Hi everyone. Lost Evenings 8 in Edinburgh was a blast, probably the best one yet, and I’m happy and grateful that it all went so well. As is now tradition, we announced plans for next year at the end of the final night, letting you all know that the ninth instalment will happen next September in Dallas, Texas. The response to that announcement has been a little mixed, it’s fair to say. There has been some misunderstanding, a little misinformation, but also some genuine concerns, and I want to address those head on, explain my thinking, and give some reassurance.

Planning Lost Evenings is a huge undertaking for me and, more importantly, my whole team. The decision on where to hold it each year is something we spend months working through. The choice of country, city and venue is a delicate one, and we’ll never quite please everyone – that’s part of the reason why we move it around the world each year. After hitting Scotland, I wanted to take it back to the USA. We’ve done both coasts, so we thought we’d head to the middle. I love Dallas as a city, there are great transport and accommodation facilities, the venue is perfect for the occasion (which is a rare find), and overall it felt like we ticked as many boxes as we reasonably could expect.

There are other important factors to consider as well, and I want to spend a moment talking about our festival partners, The Ally Coalition. They’re an LGBTQ youth charity who we’ve been working with for many years and festivals now, and we take their input seriously when choosing a location. As it happens, Dallas has a large and thriving LGBTQ community (they’re the only city in the state with an official pride flag), and the Ally folks were extremely keen for us to bring the festival to them for 2026.

I am of course aware of some of the trends and themes in politics across the US right now and in Texas specifically. There are some concerning, infuriating and heart-breaking developments when it comes to LGBTQ, women’s and minority rights, and I would hope that my stance on those issues is clear enough, as the friend, colleague and child of trans folks, and as someone who has worked with trans rights organisations consistently and vocally for many years. My point here is that these are issues that have very much been thought through ahead of time.

The criticisms that have been raised since the announcement fall into a few different categories. Some people are concerned about travelling to Texas. I understand that completely, but I’ll let the Ally Coalition Dallas speak to this directly. Here’s what they have to say:

“I know some folks are concerned about traveling to Dallas for Lost Evenings. We would like to take a moment and explain what we’ll be doing to make sure that everyone has the safest and most fun festival yet.

To start, TAC will be there. And this year, a portion of proceeds from every ticket sold will directly go to TAC. We’ll ensure that this money stays in Texas.

In October, TAC will be giving a portion of the funds raised in Edinburgh to organisations working to support Trans Youth in Dallas and Texas as a whole. We’ll be releasing more information about that in the weeks to come.

Over the coming months, we’ll be having conversations with organisers in Dallas and across Texas, to get an understanding of specific actions Lost Evenings can take to ensure we are doing all we can to support Queer, LatinX and Female Texans.

Before the festival, we’ll also be publishing a guide to the greater Dallas area that includes LGBTQ friendly third spaces, like record shops, cafes, bars, and of course, tattoo parlours. Dallas has a strong LGBTQ Community, and I am excited for you all to experience it first hand.

TAC will be available to any fans, especially queer fans, that have any safety concerns traveling to Texas. Our email is lostevenings@theallycoalition.org and we’ll be monitoring it starting next week.

For TAC, Lost Evenings represents kindness, generosity, community and hope. America needs that right now. Texas needs that right now. And we’re gonna bring it to them in 2026.”

Hopefully that both serves as a reassurance to people, and demonstrates that these are issues that I and my team take seriously.

The second criticism seems to be people saying that I just shouldn’t go to Texas because they are opposed to the policies and values of the state’s government. I’ve hope it’s obvious that I’m on the same side. I hope that people can recognise that a government is not the same as a people, especially the queer, alternative punk rock people. People who are under threat and need support and solidarity. People who are desperate not to have their lives and homes judged by a blanket condemnation made by people far away who don’t know much about them. People who are hurting, and who the Ally Coalition is specifically set up to help. Since the announcement there’s been a lot of noise, comment, and email, but I find it very notable that everyone I’ve heard from in alternative communities who are actually in Texas are excited for the festival to come to them, and hurt by a lot of the negativity directed towards their city.

On a brief personal note, I have to say I’m a little hurt by the level of vitriol coming from some people. I know what the internet is like, I’m a grownup, but after four days in Edinburgh celebrating kindness, community and inclusion, it’s pretty disappointing to read some of the language people have been using in online commentary. It’s fair for these issues to be discussed, but please let’s all of us try and remember rule number 1….

