Band: Neuronspoiler (facebook.com/Neuronspoiler)
Where: Brighton/Bristol
ED: It's been a while since I posted on WPE, the reason being I had nothing to post, so thank you to Tim for this nice surprise in my inbox today. Remember, WPE is YOUR blog, I'm just the guy who publishes the stories whilst sitting in bed eating Cheesestrings (yes, that is happening right now for the record). So long as your story is about a shit promoter and you can put a few dozen sentences together in a grammatically correct fashion, you can post on WPE and get a nice little plug for your band too. Don't be a stranger.
There used to be a promotions company whose selling point was that they would book each band two gigs - one in their home town and then one in another town on a bill with other local acts. It was a good idea to give bands the chance to get out to other parts of the country and play to other bands' local followings. Unfortunately, when my old band, Serpent Sins worked with them, things didn't quite work out that way.
We were based in Brighton so our first gig was booked at a small but well-known venue there. When we arrived at the bar, we were surprised to see four punk bands already setting up. It turned out our gig had apparently been double booked with another promoter's night. Our promoter apologised to us and said he'd have to cancel the gig. Although this was inconvenient for us, I felt most sorry for the bill's out of town band who had travelled from Southampton for this gig. The promoter told all the bands he'd book each of us an out of town gig to make up for the mistake.
The make-up gig was set up for Bristol a few weeks later on a Sunday. On the day, we left early on the 3 hour drive and got to the venue about an hour before soundcheck, so we grabbed a table in a pub round the corner to get some food and waited. An hour later, we went round the corner to find the door still locked. Back to the pub. Another hour later it was still locked but now one of the other bands was standing there trying the door too.
After a few minutes of trying the door, a man called down to us from a window above the entrance. It was the venue's soundman who happened to live in a flat above. He asked what we were doing there and we told him about the gig. He said there was no gig scheduled that night and that he should know because he'd be doing the sound for it. He agreed to come down and let us in to the venue so we could wait there and see if the promoter showed up.
After another hour, and lots of calls to the guy's answerphone, there was still no sign of him. Between the bands and the soundman we toyed with the idea of going ahead with the gig ourselves anyway, but with the extra cost and hassle of getting bar and security staff to come in at the last minute, and no guarantee that any promotion had been done or that anyone would turn up, in the end it just wasn't worth it. So we just had to turn round for another 3 hour drive back to Brighton.
From looking at their site later, it turned out that the guy who was supposed to be in charge of our gig had actually been running a gig in Southampton the same night.
When we finally managed to contact him, he offered us another make-up gig. This time we declined.
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