by Serguey Shinder
The deal was sixty per cent of the door on eight pound tickets, and the room held a hundred and twenty. We played on a Thursday, the place felt full from where I was standing, and the settlement afterwards said fifty one paid. We were handed two hundred and forty four pounds in an envelope and we thanked them for it.
I am not going to accuse anybody of anything, because I cannot, and that is the whole point of this. We had no count. We had an impression of a full room, formed from a stage under lights, which is about the least reliable instrument available to a human being. The only number that existed was theirs.
The following week I sat down with the settlement sheet and found the gaps without needing any dishonesty to explain them. Twenty names on a guest list that had never been agreed with us. A line called industry, which appeared to mean anyone the promoter recognised. A comps column with no definition. Door staff who stopped clicking during the twenty minutes when the queue moved fastest, because the queue moving matters more to them than the tally does. And the last hour paid in cash to a person who was also collecting glasses.
So we changed one thing. When we went back to the same venue three months later, one of us stood at the door for the whole night with a clicker, and we asked for the settlement before we loaded out rather than after, and we asked in the email beforehand what counted as a comp. Ninety six paid. I do not believe the venue became more honest in twelve weeks. I believe two people were counting, and that when two counts exist the conversation at the end of the night is short and friendly, because there is nothing to negotiate.
The arguments, incidentally, were never about theft on either occasion. They were about definitions. Does a plus one count. Does the support band's family count. Is the sound engineer's fee taken off the top or after the split. Every one of those is a sentence somebody could have written down in advance and nobody did, including us.
What I took away from a Thursday night with an envelope in it is something I have since applied to contracts, to internal targets, and to every arrangement where somebody else's number decides what I get. Never accept payment on a measurement you cannot produce yourself. Not because the other side is dishonest, but because a measurement nobody checks drifts towards whoever owns the instrument, and it does so through a hundred small, defensible decisions made by tired people at eleven at night.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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