Jack’s Wednesday guest blog – –
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a flight to Italy where my old band ‘Heritage’ were booked for a festival.
We played concerts, tours, and festivals almost every summer in Scotland and all round Europe for fourteen years, and often times other aspiring singers and bands would ask me how we got the bookings.
Here is an example of how we “booked our gigs,” so that you can see how I couldn’t really help them much:
I was at a party in a friend’s house in Edinburgh, where I was introduced to a French artist who illustrated the cover of a magazine called ‘Escargot Folk.’ He suggested I send information about our band to them, which I did. About a year later I received a copy, and there we were – but – my address was completely garbled and miss-spelled!
Another two years passed, and I got a postcard.
It was from a guy in the northeast of Italy who organized a regional festival there. He had received a bundle of the French magazines and wanted to know if we would be touring in Europe the next year. Well – of course! I blessed the postman who deciphered the address and delivered it.
That first visit to FolkEst in Friuli was by train, which was a great adventure involving us, our luggage, and our instruments…and changing trains in Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Milan before arriving in San Daniele. The next time was the flight over the Eiger!
All our other travels started with similar ‘happenstances’ – we didn’t have an agent, so things just came out of the blue. But it all took me to places I would never have seen and introduced me to people with whom I still keep in touch.
Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids 