by Serguey Shinder
In March 2023 we played a Saturday in Nottingham and got back to our guitarist's house a little after two in the morning. Nobody wanted to unload in the rain, so the van stayed on the street outside, locked, with most of our gear still in it. By eight it had a broken side window and was missing two guitars, the bass amplifier, both pedalboards and a box of cables. Around six thousand four hundred pounds of equipment, some of it ten years old and impossible to replace like for like.
We were insured, or believed we were. In 2017 our drummer had found a policy for musical instruments online, we split the premium four ways every year, and none of us had read beyond the page that said what it cost. The claim was turned down within a week. Theft from an unattended vehicle was covered only between seven in the morning and nine at night, or overnight inside a locked garage. Our gear had been taken at the one time of day the policy was written to exclude, which for a band is nearly the only time the gear is ever left in a van.
The second problem surfaced at the police station. They asked for serial numbers. We had one, for the bass, because it was printed on a receipt in our bass player's email. When one of the guitars appeared on a resale site in Leicester five weeks later, we were sure it was ours from a scratch on the headstock, and could not prove it. The listing came down and the guitar went somewhere else.
What I took from it is that we had bought a premium, not cover. A policy is mostly a list of conditions, and the conditions are written around exactly the situations the insurer expects to be expensive. For a band that means vans, nights and venues, and those were precisely the parts we had never read, because the price was the only line we ever argued about.
We moved to a policy written for touring musicians, which costs about forty per cent more and covers a locked van overnight if it has an alarm, which the van now has. Before we paid, we read every exclusion out loud at a rehearsal. It took twenty minutes and was the most useful band meeting of the year. Every piece of gear is in a shared spreadsheet with its serial number, photographs of the instrument and of anything distinctive about it, and the receipt where one exists. And at the end of a night the gear comes indoors, whoever's house it is and whatever the weather.
An insurance policy is mostly a list of the nights it will not cover. We had only ever read the line that told us what it cost.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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