Show of Hands - finding a way to gig in still difficult times

On Thursday, November 17 they play Worthing’s Assembly Hall; on Friday, November 18 they are at New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth; and then on Saturday, November 26 they play Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion.

The great news is that for the tour Steve Knightley and Phil Beer are rejoined by Miranda Sykes who missed out on last year’s tour as part of the band’s economies. In the meantime, Show of Hands are getting ready to launch a new online platform – all part of moving with the times. With the cost of living crisis following on from the pandemic, it’s all about adapting to survive for gigging musicians everywhere.

Steve said: “In the early days of the pandemic, I was thinking that it would take five years before we got back to where we were. That was me being a prophet of gloom. But actually for the first six months I found quite it all quite refreshing. I got to have a bit of a rest for the first time in 25 years and actually when all your choices are taken away from you it can be quite liberating. And then we really got involved in all the lockdown and online shows and I loved it. And then the second February came around and I thought to myself ‘No, it's not going to be five years.’ But then last February came around I thought ‘Yes, it is going to be five years.’ The fact is everyone is 30 per cent down whatever you are doing and when you're talking about 30 per cent, you are basically talking about your profit. And I think it's going to take a good few years from now to get back to where we were. You've just got to hang in there. You can't convey bad news. You have to be relentlessly optimistic and you just have to hope for the audience to refresh itself, maybe hope that it will improve at about five per cent a year. And you have to look on the bright side, that if you're 30 per cent down then you are still playing to 400 people rather than 600 and that's 400 people who are having a good time. But you do have to economise. That means you don't do as many CDs anymore because they just don't sell. You used to be able to put £10,000 or £15,000 or £20,000 into a CD. You can’t now.”

So the approach now is to do maybe a stripped back unplugged CD “as if it were your artistic choice”: “Certainly the idea of doing an album every year or every 18 months is really hard these days.”

But you've just got to make the best of it which is why Show Of Hands are working towards setting up their own online platform which will be called Hands On TV: “For a fiver a month you have access to hundreds of hours of material and there will also be a floor singers channel. It's all just the way it is. I do believe that the arts sector will continue to receive some subsidy but that whatever field you're in you've got 30 per cent of people that can take it or leave it and for the rest what you're doing is essential. And that's what we've lost, that 30 per cent, the people for whom going to concerts doesn’t define them. We have all got friends like that. You say let's go for dinner and some people will say ‘Oh OK, well, maybe’ and other people that will say instantly ‘Yes, definitely’ and it's the ‘OK, maybe’ people that we can't count on anymore.”