Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 16
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 16: Billiards Balls in a Sock and a Squirrel in the Attic.
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
We need to talk about that most unlikely of things when discussing the topic of grassroots music venues. We need to talk about money.
The first email footer I ever saw was penned by Tim from York Fibbers who, in about 1994, sent me an email which contained the following statement in quotation marks just after his signature:
“How do you make a million pounds running a small music venue? Start with £2 million”
If you’ve read through everything so far in this book and made it to this chapter then you should already be very aware that there is literally no money at all in running a grassroots music venue. We had opened ours in an almost deliberately belligerent and contrarian act of self harm despite the obvious financial predicament it would place us into. The entire budget for opening the Holy Toilet wouldn’t buy you an amp to power the on stage monitors these days. Slabs of concrete, breeze blocks and acres of bricks were removed from the building on literally no budget at all. Don’t ask me where it all went, Alt-Lovejoy would just load them into the back of his car and they would disappear. Between the day it opened and 1998 I’m guessing that in total myself and Mr Handsome probably paid ourselves in the region of £10,000. Not per year, for the whole five year period.
Obviously you can’t live off £2000 a year, paid sporadically whenever the event actually breaks even, then sometimes paid back again when the next show loses money. Visits to a cash point were a relatively common occurrence at the end of an evening, with the hope that when the bar money was paid into the bank on a Monday morning there might be enough of it to get back the wad of cash you’d just handed to a tour manager. It’s super important to understand that this was not because we were really bad at running a music venue. In fact, precisely the opposite. We were now experts in making the unlikeliest of shows much busier than anyone could possibly have expected it to be, in getting acts that you wouldn’t think would play there to perform, in persuading customers to spend that extra £5 note at the bar. We were maxing out every available income source and maximising the use of the space beyond anything that could reasonably be expected from a former toilet on a common in Tunbridge Wells. There just wasn’t any money in it.
Partly this derives from the nature of the whole exercise. No one except a massive fool has ever started a grassroots music venue to make themselves rich. They are exclusively started by people who have a hellbent dedication to putting on live music in their community, and we were prime examples of this passion. Part of that attitude intrinsically acts against any concept of making a profit. Any money we raised could always be put towards another event, or a better lighting rig, or a new piece of equipment, or making the space available for rehearsals, or helping someone making a video. We didn’t approach any of those things from a commercial view point. We never worked out how much electricity might be consumed by allowing someone to practice in the middle of the venue for ten hours. That would have been against the whole spirit of the thing we had created. We didn’t check if a promoter with a great new idea would get anyone else to agree with them about it, we just handed over a date and grinned at the poster. We would carry on grinning even if the audience that turned up consisted entirely of us and the promoter and the band provided that the event had an artistic vision we thought should be happening.
It’s often said that independent promoters and independent venue operators are very similar and have similar issues, and much of that is true in terms of the motivations for doing it. Where it really starts to divide apart, though, is the level of responsibility that the stewardship of the building imparts on the venue operator that doesn’t fall on the promoter. Irrespective of whether you are open or not, if you run the building you have to pay the rent. And the rates, and the water, electric, gas, staff etc. If you open only once a week, you can’t write to the landlord and offer one seventh of the rent. You can’t phone up the local authority and explain that the whippet juggling trio you booked last night really didn’t work out and would it be okay if you didn’t pay the rates this month. The building we so much wanted to open was now a major lodestone around our necks which meant we had to be open pretty much all the time, but the operating profit margin was close to zero. The more days we were open the more opportunity there was to be able to meet all the fixed costs, but also the more money we paid out to everyone else except ourselves. In the year we presented seventeen artists who went on to have top ten albums, the people who sat at the door and took the tickets earned more from the venue than either of us who were apparently running it.
Realising this, in 1998 I started treating slightly more seriously the sporadic calls I had been getting asking if I wanted a job. I started promoting as a sideline in London, where entrance fees were higher and the margins were therefore better, working with Mr Cynical - a long in the tooth and short on tolerance chap whose healthy attitude towards the various demands of artists, promoters, agents and managers can best be summed up as ‘never mind that, where’s my fucking money?’. You can learn a lot about how the music industry actually works by hanging around with a Mr Cynical, including the correct point of the evening at which to start laughing as you count the money and at which to declare that ‘everything is fucked’.