I’ll finish with this. The word “ally”, according to my dictionary, means to side with or support. I fail to see how I would be siding with or supporting the LGBTQ community of Dallas, or Texas more broadly, by abandoning and condemning them at this moment in history. Being an ally means, first and foremost, showing up. Lost Evenings is just a festival, but it is one that represents my values, and for that very reason, we’re bringing it to Dallas. Everyone is welcome, and I hope to see you all there in 2026.

I write this from a car park in Glasgow, working my way through the warm-up shows before Lost Evenings hits Edinburgh for its 8th (eighth!!!) instalment this weekend. Band and crew are humming like a well-oiled machine, I’m tired and my head is full of words for obscure songs, but life is good.

The other thing I have on deck right now, as you may have heard, is the impending release (7th November) of a record called “The Next Ten Years”. I wanted to write about that a little, to fill you all in on what it is and what you can expect.

Back in 2008, after the release of my first two studio albums, I found myself in a reasonably common position for an artist towards the start of their career. In the early days, in the spirit of saying “yes” to everything and hoping for the best, I’d ended up with songs spread across a variety of EPs, splits, compilations and so on. Many of these were either songs or versions of songs that didn’t make it to the official albums, and it had reached a point (given the obscurity of some of the releases) where it was getting quite hard for your ordinary music fan to pick up everything I’d released, at least not without disappearing down a record collecting rabbit hole, or bankrupting themselves in the process, or… both.

So we (Xtra Mile and I) decided to gather this flotsam and jetsam together in one place to make life easier for everyone. Borrowing a title from one of the best punk records ever made (Black Flag’s “The First Four Years”) we put together a compilation record called “The First Three Years” and released it into the world (2008). People were pleased. And as time passed and the process continued, it was followed by two further records, the imaginatively titled “The Second Three Years” (2011) and “The Third Three Years” (2014). Finally, in 2015, we released a box set of the three, with an extra disc (“Ten For Ten”), and people were, hopefully, a little happier than before. It also felt like a moment to take a breath with the series, the titles alone were getting unwieldy.

But of course times, and my career and songwriting, have rolled relentlessly onwards. In the intervening years I have, as ever, written more songs than needed for a studio record, recorded covers and alternative versions, released weird extra fun little things in strange corners of the world. It’s been on my mind to do something about all this for a while, and so it is that we come to “The Next Ten Years”.

The title is self-explanatory, and hopefully by now the content is as well. To pick an example, and to herald the project in general, we’ve released a song called “Better Times Will Come”. The song was written by the legendary songwriter Janis Ian; back in the depths of the pandemic (remember that?) in 2020, Janis contacted me and asked me to cover the song as part of a collaborative project she was working on, getting lots of singers to cover the same tune and see how the results came out. I was beyond flattered, gave it my best shot, and was stoked when it was released alongside a host of other talent.

But after that, I haven’t been able to do much more with the song, to highlight it in any way. It’s a perfect example of the kind of songs that are on my new release, and I’m happy that it’s getting the attention it deserves finally. As a song, it feels yet more relevant with every passing, depressing and terrifying year. I hope you enjoy it.

The Next Ten Years is out November 7th (digital and vinyl) and is available for preorder now here. I hope you enjoy it.

https://frankturner.lnk.to/TheNextTenYearsIB

I’m super excited about the tour starting next week. It’s been too long since we did a proper tour of Britain (Scotland, I see you, Lost Evenings on the books and more news coming soon). Plus we have the mighty Amigo The Devil along for the ride as well. The tour is edging up to sold out, a lot of the shows have gone already, so get involved while you can with the others.

You may have seen recently that I decided to throw the opening slot for each show to a local unsigned act. It’s been absolutely wild since we asked for submissions for that. Well over 250 of you applied, and I listened through to every single one. I have to say that I realised pretty quickly that I’d arguably made an error. That’s because the standard across the board was so damn high, it was agonising choosing only one person for each show, and having to turn down so many people really sucked. All the same, I really enjoyed listening to so much new music, so many new voices, and have a lot of new favourites.

In the end I was able to choose, and I’m happy to announce the winners here. Here’s a list, with listen links, for each of the winning acts. I’d encourage everyone to dive in, they’re all great. See you on the road soon!

