Events Management: Live Event Roundup
We had 4 cars for the day, Chris hunt watts, who took Courteney and Conor (we had helped Chris and Conor at Tea Rex so they offered to help us with our event), Millie from cut the cord media who was taking pictures and showcasing art at the event. Then we had Emsy and glen from our group, Emsy took our headliner jazzy and all her equipment, and glen took art
Courteney, Chris and Conor arrived first at 12:00 at the arts house and unloaded the PA, Courteney’s mixing desk, mic stand, cables and busking amp. Glen and Pippa arrived with all their art at 12:45, shortly after the first artists starting arriving, greeted by Courteney and Conor. Emsy arrived at the arts house at around 1 and unloaded Jazzy's keyboard, guitar and amp. I arrived with cut the cord media at around 2, and helped set up the rest of the art for the display. At the same time, Courteney, Conor and Chris put extra posters around Bristol, and at 2:30 Courteney, Chris and Aaron went to hand out flyers at Cabot circus, but they quickly moved closer to the venue because Cabot didn’t have the audience we were looking for. Glen suggested that Courteney stood outside the venue for a bit and try and hand out the rest of the flyers. The flyers outside the arts house were much more effective, with more people taking them and even some of the people showing up to the event as well.
At 3 the doors opened for our art section of the event, with 17(?) people coming buying tickets at the £2 rate during the art section. No art was sold except one picture from Cut the Cord media, for £10(?). The art part ran smoothly for the most part, with a playlist i made of majority local Bristol bands to compliment the local art on show. (Insert playlist picture here)
At 6, our first musicians, Stevie and the Masquerades showed up. Me, Courteney and a couple others went to go unload their car of their equipment, which we put at the area where the stage was going to be later during the gig. BAAST, our second act of the night, showed up with their equipment about 10 minutes later, which they took in by themselves. Bobby Scaife arrived at 6:30 with his equipment. At the same time, Glen and a couple others re-organised the room after the art finished and set up the PA, stage and seating. Jazzy sound checked at 6:45, BAAST sound checked at 7:10 and Stevie sound checked at 7:40. Doors had opened for the gig at 7, and the gig was supposed to start at 8, however due to sound check starting later than expected, the gig started at 8:30 instead, putting us behind schedule. Stevie and Jazzy both had EPs sales during the event, which we were happy about.
The timings of the sets were as follows:
Stevie and the Masquerades: 8:30 - 9:00
Bobby Scaife: 9:25 - 9:50
Jazzy Heath: 11:15 - 11:45
There were also interviews with all of the bands throughout the event. The first interview was with our headliner Jazzy Heath at 5:15, Stevie was then interviewed at 7. Both of these interviews were filmed by Courteney and the questions were asked by Emsy on camera. Later on, BAAST were interviewed at 9, and Bobby Scaife was interviewed at 10. For these two interviews, I filmed the interviews whilst Courteney asked the questions on camera.
The arts house had asked us to have left by midnight, however they were ok with us running a couple minutes over, as we had packed down and cleared out by 00:05. Giles (co-manager of the Arts House Cafe) was very happy about how the gig turned out and the reception of the gig, and said to me and Courteney that he would love to have us put on another gig on at some point in the future.
Lessons from the live event
Change the date or timing of the event. A lot of people who were upstairs eating in the cafe section of the arts house expressed interest in the art exhibition, but couldn't go to it as they were on their lunch break and the exhibition started later than they could stay. So either we could've moved it forward a couple hours, or changed the date to a Friday or the weekend so that those people could've come whenever they wanted.
Another thing to learn from the exhibition was storage. Fortunately, the Arts House Cafe allowed us to store the art in their management room during the gig, but if we couldn't do that then the art would've had to sit through the gig which could've potentially damaged the art.
The positives we learnt from the art exhibitions were that a rather large number of people are actually interested in going to see an independent art exhibition, and that we could potentially make a series of gigs which focus around a mix of art exhibitions and gigs, as this could be a unique selling point for Ghazt Management gigs in Bristol.
There were a few large things we need to take away from the gig aspect of our live event. The first one of these was the timing of the gig itself. The gig itself started late, at 8:30 rather than 8, and instead of the 15-minute changeover gaps between artists, there were all between 25 and 30 minutes. This was partly due to the large amount of equipment that Stevie and the Masquerades and BAAST had, but also due to us as management not being forceful (?) enough with the artists to get on and off stage quickly, as some of the bands took a little too long setting up.
As mentioned earlier, next time we program the artists for our gig in a small venue space like The Arts House Café, we need to consider the amount of large equipment (keyboards, drum pads, samplers) that the bands we booked for this event had. Only Bobby Scaife from our list of artists had a reasonably small setup, which did impact not only the change over time between bands, but also the storage space in the venue itself, which was already small.
Some things we learned from the Gig were positive though. We learned that whilst we didn’t draw in a massive crowd, there are people in Bristol who are very involved and willing to go see an independent art exhibitions and gig combination, and that the on the day marketing helped to pull in local people. Our online marketing was also strong, combined with the outreach of Ghazt Management meant that quite a few people from outside of UoG also came and saw the gig.
Having our event outside Cheltenham again meant that we gained a valuable contact inside of the Bristol music scene in The Arts House Café, who were very happy to have us back to host more gigs in their venue. This will help Ghazt Management gain more of a foothold in the Bristol music scene, and expand outside of Cheltenham.
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