First launched as the newly developed Camden Lock's flagship venue in the summer of 1973, Dingwalls, so called after the original owner T.E. Dingwall whose name is still painted in fifteen foot high letters on the outside of the building, had established its reputation for live music in the 1970s when Kilburn and the High Roads, an early incarnation of the talents of Ian Dury, had been the house band. I had been stumbling around its dark interior since the early 1980s, when Lemmy used to occasionally prop up the bar and I once saw REM put in a set that looked like they would rather be anywhere else. Mr Cynical had somehow acquired the rights to the diary, and was busy filling it with all sorts of weird and wonderful nights out, Based on my ability to stay up later than everyone else, and my entirely unearned reputation for being ‘the bloke that spotted Oasis’, he has invited me to do some co-promoting using the venue for anything I get offered that looks like we can make a bit of money out of it.
One night we find ourselves co-promoting the Standing Stones book tour of the former front cover star of Smash Hits Julian Cope, who these days has taken a turn for the mystical and borderline deranged. My role starts with the booking, having been a huge fan since the Teardrop Explodes days, and concludes, I initially believe, with fulfilling the rider demands. These demands start with the capital letters, right at the very top of the page, NO MEAT OR MEAT PRODUCTS ARE TO BE ALLOWED IN THE DRESSING ROOM 24 HOURS PRIOR TO PERFORMANCE. This demand is much more difficult to achieve than you might expect, because the Dingwalls dressing room is basically one very large cupboard with a slightly smaller cupboard on the side of it. Nevertheless, I spray some air freshener about, empty some mouldy bits of ham from last night from the bin, and lay out a client friendly spread of fruit, nibbles and hummus.
Myself and Mr Cynical are sitting in the smaller of the two ‘rooms’ forgetfully knocking back bacon sandwiches when the artist arrives at 5pm. Our attention is immediately demanded with the rallying cry of ‘I smell MEAT’ which emanates from next door, so I wipe away the ketchup and pop in to see what’s going on. Julian is stood on a chair in the middle of the room pointing in various directions shouting ‘Meat! Over there! Meat! I smell Meat!’ He points directly at me, takes in a long breath, then through his gritted teeth commands ‘Leave now, meat eater’. We take our bacon sandwiches outside and hide. Just before doors, I decide I’d better check in that everything is okay with Julian. I knock on the door but there’s no response. Then a white envelope appears underneath the door with ‘Open This and Follow the Instructions’ written on it. I rip it open. Inside is a carefully plotted out introduction which Mr Cope will require me to stand on stage and deliver to the assembled audience prior to his entrance. It goes as follows:
“Ladies, Gentlemen, Droogs, Dudes and Druids, please welcome The Arch Druid, The Seer of all things hidden, he has travelled the length and breadth of Albion to be here with you tonight, insanity and sanity are frankincense and myrrh, the edges fuzz, as this life fades, a century with no decades, oblivion, a past life blur, a past life passed, a new life peeling, altitude or scrape the ceiling, don’t derange but don’t defer, look happy but try not to purr, try not to kissssssss (long and drawn out here please), each moment of bliss (pop the ‘B’ of bliss conclude with a hiss), stand up, prepare to be amazed, be ready to be dazed, with the least of fuss and of bother, he who dares to know the Mother…. Julian Cope”
Mr Cynical and I draw straws. I lose and am despatched in front of 400 people waiting to find out what the hell this evening is all about to see how much of this I can get through before the bottles start flying. About half was the answer.
My new entrepreneurial attitude towards live music is not limited to hanging about with Mr Cynical. After my agent acquaintance Red Until I Die puts my name forward, I am also contracted to book the line up at The Alleycat, a new incarnation of a venue in the centre of Reading which seems to have undergone fairly regular reinvention. It is now run by a very weird mix of three people who I’m going to categorise as Failed Rock Star, Army Corporal, and Poundshop Gangster.
Failed Rock Star runs a local studio from which no bands of any note have ever emerged with any recording which has ever troubled the wallets of any paying members of the public. His big claim to fame is that he was briefly the drummer in Mungo Jerry, a group that had produced a couple of novelty hits in the early 70s, about fifteen years before he would occupy their drum stool for a summer season.
Army Corporal was an excitable, barking out orders type chap who had retired, or quite possibly been dismissed, from some division of the armed forces and for reasons known only to himself had decided his next logical move was the acquisition of a music venue/night club. He wanted everything run with military precision, his favourite pursuit being the creation of post it notes and wall pinned instructions with highly detailed, but incredibly unlikely, timings, which he felt would result in a smooth running show. Instead of ‘Doors at 8pm, first band 8.30, headline 9.30’ Reading Alleycat time sheets would start at 6.30pm with instructions of who should unlock which door, then pass through ‘8.23pm, support act to prepare for call to stage, 8.25pm support act called to stage, 8.28pm pedals and leads to be checked and confirmed for usability, 8.30pm first song to commence’.
