Four top tips for getting the best out of your band

As agents, we're not really meant to let on that the musicians who make up our bands are mortals, prone like the rest of us to coughs, colds and Covid, sleepless nights and screaming kids, breakups and breakdowns (hopefully mostly the mechanical kind!) We want you to believe they're superhuman, that their energy and technique will shine through any challenge... and to a point that's true. If there's one thing every pro musician I've met has in common, it's resilience – and oh my goodness, they need it! After the years of practise, persistence and self-promotion it takes to rise to the top, come the ravages of an international touring schedule combined with perfection-demanding session and studio work, composing, arranging, teaching, and private gigs like ours (everyone's favourite, of course ??) - all required to piece together an income in this exhilarating, exhausting industry. It's a wonder even the hardiest can deliver consistent high-energy performances over a decades-long career.?

Yet by and large they do. I'm not saying any of this to worry you, and day-to-day I've learned not to worry myself, knowing what top pro performers (and my office firefighting squad, where needed) are capable of on the day. Miraculously, not once in 16 years over thousands of bookings have we delivered an incomplete band for an event. I say this with a little pride because I've been the one on the phone at 7am on a Saturday replacing that drummer-in-crisis (and at 2am the next morning pushing the new one's four-by-four out of a waterlogged field!)... but also with incredulity, at the sheer transformation I've occasionally witnessed between the people who've arrived for sound check and those five hours later who've strutted out on stage.?

As a booker, there are some simple steps you can take to greatly ease that transformation, and unlock the fully charged versions of your band's most superhuman selves. I can't tell you what a difference these things make on the day, and the sheer gratitude all of us feel when they're done right! You may even be rewarded with some cunningly concealed disco puns along the way.

1. The band room

Among the band rooms we've spent our afternoons and evenings in: windowless cellars, unheated marquees in frozen Norfolk fields, and on one particularly memorable occasion, an actual greenhouse in Sicily in August (40 degrees). Don’t get me wrong, most band rooms are somewhere between fine and lovely. We're not prima donnas, I promise! We know many of the places we play don't come with built-in band facilities, and that if you're getting married in a marquee in your garden you'll probably be putting us up in a room in your home – that's absolutely fine. As long as there's enough space and ideally comfy seating, heating or air con (delete as appropriate), and if humanly possible some natural light, morale will be high. If meanwhile we’ve squinted, shivered or boiled our way through the past 6 hours, it may take a song or two for the sweaty sheen to ignite into a disco inferno!

2. The directions

Sadly as it stands, orienteering isn't part of the music college curriculum, while a thorough preparation for rural wedding gigs would take up most of the third year. There’s no overstating how many times we’ve lost half our sound check to the likes of a guitarist frantically circling a Cotswold village, hunting for a marquee the sign to which blew away half an hour before. In one case, we discovered on arrival that our client’s production company had completed setup at the wrong Italian venue 2 hours from where they were needed! In fact, it was this that prompted my dear friend and LMI’s founder Chris to come up with what3words, an app that expresses locations to 3x3m accuracy using 3 simple randomised words – seriously, download it. Download it now! what3words.com. I promise I’m not getting any kickbacks (it’s free!) ?? – this thing’s saved our bacon more times than I can count. Sharing the exact locations of your parking, loading and access entrances in advance for our musician schedules is by far the best way we’ve found to make sure the band are lost in music, and not in a neighbouring field.

3. The food

A band plays on its stomach, to poorly coin a phrase. If I had to pick the single tip of these that makes the biggest difference, it would be the food. Our riders come with a slightly draconian paragraph stipulating (among other things) no sandwich dinners, no microwave meals, no side salads doubling as vegan mains, no deep-fried options… but honestly the simple rule of thumb is, could you eat it yourself and then dance and sing for 2 straight hours? I so often get the same reaction from our bookers when we come to chat it through – “wow, you’re so much nicer on the phone!” ??. In reality, all we’re asking is that everyone gets a decent hot meal, large enough for a healthy appetite on a hard-working day, which won’t leave our singers horribly bloated or gasping for air, and which matches the dietaries we’ve shared. Believe it or not, that’s a big one: twice last year alone I was confidently assured a cheddar-topped lasagne was the vegan option. Navigating the minefield of event catering for those with IBS or allergies is harder still – and let’s be honest, it’s a bit of a tragedy when you should be dancing but instead you’re just focused on stayin’ alive!

4. Managing delays

Delays happen. We know how it goes – if the father of the bride decides to head off-piste and speeches overrun an hour, we’ll adjust. Sometimes we’ll have pre-agreed a hard cut-off, for example if we’re driving home late and aren’t staying locally, but often we’ll have built in plenty of contingency with you at the planning stage. All I’d ask is that you help us managing our pacing. If it’s becoming clear an hour before stage time that we’re at least half an hour behind, we hugely appreciate being told before the ladies have their heels on and lips freshly glossed for stage. Even the most seasoned performers have a self-hype routine, and the yoyo of pushbacks is tiring – all the more so if we’re already side of stage with nowhere to sit and hours on our feet ahead. We'd much rather know it's an hour than be told 15 minutes 4 times ??. When you wanna be startin’ something, ain’t nobody like being told to stop right now, thank you very much (I’m so sorry…)

For our part, whichever of our team is out with the band on the day, we’ll do our absolute best to support you when you’re running around like a headless chicken with 200 guests and countless other suppliers all nipping at your heels. We send a rep on most of our live band shows so that both you and the musicians can relax and enjoy, and a big but unspoken part of that is bringing our own energy and enthusiasm – infectious enough (we hope!) that a snivel and a bad night’s sleep feel a million miles away by the time the lights go up. There’s no point pretending bad days don’t exist, but it’s amazing how they absorb into everyone else’s good ones, and that’s why we go that extra mile, to weight those odds forever in your favour.?