Newcastle – Sam Shields
Leeds – Harrison Rimmer
Liverpool – Grace Chloe
Manchester – Steve Jackson of Atlas Rivers
Nottingham – Dan Ottewell
Birmingham – Aayushi
Cambridge – Minnie Birch
Oxford – averageginger
Norwich – Lucy Grubb
Ipswich – Jack Walsh
Swansea – Kayleigh Morgan
Bristol – M3G
Southampton – Dan Pryde
Folkestone – Matt Bawtree

All remaining tickets can be found here.

Well friends, I could not be more excited to announce to you my tenth studio album, Undefeated. Released 3rd May 2024 on Xtra Mile Recordings.

After the pandemic, back in the independent world, with a new drummer, I feel proud, grateful and pleasantly surprised to be putting out a record that I love with all my heart, that I think might be one of my best. It’s a defiant, energetic record about growing old disgracefully and making peace with that. I’m still standing up, still have something to share with the world, and I’m excited to let you know about it.

So, here we go! ‘Do One’ was the final song I wrote for this album. I felt like I needed a song to sum up where I’m at in one short burst – revitalised, rebellious, having fun, and still a sucker for a big singalong. I hope you enjoy the song, and I can’t wait to sing it with you at a show sometime this year.

Preorder the album here: https://frankturner.orcd.co/undefeated

Today sees the release of “Playtime with Christopher & Francis Volume 1”, the debut of a new musical project of mine, Eating Before Swimming. I wanted to tell you all a little about it, and encourage you to take a listen.

Chris Blake and I met at the village primary school in Meonstoke, Hampshire, in 1985, when I was 3 and he was 5. We lived on the same street and became firm friends pretty much immediately, bonding over a love of Action Force toys, for the most part. We stayed friends past that school, and by time we were in double figures, music had entered our lives. I fell for Iron Maiden, Chris for Metallica. I got a guitar and amp from Argos for Christmas, Chris got a drumkit. Set up in his bedroom, we started our first musical ventures together aged 11 and 13.

That band (a million different names, all terrible, very rough recordings do exist but NO YOU CAN’T HAVE THEM) continued in one form or another through our middle teens. We played birthday parties for my older sister and our bass player, Toby (both medium disastrous events). We covered AC/DC and Nirvana, and had some truly dreadful original songs. Over time the band drifted apart, but Chris and I stayed friends.

I moved to London after school, and set off on my own various courses. Chris played in a handful of great bands in Winchester and Southampton, and got more and more involved in electronic music, releasing stuff as Palest Boy At School. Throughout this whole period, we kept in touch, and kept discussing the idea of collaborating on something. Tapes of some very weird sounds got sent in the mail. Drum machines were programmed, guitars were bent out of tune, but nothing quite coalesced.

Roughly 10 years ago, we came across an idea for a proper project; it would involve a post-modern attack on some of our favourite old pop songs, a deconstructionist (not to mention absurdist) examination of how far you can push a song before it falls apart. It would be noisy, aggressive, weird and fun. I started tracking vocals and guitar for a few songs, occasionally piano, sending them to Chris, and he’d work on them while I was on the road.

Neither of us thought it would take quite this long to finish the damn thing. We’ve had hold-ups due to my schedule, sorting out mixes (this is a difficult approach genre to nail, sonically), getting clearance on some of the songs from frankly bemused publishers, my schedule again, finding a band name that we liked that wasn’t taken (Eating Before Swimming was the first idea; then we had a million others, then went back to the start), a pandemic, the works. We made videos, made plans, shunted things around the diary, and then FINALLY, in August 2022, here we are.

The record is out today. We don’t know if we’ll do more of this (hopefully!), we haven’t yet worked out if shows are even possible. We hope you like it. Here’s a video we made in lockdown. Brace yourself.

Let me paint you a picture.

Last Friday night, loading up the bus and trailer after the show in Milan. We’re all exhausted but radiant. We’d just had our best show in Italy to date. Being on the road again, properly, consistently, hitting places that had started to feel like a dream in the last two years, seeing old friends, making new ones – it’s almost impossible for me to exaggerate how redemptive all that felt. Shows in Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy had all been wonderful. I felt like I had a purpose again, for the first time in a long while.

But. You knew there was a “but” coming.

We were heading home, instead of heading to Austria. For those who missed the announcement a week ago, we have had to pull the Austrian shows on this tour (and thus also Nuremberg), and that’s what this post is about. I wanted to start by emphasising that the mood on a bus when you’re in for the long drive home without having finished what you started is funereal black. My band and crew and I take a huge amount of pride in our work, and letting people down is the very last thing we ever want to do.