In charge of these two, or possibly just engaged in some clever scheme to rip them both off, was Poundshop Gangster. I like to think I’m a reasonably equal opportunities, empathetic, sympathetic sort of individual, inclined to give most people, whatever their ability, or lack thereof, the time of day. But Poundshop Gangster was one of the most profoundly stupid people I ever met, a man you would not trust to tie his own shoelaces without an Emergency Vehicle on standby. He eats with his mouth open and talks with it closed. When you ask him a question it can take a full minute before he replies, 60 seconds in which, if you watch closely, you can see brain cells trying to align themselves into a group electronically connected enough to issue something that sounds like words through that hole in his face.
Somehow these three have formed at least four companies, one of which has contracted me to book the bands they need. For this work I am to be paid the princely sum of £250 a week, a relative King’s ransom, about five times the amount I am paying myself to work at my own venue. Army Corporal takes me aside to confirm that on the first week I should bill the company who have issued me the contract, but on the second week should invoice a different company, then week three the first one again, but on week four a third company. It is, he explains, a tax management plan designed by Poundshop Gangster. This is easy to believe, because every time I give the world’s stupidest man an invoice he gives me £250 in cash from the till and throws it away. Into this venue I start booking a second show for everyone who is already playing at the Holy Toilet the night before or after, pausing only occasionally to up the ante a bit by getting a Blur underplay.
I’ve been doing the venue game for a fair while now, and it is pretty easy to spot that the Alleycat is doing something very very odd with its accounts. Everyone seems to be being paid in cash, even on nights when there’s no one in there, and all sorts of things keep going missing. Like, on one weekend, the mixing desk and three of the monitors. Various people from various services or acts keep turning up saying they haven’t been paid when the books say they have, or even, on one occasion, the singer asking for the fee just after I’d seen the bass player pocket £100 from Poundshop Gangster. There’s a lot of cash around. I mean…. a lot. Acts you would always pay by transfer or in advance by cheque were suddenly being handed wads of crisp notes that appeared out of nowhere.
One night I am asked to pay Mark E Smith in cash, £4000, for what might loosely be described as a Fall show - he had sacked the band the night before but still managed to find four new people on the day hanging around Reading somewhere. These new four musicians had been instructed to play the E chord for forty five minutes while he shouted some Fall lyrics over the top of it, a successful attempt to fulfill the very basic limits of his contractual obligations and thereby access the fee. Paying Mark, which I would do several times, involves repeatedly counting the money until he loses track. This normally occurs somewhere just about when you’re halfway through it, requiring you to attempt it over and over again while he smokes a cigarette at you. After ten or so counts, lasting six or seven smokes, we eventually we make it all the way to £4,000, whereupon Mark E Smith picks the money up, stuffs half of it down the front of his trousers and then proceeds to start hitting me round the head with the rest of it. I tried scarpering away out of reach, but he was a remarkably fast runner. Another night Shane MacGowan gets £5,000 in cash from me, then Poundshop Gangster pays him again. I don’t recommend frisking upstanding and highly respected members of the Irish community while accusing them of having ripped you off, but sure enough he did have £5,000 stuffed up each trouser leg.
The money swirling about can’t hide the fact that the venue isn’t making any profit. The turnover of staff is absolutely insane, with people rarely making even a second shift as a bar staff, let alone a venue manager. To make sure my own money is secure I start making a once a week appearance at the biggest show, but even that cannot stop the inevitable drift towards them owing me two weeks money, then three, then four. I keep booking acts hoping things will change, but the whole operation seems like its not actually a music venue at all but more like some sort of clever front for the Bank of England to give away freshly printed notes.
One night I’m driving back from Reading towards East London through driving rain when the phone chirrups and it’s a message from Mr Handsome at The Forum. The messages just says “Urgent Squirrels Come down now” so I re-route and arrive at the venue just as it’s closing. Mr Handsome and a group of his acolytes are gathered together in a small room to the rear of the stage, home of the amplifiers which power the front of house system. The room is filled with buckets and receptacles of various sizes, almost all of which are full to bursting with the water which is gushing through one big hole and about twenty smaller cracks in the ceiling.
