blimey
right, let's have a look into this.
over the last couple of years the HL meets have started to dwindle in terms of numbers. all perfectly understandable and tbh i was always the more popular meets got as many as they did ~100 iirc...
i was actually thinking that i wasn't going to do any more, certainly not for a couple of years. the idea being to let people save up/realise what they were missing/etc etc
i wasn't going to do the last one until paddy said he wanted to send the smurphs off with a bang
also, to be perfectly blunt, we've been running out of different things to do.
the formula was always supposed to be
- a club night
- a gig by a sisters-related band (& if poss a HL family band)
- a social night
i feel it is my duty to provide a full and interesting programme of events for you guys in order to make it worth your while travelling up/down/across/over for the weekend.
sadly that formula has been exhausted now
basically we've run out of bands who would a) consider playing b) we could afford and c) i'd want to put on
the sad reality is that some old bands require upwards of a few hundred quid to play, and we would not recover anywhere near that amount in tickets. larger promotors with bigger events can afford to take that hit because the smaller bands bring on the extra numbers, and they will play for (relatively) pennies to gain experience and the kudos that comes from playing larger gigs with big bands.
bands like anne-marie, the lorries, the skellies (rip) are all way beyond the scope of HL meets.
in the past i've approached several of those old sisters-affilliated bands and they have all politely declined to play to a room full of sisters obsessives
bands & artists such as the lorries, porl king/miserylab, robochrist, salvation, marx (solo) have all been approached in the past but the lorries and the sallies couldnt make it logistically, robo was busy and didnt feel 100% comfortable milking his rock star status with us fanbois
, and porl & marx both felt their solo material was not ready for a live outing.
to go into bit more details:
when phono paul and myself organise the weekend, paul looks after the gig side of it using any contacts or recommendations i may have. one of his main considerations has to be how many people the gig will pull in, so he can cover his costs. Hl punters alone are not enough to fill a gig in itself. they can certainly go a long way to 'topping up the audience', and are frequently some of the most ardent fans in the audience, but a room full of you lot just ain't enough bodies i'm afraid
this means he has to have bands of a certain stature and size in order to get people's interest. sadly the scene for the last few years means that dodgy ebm "man with a laptop" bands get more people than dodgy goff "3 men & a drum machine" bands
and quite frankly, i do not want to put in a weekend with bands like that. it's not what HL is about.
without the gig to bolster the weekend, just having a social night in a pub (albeit with the coolest DJs ever
) would be unlikely to be enough of a draw to most people. and it doesnt feel fair to the hardcore regulars who always make it to leeds to keep on expecting them to turn up for essentially the same thing every year
apologies of that is all a bit rambling.
i know it probably raises more questions than it answers, but i just wanted you all to understand the situation myself, phono paul & fraser (the man who books everything for the HL social stuff
) face when trying to plan these things.
the crux of it seems to be that we've run out of varied things to do, that can still cover their costs, and without that variation i feel bad
expecting people to travel to leeds for the same-old-same-old
and until i can think of a fresh plan that is a) logistically possible and b) financially viable, i can't see what else i/we can do
sorry if that sounds a little negative, but anyone that came to leeds for the last one (smurphs gig notwothstanding) will know what i mean.
I'm sorry Barry!