So let me explain the reasons. I think the initial announcement wasn’t clear enough about this, for which I apologise, but after a fair few hostile comments on the subject, I wanted to state my case and try to help people understand what’s going on, not just for me, but for the live music industry in general.

Someone somewhere snarked that the cancellations showed I was “all about the money” – and that is true, to the same extent that paying rent, paying bills, eating food is “all about the money”. Touring isn’t free – in fact it’s hugely expensive. With 12 people being paid full time, a bus and trailer, fuel (fuel!) costs, hotels, PDs, food, taxes, carnets and the like, it used to cost me a comfortable five figures a day to be on the road – show days and days off the same. Now, with extra Brexit bullshit and soaring gas prices, it costs more.

I’m not trying to garner sympathy or complain about my lot in life, just to explain. Looking forward through the tour, and after consulting with our promoter in Austria (an old and trusted friend), it became clear that going there for a week was going to cost a fortune – it was going to put the tour catastrophically in the red.

Now, in times gone by (and maybe again in the future) I’ve toured at a loss plenty. It’s arguable that I’ve never actually done more than broken even going all the way to Vienna (13 times now), but you make it work – you route it in with bigger shows, you balance it out against other tours, you make some (not as much as people think…) money on merchandise. You do the job you said you’d do.

But after the last two years, the music industry in general is still bleeding profusely, wounded, limping. Any buffer zone, any fallback, is so long gone it’s a joke at this point. Everyone is broke. A lot of people think musicians at our level are wealthy people – pretty entertainingly wide of the mark at the best of times, not even funny now. Among other things, no one got paid for two years. Doing those shows at this point in time was simply not possible.

There’s a whole bunch of reasons for that. Obviously I know that shows in Austria are open now, but attendances are low across the board, and no-shows are through the roof. I know of 3 other acts in the same shoes right now. I’m not blaming anyone in that part of the world for anything, it is what it is, but ultimately there’s a bottom line here that I can’t just wish away, ignore, tough out, or anything else.

So we drove home. My team are working overtime to get the shows back on the books for later in the year. I think there’s been some confusion about ticketing – for which I apologise, and which we’ll sort ASAP. But we ARE coming back. We WILL make good on our promises, as soon as that’s humanly possible.

I guess ultimately the reason I’m writing this is because there’s been a fair bit of disappointment around the cancellation – which I fully understand, and to which I can only add “me too!” – but also because there’s been some comments which, to me, feel pretty unfair. Sure, things unlocked recently. That doesn’t undo two years of catastrophe for touring musicians at a stroke. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. I know people were looking forward to the shows, and some of them are now out of pocket – again, me too.

Thank you so much to everyone who made a show on this tour. Thanks to the people in Austria who have been understanding about this situation. We will be back, before the year is through. I’m going to take a bit of a break from the internet for a minute, but we’re hitting Yeovil and then the Eden Sessions with MCR at the end of the week, and I can’t wait. Peace.

About last night… Last night, the road took me, Matt Nasir and the crew back around to Columbus, Ohio. We had a pretty eventful day and show, and I wanted to put the story down for the record.

The venue booked was The Basement – a 300 capacity room in the basement (natch) of a complex of venues. We arrived overnight on the bus, wandered off to find breakfast, loaded the equipment in in the rain and started setting about the daily business of putting a show together.

About half-way through our soundcheck (a daily ritual that becomes more perfunctory as tours roll on, naturally enough), an explosion of noise came through the ceiling, drowning out even the loudest noises we were making with our current acoustic, duo setup. It turned out there was another show in the mid-size room above us, a rescheduled event. The volume coming through was such that our show was basically impossible.

It’s important to note that I don’t hold anyone particularly to blame for this; there can be mix-ups at the best of times, and with everyone scrambling to try and repair the live music infrastructure as we begin to entertain thoughts of life in a post-covid world, well… It’s difficult. Nevertheless, after a few minutes of trying to pretend it’d be fine and we’d muscle through and not be precious about it, it became clear that we had a serious problem for the evening’s plans.

Now we come to the part I want to tell you about – my crew. On this run, we have Dougie (production manager and live sound), Ryan (backline and guitars) and Tre (tour managing). I’ve been on the road with these three for years, and I know they’re good at what they do, but yesterday afternoon they proved that in spades, and also showed why crew are so vital (as well as so skilled).