“Squirrels” says Mr Handsome, pointing upwards. This apparently unrelated announcement of the colloquial name of the species Sciurus Carolinensis turns out to be not such a sidebar to the situation as it first seems, when I catch sight of a whole pack of the buggers leaping about in the hole. “Squirrels” intones Mr H for clarity “have eaten through the roof and built a nest in the ceiling.”
The event that evening has only avoided being cancelled by a rota of people emptying buckets out of the back door to protect the amps underneath. This is a much less comical situation than it might initially appear to be. There’s no money in the account, the hole in the roof is the size of small coffee table, and the building is, incredibly, listed because of of its location and age. The orange arch-shaped tiles that make up the roof of the old toilet are difficult to source and extraordinarily expensive. And we are going to need about fifty of them.
The next morning we ask The Punk Singer, who as a sideline from shouting about his hatred of people also does roof repairs, to take a look and he brings us the bad news. He can do it, and he will do it, without labour charges, totally free, borrowing the scaffolding and using bits and pieces from other jobs to patch together the structure so that the tiles can be placed on top of it. He also offers to ‘get the squirrels’ which we decide to believe means he will hopefully find a new home they can call their own. What he cannot do, however, is get us the tiles for anything less than the trade market price, and that will be seven thousand pounds. Which is approximately £6995 more than we have.
We phone round everyone we know to see if anyone can lend us the money, but we aren’t being very successful owing to the significant obstacle that we have no idea how we would ever pay it back. By chance, one of those calls is to the Legal Beagle, who I phone more to commiserate with than in any expectation that he is a secret philanthropist millionaire who either loves live music or hates squirrels.
“Well, hang on” he says “that’s not your job”. And he’s right.
One of the advantages of casting a net wide and far when forming friendship groups is that your close circle of acquaintances will include people of varying professions, skills and experience. In this case my generosity in letting the Legal Beagle air his teenage frustrations by briefly being the singer of Royal Tunbridge Wells’ second most offensive punk act some 15 years earlier is about to be repaid in spades. The Legal Beagle had handled the original tenancy acquisition of the Holy Toilet, and unbeknownst to us, because we’d never bothered to read it, had inserted into the initial draft the clause that the Landlord, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council, would have a full repairing obligation for the exterior of the building, including, and especially, the roof. I believe he he had noticed it was made out of the sort of stuff that if ever squirrels ate through it would be really costly to replace. As a result of this piece of excellent lawyering, it is not our job to fix the hole. It is theirs. So the Legal Beagle phones them up and tells them that, indicating that the venue can’t open until they do the work.
For those unfamiliar with the weird internal workings of a local authority, prepare to do some very fast learning. The council are obliged to repair the roof and are liable for any damage done to the fixtures and fittings, and any loss of business, until they do. We can’t open because rain isn’t compatible with electricity and we are going to need rather a lot of that to put the bands on. Because it manages a number of buildings, some of which are not even disused toilets that someone has turned into a music venue, the council has a set of approved contractors to carry out repair work. One of these approved contractors will be with us by tomorrow morning, because if they don’t do it quick us being closed will cost more than them repairing the roof. Or at least, that’s what we think is going to happen.
The status of being an ‘approved contractor’ for a local authority is, and it’s my story I’m telling so I can say what I like, the biggest licence to print money I think I’ve ever heard of. Tunbridge Wells Borough Council, in 1998, has precisely one approved roofing contractor, the only company who it can legally employ to carry out the repair. The commercial market being rather reliant on competition, this roofing contractor arrives in a Bentley, takes one look at the hole, whistles through his teeth, then pronounces that he can start right away. But it will cost… prepare for that learning experience… £110,000.
After we finish rolling around on the floor laughing at the audacity of the price, we politely inform the Bentley driving con artist that this is no problem for us, since our lease says TWBC will be paying for it. So he drives away, submits his quote to them, and everything goes quiet for a bit. The Legal Beagle is having none of it, and starts phoning them on the hour every hour seeking the time and date on which the work will commence. He start sending them invoices for us being closed, although we really wanted to see Wilko Johnson, Coldplay and Snow Patrol, so we’d just carried on chucking buckets of water out the back door to make those shows happen. Finally, after about two weeks, the CEO of TWBC sends us a letter indicating that they can’t afford to fix the hole, so we would be prepared to buy the building to get them out of the obligation to do so?
