Theatrical shenanigans....

One of the tricky things about this tour is that normally you pass all of the negotiation with the various theatres on to your agent or promoter, allowing you to spend time on more practical pursuits like booking hotels, working out transportation plans and cultivating your smack habit. However, the Four Musketeers of Bootleg Sixties LLP, me, Arthur, Steve and Den, are also the de facto promoters,as well as being the band, production company, press office, logistics managers and financiers of the tour, making things a lot more hands - on than they'd be under normal circumstances. So when we hear that one of the venues seems to be playing silly buggers and hasn't sent back the contract, ordered any posters or put any details for the show on their website, we can't just shrug our shoulders
or " get our people to speak to their people "....we have to pick up the phone and actually see what the problem is. So we do this, and at first it's the normal tale of woe....they didn't get the contract, the promo DVD didn't arrive yadda yadda yadda. I've actually come to the conclusion that most theatres exist in some kind of postal black hole; a letter sent to a remote yurt in an as yet undiscovered area of the Siberian tundra manages to get there for the price of a first - class stamp, whilst a contract or technical rider seems to disappear without trace the moment it gets anywhere near the orbit of your average City Hall, Assembly Rooms or Theatre Royal. Alan and Nick, the stout fellows who have put this whole tour together, have already had a full and frank exchange of views with the theatre in question, and whilst blood may not actually have been spilled, it was certainly slopped around a bit. It's thus with a certain amount of relief that when we speak to them this morning we find them in conciliatory mood, and with very litle pain we manage to work out a schedule of promotional activities that will hopefully kick the gig back into gear. No-one likes to lose a show ( unless you're Britney Spears and your playback machine won't work, in which case you HAVE to cancel ) so we're happy to have been able to resolve this. The real pain in the biffins about it all, of course, is that it takes up EVEN MORE TIME to sort out, when there are literally hundreds of other things need doing....for example, there's a new flavour of McFlurry out and I haven't had a chance to taste it yet....In fact, I've just realised that the nearest Maccy D's is open 24 hours..... NOBBY, WARM UP THE MOTOR ! WE'RE GOIN' FOR A LITTLE DRIVE !

Tomorrow's topic : Verbal contracts and why they're not worth the paper they're written on.