Contact:
Jacey Bedford of
Jacey Bedford Tour Management
01484 606230
agency(at)jacey-bedford.com
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Appalachian Roots
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Finest Kind
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Tania Opland & Mike Freeman
William Pint & Felicia Dale
UK folk touring from outside the EU
or
All ye who would enter here - abandon all hope
By Jacey Bedford
If you've done your homework before reading this you'll realise that I mostly specialise in bringing Canadian, American and Australian acts to tour in the UK, i.e. English speaking acts.. I think I'm pretty much unique in this. Though many folk agents have some foreign artists, they don't specialise (or if they do they specialise in world music or European). The rarities on my agency list are the UK and African artists.
Sometimes I have a quiet week, but most weeks I have a steady stream of artists from the USA, Canada and Australia (and all sorts of places I don't specialise in...) asking if I will arrange a tour for them in the UK. I have very rarely - if ever - heard of any of them. Not too long ago I had my record week - eight hopefuls sent away disappointed by Tuesday morning.
It's not that I'm such a wonderful agent that people flock to mydoor, but the simple fact that I'm any kind of agent is enough. People see the UK as the folk-promised land, a good addition to their regular home-income; a place they will be welcomed because they have rarity value. Well folks, it isn't. It's no easier to make a living here than it is in your own country. Being foreign is no guarantee that our folk audiences will find you exotic and therefore attractive. We have lots of great foreign artists touring here. It's already a crowded market. You need to be a cut above (actually you need to be three cuts above) and you need to be sufficiently different from the crowd.
Sorry if that's hard news to take.
Even if you've achieved any kind of status in your own country don't assume you can transfer that status here. Oh yeah, sure, if you have a big record company behind you and can afford a publicity campaign and major advertising to soften up the market for a big-push high-profile album release... maybe... If that's the case you're not the artists I'm talking to. Goodbye and good luck to you.
For the rest of you, trying to slog it out the hard way with self-managed tours and no recording deals or with only small Indie deals that come without a touring budget attached... you need to know that first tours over here invariably don't make money. If you're lucky they'll cover their costs. Second tours (if you get that far) hopefully do cover their costs and by the fourth tour you might be actually coming out ahead on the deal. And this is presuming that you've done everything right and made a commitment to winning over UK fans the hard way - with talent, hard work and diligence in building up your mailing list.
Agents:
We're a fickle bunch. For some reason we have an aversion to taking on new acts that are going to be very hard work to break into the market. Go figure! When we do take on an unknown act they have to have someting really special going for them. Are you really that special?
Lead time:
Folk clubs are booking further and further ahead. You need a minimum of 15 months lead time to prepare the ground. As I write it's July 2008 and I know some clubs have already booked up the whole of 2009 while only a few others are still finishing booking the autumn of 2008. Arts centres tend to book a season ahead (but sometimes more). Festivals mostly start booking in September for the following summer (but some book their headliners more than a year in advance). Touring schemes book January to March for September the same year to June the following.
I've lost count of the number of emails that arrive in February or March from bands wanting to tour in the summer of the same year. TOO LATE!
Venues:
Festivals: absolutely the best introduction to the British folk audience. A great shopwindow for your talents and you (probably) get paid for it as well... but... please be aware our festivals differ from North American and (many) Australian ones. Out festivals do NOT feed performers. You'll be expected to fend for yourselves. While they provide accommodation it's not likely to be all in one hotel with organised artists' get togethers in the wee small hours. Some festivals are town-based with many small venues, so you're not always playing to big audiences. Unlike many North American festivals the whole event doesn't close down to one main stage at night so you may be playing a concert opposite popular artists in other venues. UK workshops are teaching sessions, not multiple-musicians-sharing-a-stage-to-see-what-happens. BUT - a caveat - festivals seem to be spending megabucks on big names that sell tickets and are reluctant to pay high fees for unproven acts. They'll likely only offer you peanuts on your first visit unless you sell yourself well.
Folk clubs: are mostly small (sometimes only thirty people in the audience, though occasionally up to sixty or seventy) and ticket prices are low (£4 to £6 or £7) so work out what they might be able to pay you after expenses. Yeah, right! You should remember to negotiate accommodation as part of the deal. It will often be with the organisers so remember to tell them if you're allergic to cats etc.
Arts centres: have a little more leeway because they sometimes have an arts subsidy to take new and emerging acts, but they often don't get huge audiences (though ticket prices may be a little higher). It's only a small proportion of arts centres that take folk acts and disappointlingly some of those don't seem to know how to promote them. Most arts centres don't provide accommodation. Remember to book your own.
Theatres: are a much harder market to break in to because they tend not to take too many ome-might events and will often only book unproven acts on a percentage of the door with no basic minimum guarantee. I've had some acts earn as little asunder a hundred pounds from a theatre gig which was badly promoted by a theatre that understood little about reaching the folk community. On the other hand, for artists with an established following, small theatres can be a good move.