Whilst I was in the middle of having a minor sense of humour failure about the whole thing, Tre declared that “there are no problems, only solutions”, and the three of them set about finding one. The other room in the complex is the big room, Express Live (where I’ve played a bunch of times), but it’s currently slightly up on bricks, being refurbished and so on. Plus putting 300 people in a 3000 cap room wouldn’t really work. But there was space on the floor, and Dougie had located various piles of staging and PA equipment around the backstage.

So it was than in 90 minutes flat, the three of them found and built a stage, found and wired an entire PA (with monitors), set out bike racks and signage to get people into the venue, through the bar area and into the gig, worked out some makeshift lighting, and put an entire show together. In the event we were good to go, soundchecked, Nathan Gray as support all checked as well, by the time doors were originally supposed to open, and the show went ahead as planned. I’d even say that the euphoria of success made it a better show than it might otherwise have been.

A lot of people (probably including me) would have given up. A lot of people would have had no idea how to make a show happen given the materials on hand. But my crew didn’t do that; they soldiered on, got the show running, and enabled me to do my job. I am drowning in admiration for and (if allowed) pride in their work, and I know I’m lucky to have these people as both my crew and, more importantly, my friends.

So, raise a glass to the crew. The last 18 months have been rough across the industry, but it’s these folks who have suffered most in some ways. If they’re doing their job right, people at the shows barely know they’re there, but trust me, without them there’d be no shows to speak of. All hail the crew, support WeMakeEvents.

The show must go on. Asheville tomorrow night!

Last week, I played the first three full capacity indoor shows since March 2020. I’m still getting my head around the experience, but I wanted to do some of that here, and to talk about shows coming up through the rest of the summer.

The build-up for the first show, which was of course at The Clapham Grand, was surreal and quite stressful. There is of course a lot of tension and uncertainty out there right now about shows, about restrictions and regulations, government action and personal responsibility – no doubt you’ve all read and thought about all that enough recently. The UK government has helpfully (sic) decided to duck hard decisions and left restrictions in the hands of individual venues. That’s difficult in many ways, but does also leave open the possibility of doing shows again, something that is incredibly important to me and (I like to think) the audience, something we’ve missed more than words can say. Through a combination of hard work by venues and promoters, and a voluntary ask for people to test or be vaccinated, we managed to get to a place where we all felt the shows could go ahead safely for all concerned.

The crucial thing, the thing I want to talk about here, was the magic. Playing again was completely, indescribably pure. I wept openly twice before I even went onstage, and it got worse from there. The audiences were a delight, the atmosphere was tangibly electric. Everyone in the industry wants to help, wants to be responsible, but in the midst of that we’ve sometimes lost sight of the need to stress the importance of what we contribute, to us and to those who come. This is our culture, our therapy, our life. Thank you so much to everyone who came to the shows.

Looking forward, of course things aren’t simple. The tensions and uncertainty remain. There has been huge damage wreaked across the industry, in particular the supply chains behind the scenes, which is still reverberating. Many people are not yet comfortable with indoor shows, and I completely understand that. Collectively, we’re doing our best to do our jobs and keep everyone happy. It’s not always easy.

All that said, I have some awesome shows coming up this summer. Margate on Friday is at Dreamland – full capacity but outdoors, with an amazing lineup. I can’t wait. We have more Gathering shows in Frome, and various festivals (Beautiful Days, Victorious and so on), even a free show in London for Love Music Hate Racism (August 14th). To have anything in the diary, after the last 18 months, is a singular pleasure, and I can’t wait to see you all.

A moment, now, to address the Manchester show next month. It was originally planned to be a full capacity outdoor show. Alas over the weekend the promoters contacted me to say that the infrastructure for an outdoor show just isn’t available to them right now, there’s been too much lost in the last year. The choice facing me was either cancelling, or moving it indoors. I chose the latter – the show will now be at the Apollo. All tickets remain valid, more are onsale. For those who, completely legitimately, don’t want to attend an indoor show, full refunds are available at point of purchase. This is not ideal, but it’s the best we can do right now.

I hope everyone can be understanding of the stresses and strains facing the live music industry right now. And I hope many people will join me in coming down to a show and remembering what we’ve been missing, losing themselves in the power of live music. I can’t wait. Peace.

