by Serguey Shinder
We left at ten in the morning in a hired van for a city three and a half hours away, sat in traffic outside Birmingham for fifty minutes, loaded in at five, got a soundcheck that was scheduled for half an hour and turned into fifteen minutes, ate chips, waited, and went on at twenty to ten to about seventy people. We played for thirty five minutes. We loaded out, settled up, drove home and I got in at twenty to three in the morning.
The fee was a hundred and twenty pounds between four of us. The van was ninety five and the fuel was about sixty.
We did eighteen of those in 2014, and when anybody asked, that is exactly how we described it. Eighteen shows. It sounded like a year of work, and it was said with some pride, and the number was true.
The drummer's partner is a nurse and thinks in shifts. Sitting in a pub after one of them she asked, not unkindly, how many hours a gig actually took. Nobody had ever counted. Door to door it was about fourteen. Eighteen of those is two hundred and fifty hours, on top of Tuesday rehearsals, which was another two hundred.
Once the hours were written down, the sorting was easy and slightly painful. Three of the eighteen were worth the day. A festival slot in the afternoon that put us in front of four hundred people who had not come for us. A support on a tour that got us two hundred and thirty new listeners in a week. A hometown night that sold out and paid properly. The other fifteen were the same fourteen hours for a fraction of that, and several of them we had taken because somebody asked and saying yes felt like being a working band.
We played seven the next year. Further apart, further away, better chosen, and we wrote most of two records in the hours we got back.
What had gone wrong was the unit. We counted gigs, because a gig is the thing that appears on a poster and the thing you tell people about. We spent days. When the unit you count and the unit you spend are different, the gap between them fills up with activity that is perfectly real and does not add up to anything, and no amount of working harder inside that gap will close it.
I have found the same mismatch at work more times than I can count. Features shipped against weeks lived. Meetings attended against mornings surrendered. Tickets closed against the fortnight it actually took. The remedy is dull and it works, which is to write down, once, what the thing costs in the currency you are genuinely paying in, and then look at the list again.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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