played a disastrous gig and then decided we needed a drummer. We hired Billy. Since then we haven't had a break. Either from playing shows all over the country, in the city or simply writing. Now, when we started we were simply amazed by how easily everything seemed to come together. We were getting gigs, writing songs, everything was going great.

You wonder how bands in the past could have managed to get anywhere without social media. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter were our main lines of contact with each other, fans and booking agents. How on earth did the Stooges get noticed without even having a MySpace? Surely if we embrace this amazing technology, we HAVE to get somewhere. Surely. Surely.

After a while of embracing the great electric mother you realise why you haven't been on the cover of any magazines yet. Imagine yourself as a record label scout in the past. You scour your city, your area, your country looking for amazing bands. You manage to get yourself to three gigs a week, you find The Stooges or Nick Cave in an unpolished form, you take a chance and you're set. Now imagine yourself as a record label scout today. It's your email address on the labels website. You get 200 emails a day from every band in the country advertising their MySpace to you.

The chances are pretty slim, whether you're Nick Cave 2 or not, that you'll be noticed by these people. They are simply over-fed with requests. It is understandable why record labels like to put their own bands together, a sure thing that they know will sell, rather than search for years trying to find a band to take a risk on.

This is why DIY has become far more popular than ever in the past few years. Record labels don't seem to care for the bands any more. The bands have to care for themselves. Holding out hope, of course, that a scout from Parlophone or EMI will be in the mass of 7 people at their gig. Maybe David Geffen works on the bar, part-time.

While this may sound like some kind of rant at the music industry, it really isn't. By forcing bands to take care of themselves, bands have now been given complete power. They can truly express themselves exactly how they want to. No more money-minded executives breathing down their neck. They also now have a direct line to their audience, the only people the band need to impress. Although financially this is probably not the best thing to happen to bands, artistically and creatively it really is.

Starting a band is one of the easiest things you can do. All you need is a couple of willing participants and some instruments. Keeping a band together and keeping hope is far trickier.

My Name Is Thomas

My name is Thomas. Nothing much happened for the first part of my life. Mainly a series of movies, video games and trampolines. Then, at some point in 2008, I was approached by some school friends and asked to join a band. Since that day it seems I haven't stopped. The name of that band is The Temps. We average at about 60 gigs a year. If each gig I played with had 2 other bands on (which it is usually more) using my simply astounding mathematical prowess, I can calculate that over the past 3 years I have watched 360 bands. Give or take. Although we are fans of travelling, before we had the ability to do so we mainly played Liverpool and we still do play Liverpool quite a bit, but I think this has given me a fairly accurate view of the state of the music scene here -and how the rest of the UK relates to Liverpool.

More recently I have been getting involved in another aspect of the arts. I gained a BTEC in Theatre Technology and have been working on and seeing a fair amount of Liverpool’s theatre chops. It was a bit of a culture shock moving from a musical performer to a back stage theatre worker. The sheer levels of stress that are involved for the latter, seem so distant from the fairly laid-back approach of rolling onto a stage a few minutes late and hitting an instrument with battered and bloodied hands. The theatre scene in Liverpool is also a very different affair to the music scene. The music scene always seems to follow a pattern. One year in was entirely indie bands, the next it was entirely metal bands and the latest year it seems to be the combination of rock music and electronica that I don't think has been labelled yet, so I will do it myself: ‘Beepcore’. While the theatre scene seems to never follow a pattern. Every show I go to or am involved with seems to be a world apart from the last one.

I think the main reason that theatre is so creatively free, while music is sounding somewhat uniform at the moment, is a simple one. Theatre is not as popular. This means that only a person, who is truly in love with it, aspires to be a part of it. Because music is more in vogue, it seems that most of the musical outfits are only half thought out and as a result...not too great. This isn’t to say that I have fallen out of love with music. To the contrary, amazing music is still being created all throughout Liverpool and the UK, and even the world. It has just become trickier to find. This is why I have stayed to see 360 bands over the past 3 years. So I could see the 20-30 bands that made me say ‘wow’.