David Gray, Bono’s Sunglasses and Me

In his particularly funny and entertaining way of writing, Neil Mc Cormick tells us how tiresome and difficult it is to run a charity event.

From The Telegraph:

Neil McCormick's son Finn wearing Bono's sunglasses

On Wednesday March 6, I am presenting a charity concert at the Islington Assembly Hall in London, featuring David Gray, The Magic Numbers, Gabriella Cilmi, David Ford, Bo Bruce and a few other musical friends and associates. Please buy a ticket and prevent an out-of-depth rock critic’s nervous breakdown.

I was not cut out for the life of a promoter. Indeed, I’m not sure anyone is. I was in bands for long enough in my younger years to know how fretful staging a gig can be, involving a huge advance effort in getting musicians, equipment and venue ready, with no guarantee that anyone will turn up and make it worthwhile. “Why do you think all promoters look permanently stressed?” a band manager sympathetically said to me, before adding, “You’re looking a bit peeky yourself, mate.”

I’m doing it for love. Well, specifically for my wife. She is an acupuncturist involved in a small charity, Moxafrica, who run a research project in universities in Uganda and South Africa, investigating the treatment of TB with Chinese medicine. It is not an obviously appealing cause, like food for the starving. Yet Moxafrica is having results with potentially wide ranging implications for the developing world, where drug resistant TB is epidemic (it kills someone every 20 seconds in Africa). Although the sums required to support Moxafrica seem small in the grand scheme of things (£16,000 would keep them going another year), it is a tough time for all charities right now and Moxafrica is in danger of coming to a premature end. I listened to lots of conversations about little schemes to raise small amounts as the clock kept ticking, until, almost against my own better judgment, I uttered the fateful line, “You know you could raise that in one go with a gig.”

And so I have entered into another world, of promoters, managers and agents. I have been spending time in empty venues, looking out from empty stages on to empty floors and empty seats, the most beautiful concert halls and lavishly appointed clubs all taking on a strangely bereft atmosphere without the throb of humanity that brings them to life. “An empty venue is of no use to anyone,” is an oft-repeated line, and I have been offered top night spots on attractive terms.

“The money’s on the popcorn,” is another much repeated phrase, meaning, if I could guarantee a certain number of people through the doors, the venue would make its real profit behind the bar.

But I also learned that January is a hard month to sell tickets, because everybody’s broke after Christmas, and payday doesn’t come ‘til the end of a long month. And February isn’t much better. In freezing offices, huddled around heaters, I learned about bottom line costs and narrow profit margins, watching overheads mount as backline hire, stage hands and security staff were added in, and came to dread questions like “have you got public liability insurance?” One initially attractive space started off with a price of £400 and wound up, with all additions, costing closer to £7000. When I expressed concern about selling out a particularly capacious venue, worrying how stars might feel playing to a half empty room, a chorus of voices responded, “We’ll dazzle them with lights!” To complicit laughter, I was informed that you never tell artists the venue isn’t sold out. “They’d get nervous. You just turn the lights in their eyes so bright they can’t see past the front row.”

The mood amongst backroom professionals was friendly and bluff, with a shared comical disdain for the musicians people pay to see. “I bloody hate artists,” one venue manager told me. “That’s why I employ people to keep them away from me.”

The hardest thing, for me, personally, was opening my contacts list to call stars and managers that I have at least a tentative relationship with. I meet a lot of musicians in sometimes intense and intimate circumstances, making a brief yet strong connection, but there is always a necessary quality of distance, because I have to reserve the right to criticise. So while particular artists may have appreciated a good review at a crucial moment in their careers, I certainly don’t feel anyone owes me a favour. Yet that is exactly what I was asking for: artists to lend me their time and talent for no remuneration.

What’s more, big stars are constantly asked to do this, fielding dozens of charitable requests a week. So I prevaricated and procrastinated, carefully phrasing a diplomatic approach that facilitated friendly refusal. Turns out that I was worrying about nothing. Most people do have a charitable instinct, and if they can help, they will. Musicians who couldn’t appear offered donations, or other assistance. Bono sent me a pair of his sunglasses for a rock’n’roll raffle. By my third call, I had a headliner, a major rock star whose enthusiastic response took me aback: “I love these kind of things. Is it all right if I just turn up and do an acoustic set?”

One artist led to another, and I began assembling an eclectic bill, effectively a coalition of the willing. Everything was slightly provisional, however, dependent upon touring and recording schedules. We took a venue and pencilled in a date but I felt like a juggler desperately trying to keep a dozen balls in the air at the same time. Then, one nerve wracking Friday, I dropped them all. With two weeks to go til showtime, we lost our venue, lost the date, and lost our headline star.

I was almost relieved to embrace failure. I had been at it for weeks and it was causing sleepless nights, when all I could think about were the details of the show, tossing one possibility after another around my fevered brain. Then David Gray’s manager called. He’d been on holiday and missed earlier attempts to contact him. “What’s this all about then? Trying to save Africa with Chinese medicine? You’ve obviously gone completely mad!”

We got a new venue, a new date, and a new bill. My sons were dragooned into designing posters and web fliers, hundreds of emails were pinging about between the charity, the venue, our live events producer and artist managers, contracts were drawn up, databases bombarded. A friendly PR sent out a message announcing the show, with a warning not to expect much of a response. “Every time I send out a press release, it’s like that scene in Star Trek, when they fire Spock's coffin out into the inky blackness and watch it getting swallowed up by the void.” I felt a twinge of guilt, thinking of all the emails I routinely ignore.

Now all I can do is wait in a state of helpless tension. I keep clicking on the Moxafrica ticket site to see whether the counter has moved. It’s worse than Googling yourself but I can’t leave it alone, always wondering what else can we do to shift tickets? It’s a beautiful venue with only 700 capacity and we have a magical bill of fantastic singer-songwriters and great bands doing unplugged sets. So go on, put me out of my misery. It’s all for a good cause. And did I mention you can win Bono’s sunglasses?

http://moxafrica.eventbrite.co.uk/http://www.telegraph.co.uk