‘We all need a plan B now’: the dicey world of live music after Covid
Eighteen months ago, Tre Stead was in hospital; now she’s on Coronation Street. As Frank Turner’s tour manager, back then she was one of six people the Guardian spoke to about how the shutdown of the live music industry had affected their lives. But now, with Covid restrictions relaxed and gigs allowed to happen as if the pandemic doesn’t exist, have they all returned to work? Yes, but not necessarily in ways anyone expected.
Live music is back and bigger than ever. Artists such as the Weeknd and Harry Styles, who were originally going to play arenas, have rebooked their tours for stadiums, while major names such as Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish are beginning their delayed runs. There’s more work than ever before. But some tours – including Frank Turner’s – have been postponed in recent weeks, and new Covid variants mean that live music remains a horribly uncertain industry. Aerosmith cancelled their summer European tour last week, citing “uncertainty around travel logistics and the continued presence of Covid restrictions”, and Doja Cat cancelled her Brit awards performance due to a member of her team contracting the virus.
Stead is once again tour managing for Turner, but when she’s not, she now works in TV. At the end of 2020 she was contacted by another tour manager, who was working with the trade union Bectu to help music production people move into TV work – specifically to work in newly compulsory Covid departments created to ensure TV production could go ahead in a Covid-safe manner. She got her first credit on Rules of the Game, and currently she’s working on Corrie.
“Part of the reason I did a Covid supervisor course was that anything I learned would be massively relevant when I went back to touring, in terms of knowing how to keep a tour safe,” she says. “We did our own festival at the Roundhouse in London September 2021, at full capacity, and we did 15 weeks of weekend touring, with no breakout in our team. We went with a team of six to the US on a tour bus, and again not one case. Then I went to Vegas on holiday in December and caught Covid on the plane home.”
Matt Cox, keyboards technician for the Chemical Brothers and many more acts, knows other crew who moved into Covid supervision for TV. He had his own project – offering tech instrument support to musicians – that kept him occupied until live music returned. His first show was with the Chemical Brothers at Latitude, in July 2021. “It was weird,” he says, “because I’d been so dialled in to masks and sanitising – you can’t work if you’ve got Covid. And seeing 40,000 people without masks was weird.”
The strangeness of the new world of touring is something everyone dwells on. “The album launch tour was very different,” says the Vaccines’ tour manager, Edd Sedgwick. “We did a lot of in-stores, and normally that means a lot of hugging. This time it meant the fans being two metres away from the band, and security guards wearing gloves passing the albums. I had a strict policy of no guests in the dressing room, no one going out to clubs and bars. We could have dinner together, but you couldn’t go to see your mate when we were in Birmingham. I might have been resented, but everyone wanted to get the job done and not have shows cancelled.”
But going out on tour on the basis that you work the show and spend the rest of the time staying safe has rather reduced the level of enjoyment. “For some tours, there’s a more corporate feel to it now, with so many rules and regulations,” Cox says. “It’s taken some of the gloss off it, made it a bit more nine to five.”
“It’s not as much fun as it was,” says Ben Bowers, a guitar tech for the hard rock band Rival Sons. “If you spend your time touring, you sacrifice a lot of your friendships at home. Your friendships are all over the world, and the road is your social lifeline. But it was like going to an office job where you have to stay in the office at the end of the night. It was really mentally challenging.” Harder for Bowers, in fact, than when there was no work, when he spent much of his time chasing the surf around the British coastline with his girlfriend in his old van.
And even with protocols in place, disaster could still strike. Rival Sons went on a US tour during September and October, and then their drummer tested positive hours before a show. “We don’t get paid without a show, but I’m a drummer myself and I ended up stepping in and picking up the tour, so we were getting away with it. But then the rest of the band started falling down – we lost the bass player, then the singer, and we had to cancel 10 dates and quarantine.”
That meant no money coming in, and lots going out – a financial disaster. And when the tour resumed, the crew started coming down with Covid: only Bowers and one other escaped, and he’s sure that’s because they had antibodies from infections before the tour began.
There are those who are grateful for the chance to tour even with strict protocols. When we spoke in summer 2020, Tiffany Hendren was facing the prospect of having to spend the foreseeable future shut away at home in St Louis, Missouri – she is prone to respiratory infections and was at higher risk from Covid. She only returned to touring as a sound engineer in September because she had no choice: she was out of money.
“That was a little terrifying. Even though if you are careful you are probably pretty safe, it just takes one afternoon in a coffee shop to get sick.” She loves her job so much that she’s happy to swap the normal touring routines for just going venue-to-bus, but safety is paramount. When she’s not touring, she runs the sound for a group of St Louis venues, which had reopened for business when the city lifted its mask mandate. “Cases went back up, and I almost cried when I realised people weren’t going to wear masks. And when we went back to full-capacity shows, that really freaked me out. Some shows everyone is doing the right thing and wearing masks, but country or hard rock bands you look out and see no masks.”
Right now, the life of the crew member is more unpredictable than ever. Fears that they would see a drop-off in earnings because of low consumer confidence have been unfounded. “I’m earning the same, if not a bit more,” says Chris Yeomans, who has returned to work as a lightning engineer for McFly, among others. “Every artist wanted to tour again as soon as the gates were open, and there weren’t enough people to cover the number of tours. You might get four offers in a week, but you could only accept one of them.”
The problem is the uncertainty: the peak of Delta and the rise of Omicron late last year prompted a rash of pre-emptive tour cancellations, and no one is ever sure shows will happen until they actually do – which means work can be there, and then disappear. On the other hand, though, there are always replacement slots on crews available when someone else has to pull out, owing to Covid. And, as Stead points out, the uncertainty is causing problems for everyone in the live music chain, from bus companies to booking agents. “At the Roundhouse we had a struggle to source lights, because everyone wanted everything at the same time,” she says.
Stead isn’t unique when she surveys the future of crew work. “Working in TV made me realise how much I love music, but we all need a plan B now. My job as a tour manager is to plan for all eventualities. To not do that in my own life would be a bit silly.”