Village halls: Nice work if you can get it. Many village hall gigs are administered by forty or fifty rural touring schemes spread across the country. They provide a subsisdy for community venues but the downside is that they are the gatekeepers. They choose which acts to 'tour' (usually in the early spring for the coming year Autumn to Spring) and then they reserve maybe four or five consecutive dates for their area at an agreed fee. At this point you are usually rubbing your hands together with glee at the idea of five gigs in a row. But as the deadline for their confirmation approaches and you haven't heard you begin to get twitchy. Sometimes it's OK, all the dates are 'sold'. Other times two out of the five might be sold. In a few cases none are sold and you are left with an embarrassing gap in your tour which it's too late to fill.
Work Permits
Yes you need a work permit if you are being paid for gigs in the UK. Only a recognised agent can apply for a work permit on your behalf, so even if you arrange your own tour you might need to pay an agent to apply for your permit. Some agents have found this is more trouble than it's worth, other agents will do it, but will always charge a fee on top of the disbursement to the UK government (currently £190 per application). For the record, I will apply for a work permit for people not on my agency books as long as you've not had any previous work permit refusals or brushes with the law, but I charge an admin fee because the work is time consuming and boring. In autumn 2008 the work permit system is changing, watch this space. It shouldn't make it any more difficult, but the application process will be different from an admin point of view and charges may change. Hopefully it won't make it more difficult. At the moment the application process is pretty quick and though there's a lot of careful form-filling to be done, it's not usually the nightmare that applying for American work permits can be.
Foreign Entertainers' Taxation
Any gigs that pay more than £1,000 oblige the venues to withhold UK tax unless you've applied for an exemption to the Foreign Entertainers Unit of the Inland Revenue (giving a clear tour budget with income and expenditure). There are tax threshholds which differ depending on your country of origin. Canadians, for instance, can earn approximately £6,000 (per individual) in any one UK tax year (profit, after expenses) before they have to pay UK tax, but Americans have no such limit and pay tax from the get-go if earning more than £1,000 per gig. If you do have to pay UK tax you should get all the relevant paperwork so you can claim it as tax paid in your own country when you come to do your own tax returns at the end of the year.
Foreign Entertainers Unit, Inland Revenue,
St John's House Unit 401
Merton Road
Bootle
L69 9BB
+ 44 151 472 6488
Words of caution about UK touring logistics
So you manage to book yourselves a tour or find an agent to book one for you... what do you need to be aware of?
Vehicle rental. You can get decent deals on small cars by renring at the airport, but if you want to rent a vehicle big enough to carry a band plus instruments be prepared to pay through the nose. Also be prepared for companies to refuse you if you are a musician as it doubles their insurance costs (or invalidates their insurance altogether). You might consider renting a commercial van. Note this is a vehicle that's likely to have been on hire to a builder or a delivery company the previous week, so don't think 'van' in USian terms, We call those 7- seater big-car things 'people carriers' in the UK. By van I mean something with three seats across the front and load carrying (windowless) space at the back, notably a Ford Transit type of vehicle.
Yes the UK is small but the nature of the folk club circuit means you'll have to zig-zag back and forth a fair bit if you want to do a decent number of gigs and that means high mileage. If you think US and Canadian gas prices are high, you'll have a heart attack at UK prices. I'm not going to tell you what they are because they change too often to quote, but google and be amazed.
Accommodation is a lot more expensive here than the average American Super-8 etc. and you only get one (double) bed and possibly a couch-bed in most roadside motel rooms.
Food is also a lot more expensive here. Expect pound for dollar on a roadside diner menu, so maybe more than £7.00 for an American Breakfast in a Little Chef and by the time you've added a drink to that you have no change from £10.00 per person - for a skimpy plateful that you'd send back as inadequate if it was served up in the States.
CDs are more expensive. This is about the only thing that works in your favour, which is a good job because you have to make up for the cost of shipping. Sell your CDs here for £12 or £13. Sell them for less and people wonder what's wrong with them.
If you ship CDs ahead note that your recipient will be charged customs duty equivalent to an administrative charge plus 17.5% VAT on the declared value of the goods plus the value of the shipping but only if the consignment is declared at £18 or over. If you declare the retail value of your CDs your recipient will have to pay a fortune or refuse the package and let it find it's way back to you over a period of weeks by slow-boat. The trick is to send smaller packages and to declare the cost of CDs at the factory prices, i.e. no more than a dollar apiece or less.
Am I trying to put you off?
Yes.
Because I want you to really think about this. Can you make it pay? Have you got what it takes? Are you sufficiently different? Are you willing to stick with it beyond the first few loss-leader tours? Can you afford this new venture if it loses money? Do you want it badly enough to work for it?
If the answer to all of the above - after suitable soul searching - is still a genuine yes, then good luck to you.