I wrote
a piece for BandMembersDayJobs about what it's like to be in a band in your mid-20s. I'll post the entire thing, but it's really worth looking at the
rest of the blog too. When I'm at these little DIY shows watching out-of-town bands, it helps me think about what they're giving up to be there.
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There are four of us, all working on relatively low rungs in the employment ladder. I’m casual member of staff at a local arts centre, which is wonderfully flexible and good in a lot of ways. It’s not, however, a career. People have only so much time, effort and money, and after you’ve spent most of it on practices, gigs and recording, there’s little left to use pursuing work or study.
Of course this is a choice we make freely and no sympathy is required or expected. Still, as people in our mid-twenties who left student-dom behind a few years ago, we’ve found that people’s expectations of us change. Friends get graduate jobs, flats and respectable pay packets. They have lofty ambitions within their field that all of a sudden don’t seem out of reach. I, on the other hand, explain that I want to be in a punk band. People ask if you’re “signed”, or how much money you make from gigs. I say that the lucrative record deal is basically a myth, and nobody makes any money from DIY gigs. It’s not a career - but I don’t need it to be.
Perhaps we fly down the motorway in that small early evening gap between finishing work and going on stage; 100mph for 150 straight minutes in the pouring rain, feeling genuinely worried for our safety but even more scared of missing our 25 minute set. The venue isn’t really a venue at all, it’s a pub without real microphones or stands - we fashion our own from sellotape and the radio mics they use for bingo. Later we fall to sleep on somebody’s cold wooden floor.
The point is that this stuff isn’t a means to an end. It’s simply what I want to do, and I find it as rewarding as any “proper” job could be. It can just get tough to talk to people who can’t see it that way. Without quantifiable achievements, you can’t justify yourself as a person of worth. Unfortunately it’s something that’s only going to get more difficult as time goes by.
http://bandmembersdayjobs.tumblr.com/post/18842331986/nick-oakden-without-maps