Like most people, some days I find it hard to believe what’s actually going on in the world right now. I wake up and get staggered all over again by the fact that we really are living through a pandemic, and more specifically, that the industry I love and have made my life in remains in cold storage. It’s weird, and it can feel pretty defeating a lot of the time.

Playing the Independent Venue Love shows on and off for the last year (year!) has been one of the ways I’ve tried to make sense of all this. Obviously, independent venues need help; obviously I owe my career in large part to small rooms up and down the country (and around the world) where a few hundred people can gather together and immerse themselves in underground music and culture; and obviously, if I can help, I will. It feels like the least I can do.

More than that, though, it’s given me structure and routine, two things I need to have in my life to keep myself on an even keel mentally. A lot of people have said to me that the regular Thursday night gatherings, as ersatz as they might be, have been helpful to them. To which I can only say, “I know what you mean, friends.”

Having said all that, I’ve decided that it’s time to pause the shows again for the time being. Like the last time I did that, it feels like my own wells of energy and creativity are running low for these shows, and I want to focus on other things for a while (I’m finishing off my own studio among other things, am working on a new album, and I’m planning for how to move forward as and when lockdown eases up here in the UK). That’s not to say that other venues don’t need help, or that the Music Venue Trust #saveourvenues campaign is in any way “finished”. There’s so much more to do, and I’ll be helping out with that (and the #wemakeevents campaign) as much as I can going forward. It’s just time to pause the shows again for now.

I am overwhelmingly grateful to everyone who’s tuned in over the year, and especially to everyone who’s donated. At around £250,000 raised, I think we can all pat ourselves on the back a little. The final show, number 21 (!!), will be this Thursday, the 25th. It’s a benefit for The Lexington in London – a venue I know well and love dearly. Let’s all gather together one more time at 8pm (UK) and raise them a ton of money. Jess is playing first, and then she’ll be picking my setlist for me (payback for all the times she’s run the requests for other shows!).

I’m really looking forward to it. See you all there.

(Photo credit – CapturedByCorinne)

Last night I played an actual, real-life, no-fooling, human-attended GIG. The first one since March 15th in Southend-On-Sea. In the interim I’ve done 26 livestream shows, but this was the first one with people in front of me, rather than my phone, my wife and my cat. It was quite an evening.

The gig came together like this. One of the venue benefit livestreams I did was for the Clapham Grand – a 120-year-old music hall run by my old friend Ally Wolf. I actually went to the venue for that one, and the fact of being in a room with a stage, a PA and a dressing room upstairs affected me emotionally much more than I’d been expecting. It changed my mind about the worth of doing a reduced-capacity show, should the occasion arise.

Meanwhile, the government here in the UK recently announced that they’d start permitting indoor performances from August 1st, dependent on a series of pilot events. Mark Davyd, the hero of the Music Venue Trust, was charged with sorting that out, and he called me to ask if I’d be interested in performing, in part as a thank you for the Independent Venue Love shows I’ve been doing. I readily agreed.

There was then a titanic bit of faffing around on the part of the powers-that-be (I’m aware that we’re in an unprecedented global pandemic, and that government infrastructure is under great strain, but fucking hell, this government couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery), it was arranged that the show would take place on Tuesday July 28th at the Grand. While there had been a musical theatre pilot event at the Palladium last week, under the aegis of Andrew Lloyd Webber, this was to be the first indoor independent music gig since lockdown started. Historic stuff.

Ally is an old friend – we met back in the Nambucca days – and he and his staff at the venue are the real heroes of this story. After we’d agreed to the show, Ally then called me to explain the regulations and restrictions required for it to go ahead. Among many other things (reduced capacity, track and trace, one-way systems, table service, temperature checks and more), there was a requirement that the audience were not allowed to sing. That brought me up short, and nearly made me change my mind about the show. Getting the crowd involved in the performance is at the heart of what I do on stage, and the shows I play work towards a moment of unification, where the barrier between performer and audience breaks down. That wouldn’t now be possible (or at the very least would be much harder). The reason, of course, is to to with aerosol diffusion from people’s voices – and as part of that I had to be 3 metres back from the front of the stage. I get that, but it was still galling to hear on the phone.

In the end I decided to go ahead – mainly by thinking about the alternatives. The government has requested that pilots go ahead. Collectively, as an industry, if the artists and venues respond to that by saying “no”, then, well, we’re just stuck where we are. Something has to happen to break the logjam and get us all moving forward.

