![]() ![]() It also includes his wife Laura - they have two young children - and earned almost all its revenue from the live circuit. “We’ve no income and no idea when it will return.” His band has had six top 20 albums, was playing to 3,000 fans in Manchester before the pandemic, and is a festival favourite. “It is really worrying: anxiety is the all-pervasive emotion in our minds,” said Jon McClure, lead singer with Reverend & the Makers. Even successful artists are looking nervously at the future, regardless of a surge in streaming by people stuck at home during lockdown. And while a few superstars pocket millions, three-quarters of them earn less than £30,000 a year. Bear in mind eight in every ten pounds of the average musician’s income is derived from live performance, after recording revenues dwindled in the digital age. ![]() John Giddings, who runs the Isle of Wight festival, told me his “gut feeling is there will be shows next year but no-one knows when” but others have already written off 2021 as well as 2020. One manager told me he lost £27m-worth of bookings overnight when the virus took hold in March. This sector is in pandemic-induced meltdown. “If I were to retrain, I would like to retrain as a boxer and then go into the Cabinet and ply my skills on some of them,” responded Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze. But his ham-fisted interview was heard as a flint-hearted message telling musicians to switch careers and abandon their art, which infuriated an industry that feels crushed, forgotten and forlorn. He was not helped by ITV twisting his words in a tweet that it later withdrew. MUDIC INDUSTRYBDEATH PROFESSIONALThis is why there was such anger when Chancellor Rishi Sunak told ITV News that professional musicians, like others in the arts who could not earn enough to live, might have to find “fresh and new opportunities”, since “everyone is having to find ways to adapt and adjust to the new reality”. “As an artist, you have to have faith.”īy the same author The older workers condemned by Covid “I’ve always been a musician and there’s nothing else I can really do,” she told me breezily. Like most musicians I know, Georgia’s life is shaped by her art. But instead of slumping into my sadness I went into my studio and it’s been a really productive time, with all this sudden space to write new work.” I was just at that stage of going from one level to another level, so it’s been very disappointing not to be able to play. Then along came the pandemic, which was utterly disastrous for the music industry and forced the scrapping of dozens of shows that filled her diary until the end of next year. Her effervescent live shows, featuring the curly-haired singer standing with drum pads, cymbals and synthesisers, were winning rave reviews while her second album - described by one critic as a “bold British hymn to hedonism” - was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. After more than a decade in the music business, Georgia Barnes was on the brink of stardom at the start of this year. ![]()
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