The rent of a building is one of the fixed costs that venue operators struggle the most to cover. 93% of the venues in the UK are tenants, and this means they are constantly under pressure to do things that raise money to keep the landlord happy and not things they think they really should do because they are culturally important. Or just really good fun. We had never considered buying a building to house a venue, not least because we rightly believed that if we went to a bank and asked them for a mortgage to do so they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves laughing in our faces. Hindered only by the certainty that it wouldn’t be possible for us to actually get a mortgage, the Legal Beagle nonetheless asks them how much they want, so they send down a valuer and then tell us it will be £188,000. In case you’re wondering, that’s an incredibly cheap price for a unique piece of land on a common in Tunbridge Wells, much less than we thought it would be. It’s still £188,000 more than we’ve got, but at least we know how far away from being able to do it we are now.
It is at this point that the Legal Beagle, ex singer of Jez and the Ejaculations, a man with a tendency towards the unsafe use of matches in inappropriate locations, whom I had once pulled out of Dunorlan Park lake at 3am after his particularly close encounter with the entire range of Merrydown Cider products, does the single most significant thing any one individual has done in the thirty year history since the opening of Tunbridge Wells Forum. The result of this one action will echo across the next 25 years, meaning that The Forum is still there, still open, still standing, long after other venues in more sensible buildings run by more sensible people, are long gone. He picks up the phone, calls the CEO of TWBC, and offers him £78,000. His justification for this audacious move is that immediately after we buy it we will need to spend £110,000 getting the roof repaired. He goes on to explain that this is our final offer, that we won’t give up the lease, that our losses are running at £5,000 a week and will continue to do so until the hole is repaired, and that he has the phone number of the local ombudsman who he can call up to explain how TWBC are treating its tenant if needed.
24 hours later Tunbridge Wells Borough Council offer to sell us a 999 year lease to the old toilet block on the common for £78,000. Even our bank manager, who regards us as only slightly better customers than a full blown criminal gang, can work out that this is the deal of a lifetime. Papers are signed, financial checks are run, and within a week we have agreed to buy the Forum and be responsible for the hole in the roof and the squirrels. We agree with the bank manager, who suddenly finds us to be a much more agreeable client, that we will borrow £85,000, so we phone the Punk Singer up, and for £7,000 he agrees to take care of both the hole and the causes of the hole. The following week we see he’s added a collection of bushy tails to the wing mirror of his Harley Davidson but we choose not to ask any awkward questions about the origins of the furry attachments.
We are now in the almost unique position of being able to imagine a long term future for the club. We have a ten year mortgage, and there is a date on which we will own the venue out right and never have to pay anyone to rent it ever again. The mortgage payments, even including the resolution of the hole and the squirrels, are less rent than we have been paying, which means that an unlikely small margin of profit has opened up. Obviously we immediately fritter it away on a new lighting desk; it’s a small venue, there’s always something better to spend money on than filling your own wallet.
Meanwhile, back at the Alleycat, there has been a terrible turn of events for Poundshop Gangster. Apparently, while carrying all the money taken at the venue during the last two weeks, in cash, in two big holdalls, which I am choosing to imagine he had decorated with the slogan “£ cash inside”, he has been mugged on the driveway to his house and badly beaten in the process. We are all told not to worry, the venue is making a large insurance claim and as soon as the money is paid out we will all be brought up to date for salaries due and invoices unpaid. The Police and the insurance company begin investigating, but while they are doing so my very good friend Big Paul sends me an email with a link to an insolvency company listing the intention of Army Corporal and Failed Rock Star to shut the venue down. I call up Mr Cynical, we move all the upcoming shows, including Marillion and Faithless, to Reading University, get Big Paul to run them for usand I issue a small claims through the local court to get ahead of the inevitable outcome of the three of them becoming suddenly difficult to contact.
Unbeknownst to Poundshop Gangster, his neighbours across the road have CCTV pointed at their driveway. On inspection of the footage of the night in question Reading Police are surprised to discover that in the background of the otherwise sedate scene of the car parked in front of their house, the residents have unwittingly captured the image of the Poundshop Gangster, who can be clearly seen emerging from the driver’s seat of his car armed with a sock containing five billiard balls. Looking up and down the road to check he is unwatched, Poundshop Gangster has proceeded to lay down in his drive and then smash himself repeatedly about the upper body, including the face, with the sock.
There will be no payout, and my invoices will never be settled. The Alleycats slunk away into the night and the Poundshop Gangster checked himself out of hospital and vanished.
Did I mention that he wasn’t very bright?
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here:
Best chapter yet!