So our aims with the show were threefold. Firstly, to demonstrate willingness to try. The live music industry is full of people who are triers, problem-solvers, go-getters, by its ver nature. We have to show that we’re game to find a solution to the problem posed by the pandemic. Secondly, we wanted to show that both performers and audience could successfully abide by the restrictions posited by the powers-that-be (in which we were successful – more on that shortly).

But thirdly, in a weird way, we wanted to show that this specific set-up doesn’t work. The Grand was at less than 20% of capacity (around 200 people), but Ally had to double the number of staff working, to meet all the guidelines. There was no talent spend (I didn’t get paid), and no advertising spend (the show sold out pretty much straight away), and yet it still lost money. And the Grand is a versatile space, as an old music hall, in a way that many independent venues are not. We needed to show that this isn’t a complete solution or a workable model, that either restrictions need to change or more funding is required; essentially that fight is far from over.

All told, it felt like the right thing to do – and of course, it’s what I do. Lockdown meant the immediate and total collapse of the industry I work in, a complete halt to my earnings, but most crucially, a body blow to my own identity. I play shows, that’s me, I’m that guy. Not being able to do that (streams aside) for the last four months has been weird and hard. I really, really wanted to play a show.

I got there on the day at lunchtime, for a long afternoon of press and a soundcheck. I’d sort of forgotten that gig days are hectic outside of your time on change – it’s funny how quickly we’ve all adapted to the situation. I went through my lines with journalists, checked the sound, and took stock of the layout of the room. Ally and his team had gone to enormous lengths to make everything safe and controlled as required. It felt pretty weird, but at the same time, it was still definitely a show. Hell, I’ve played to fewer people than this in larger rooms in my time!

Everything was set, and the time for doors to open rolled around. Ticket holders had been given staggered arrival times to prevent any crush, but Ally still had to chase off a couple of tabloid photographers who, as far as we could tell, had come down specifically to try and get a compromising shot of people breaking the rules. In the midst of the hard work and good will around the show, it was a reminder that some people are just dickheads. Thankfully they left empty-handed.

In no time it was showtime. First up was the amazing Ciara Haidar – another friend from the Nambucca days who briefly played keys in my band before Matt Nasir. In a way the honour of “first show back” goes to her and her wonderful, haunting set. The audience were respectful and enthusiastic, whilst obeying the rules – more foot-stamping than cheering. Everything was going swimmingly.

Next up, Jay (Beans On Toast), who likely needs no introduction for people reading this. He opened with a new song called “Save The Music”, which brought a genuine tear to my eye, so perfectly did it capture the moment. I think most artists will have written “lockdown” songs (myself included), and I think this song will put most of those to shame.

Unsurprisingly, Jay had the whole of the room in the palm of his hand for 30 minutes, and then he was done. I found myself feeling properly nervous, which is unusual for me, with the amount of shows I’ve done. Usually I know roughly what to expect, but it was different now. I congratulated Jay in the dressing room, and he told me: “You have no idea what’s about to happen to you, emotionally, once you step on that stage.”

And he was right. I think all three of us playing last night had become a bit blasé about it, not least because we’d played on that stage to no audience a month prior, for a livestream benefit. So mentally, well, it was just the same again. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. This time there was an audience.

I took the stage and felt the power of what jay had been warning me about. After months of playing to the back of my phone, this was something entirely different. It was powerful, slightly nerve-wracking, magical, and it felt like coming home, all at the same time. I opened with a new lockdown song of my own called “The Gathering”, which is about the moment when we’re allowed back into our hallowed communal spaces for the shows that give our lives such meaning. Today was not quite that day, given all the restrictions and financial strictures, but it was getting closer.

The set flew by. The audience were amazing – appreciative but respectful. Ally brought cardboard cutouts of some silent types – Marcel Marceau, Mr Bean and Charlie Chaplin (who last walked that stage in 1901 – really!) – up to remind people about the singalong rules. And at the end he triggered the traditional balloon drop. I left the stage sweaty and elated.

So there it was. This is not the start of a series of shows like this – that’d bankrupt everyone involved. But it was, as I say, a gesture of cooperation, an attempt to feel out the situation with an eye to taking steps in a better direction. But most of all it was a fucking GIG. I have missed that, for sure. It turns out, live music really, really matters.

The fight is not yet over, not by a long stretch. The Music Venue Trust’s excellent #saveourvenues campaign is here.
The Grand have a fundraiser with signed items for sale here.