Insider Artist: DIY Tour Booking — with Deafcult
The following is a guest post from Innez Tolloch of Brisbane band DEAFCULT.
The first tour I ever booked was for a punk band I was in, Pastel Blaze when I was like 23 or 24, so it was kind of late in my ‘musical career’ to start booking them. That being said touring’s been fairly constant ever since, with interstate jaunts every couple of months and overseas tours more recently, so maybe it was meant to be.
Logistically, for a band like DEAFCULT, we need to book things out way in advance so we can all block out time. A band of six people is certainly harder to find suitable times, with everyone’s conflicting schedules and such. We have a band of business owners, parents, huge workloads, partners, lives etc. There’s got to be an understanding of all of those factors when we take time out to tour. So initially, for us, we have to book out a bunch of weekends between us, and then get to planning the tour. I typically like to give three months for booking an Australian tour, it gives enough time to get everything done.
From there the fun part of booking venues. I’ve become quite brazen in this area recently. Many years of getting the ‘run around/no responses to emails/Get a headliner’ type communication from venues has taught me a fair bit about who to contact and if they’re not answering, who/how to ask to get an answer. I completely understand people aren’t always on email, or don’t always want to be. That’s cool, but also it gets old fast when people just don’t respond. In general, it’s not a nice way to run your business right? Like, I really don’t care if you don’t have the date, or don’t want us to play your venue, just let me know so I can move on and try somewhere else. So with this tour, if I wasn’t getting responses, I’d message bookers facebook, try all the emails I could find online, then if that didn’t work, ask people I knew who might know the bookers and such. It’s kind of fun at times, like being a private investigator or something. Then there are amazing venues/bookers who are always on it, email back within the hour, it’s all just part of the parcel of being a self managed band.
The next step of getting lineups sorted is actually really fun. This is where you get to pick some of your favourite Australian artists and ask if they want to play a show with you. If you’re lucky, they mostly say yes too! This is sort of the point where if you’ve spent your whole life going to shows, helping interstate bands out with backline, shows, places to crash, places to find the cheapest food/beer or best records, this is the time it all pays off. I think that’s one of the most special parts about playing music, it’s like this huge community of people wanting to help each other out, and basically just be mates. It’s pretty special and cool.
From there it’s time for doing promo, which for this latest tour has been incredible.To have the Hobbledehoy crew and Genna at Super Duper in on it has been a dream. It can kind of feel like, once all the booking part is done, then the job’s done, but you have to try and get people to the show or else those bands/bookers won’t want to work with you anymore. So, yeah, come to our show please! Haha
Thanks to Innez Tolloch of DEAFCULT for sharing her experience and insights.
AURAS, the bands debut album, is out now through Hobbledehoy. The band will be touring in support through July-August 2017.
