A few weeks ago, I got a lovely message from my friend ‘Bry’ asking me to support him and his band on their UK tour. I was over the moon and started telling people. A few weeks later, he sent me another lovely email telling me that he’s supporting Twenty One Pilots on their European tour. I’ve never really listened to them, or know who they are, but I do know that they’re a big deal. This however clashed with the tour that I was supposed to be on, which in turn, has been postponed apart from the London show.
So that left me (and Dave Giles who was also on the tour) with around 10 days free in our diary. I love touring more than most things in life. I love going out to cities and playing my own songs. Songs that I’ve spent hours/days/weeks/months writing in my bedroom, and sometimes people sing along. It’s the greatest feeling that I’ve known up until this point in my life. In my head, I was going on tour and I was really excited and now I had to find something to fill that void. Dave and I had a chat, and decided that to fill the void of a postponed tour, with another tour.
We had the idea on a bus coming home from watching American Idiot. We wanted to hire out small tiny rooms in the cities that we were meant to be playing. We didn’t want to charge people for the gig if they’d already bought a ticket for the original tour. So with this in mind, we decided to do a ‘Pay What You Want Tour’, as we need to cover our petrol and hotels and such like.
In all seriousness, the idea was the easiest part. That was last Thursday. Since then, we set up a group on Facebook and asked people to join if they were interested in helping us with the tour. The response was incredible, I was getting emails people offering to do websites, and naming every possible venue they could think. Dave and I were going to work on different cities individually and then only contact each other when we had good news. The good news didn’t come for some time. The problem with booking a tour this late on is that venues already have gigs going on. We were phoning every venue, sending out emails and joining groups on Facebook to try and get more help.
Unfortunately we couldn’t do the original cities on the exact dates so we tried to do the next best thing. And with a little help from our friends, this is what we came up with:
Sunday 16th October: B2, Norwich 14+
Monday 17th October: Verve, Leeds 18+
Tuesday 18th October: Gullivers, Manchester 18+
Thursday 20th October: Four Bars, Cardiff 18+
Sunday 23rd October: Jumping Jacks, Newcastle 14+
I’d like to thank Sara in Cardiff for booking the Cardiff date for us, and Double Denim in Leeds for booking the Leeds date for us. We’re still desperately trying to get a Glasgow and Brighton date but it’s getting more and more unlikely as time goes on.
These gigs are PAY WHAT YOU WANT, but if you want you pre order a ticket and help us fund our travels here:
https://davejgiles.bandcamp.com/merch
Thanks to everyone for their help. It really is great to know people have you got your back when you need it.
And also…Massive Congrats to BRY for getting that massive tour. SMASH IT!