We haven’t been booked for any tours, support slots, larger venues, or for any festival appearances in 2023 so if you wish to catch us live, it will be at our local gigs only.
We did investigate future tour support bookings following our tour with Lillian Axe and Riot Act last year, however, we didn’t get any interest for any future supports. As is usually the case, there was no interest in our band for playing any of the medium to bigger size festivals in the UK/Europe for 2023 either. We are disappointed that we weren’t able to follow up last year with a further tour, or some bigger gig and festival offers, but this is the nature of the business and we will work harder this year to try and progress.
If you do want to see us live this year, we will be playing our usual small venue shows as and when we are offered, these will largely be free entry gigs, or for a low ticket price. Our first (and so far only) of these for 2023 is in Chelmsford this month and you can find more details of this event here. We will continue to be as honest and upfront with our supporters about our situation. We hope to see you at a gig soon!
The challenges we face as bands, musicians, venues, and promoters are numerous right now, but as proven in recent weeks, many are still doing well. The question is, how?
Before we can get to that, we need to understand how the climate has changed and adapt.
What we have to remember is that for the underground Rock and Metal scene in the UK to continue to thrive and grow is that we have to create a culture of encouraging people to come out to live music events on Friday and Saturday nights again.
That means we as bands have to not only promote ourselves effectively, both online and offline but also be good enough live, and engaging enough to draw people out and continue to draw people out. The challenge for venues/promoters is to adequately communicate to their natural audience what type of events they are running and to be engaged and understanding to their audience and to tailor their bookings to meet their taste.
So what are we competing with in 2022?
Up until the early 2000’s, there was a culture in this country of going out Friday and Saturday nights, which meant many venues didn’t have to work as hard to draw people out, especially for live music, as they had a natural audience who came out of habit to their venue or events because that was what they did in their leisure time. A bit like how football fans will watch their team’s home games every other Saturday. It’s a habit, they turn out, and thus the games have a natural audience. We in Rock/Metal have failed to achieve that same mentality with our core audience.
Since the old days, the world has changed, and now we are competing with Netflix, YouTube, PlayStation, and cheap store-bought alcohol. The natural behavior for people, especially in the under 30’s demographic, is to stay inside rather than go out to a venue for a drink, let alone live music. People don’t go out to meet a potential partner in the same way as before either, most dating is done online rather than out in bars and pubs like generations past. The current audience habit is many who do love Rock and Metal will prefer to save up for say a Bloodstock/Download style event once or twice a year and see a handful of bigger bands when they play their hometown. It’s more cost-effective to do it that way, especially with major festivals, because you get a lot of bang for your buck and can see a ton of bands over 3 days.
The question you need to ask is, why would people come out to see my band/event over what they can do at home for free?
Some certain promoters and venues are presently unable to understand these challenges and frankly have fallen so far behind the times it is damaging the efforts of those trying to buck the trend. They don’t even use a mailing list to communicate the events to their audience.
The scene needs to move away from using Facebook events and poorly designed, and often pixelated gig posters as a cover photo-only style promotion. We need to invest in the promotion, using mediums such as Google Ads, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), TikTok promotion, and so on as well as posters in the venue and flyers if you are able. We need to target our campaigns to those people who actually will most likely attend the events and continue to remind them the event is happening. We need to use tools like Bandcamp, and Postcodes to target those people who have already bought from us as bands to alter them of the events happening in their area.
We can not rely on any free promotion on social media as the algorithms are designed to hide the posts and push forward those who are paying for them. Posting events in a 1000 Facebook groups with no paid promotion will result in poor attendance as nobody will see it.
Moving away from Facebook is important, most people under 40 aren’t using Facebook and have moved over to TikTok and Instagram, even for messages, they use WhatsApp and not Facebook. By all means, keep up with Facebook but use the other tools as well. If people aren’t responding, do some research, learn how to use the new tools, it’s simple enough and be ready to spend some money to push your events.
We as a scene need to have professionally designed posters, and promotion that communicates the event in simple terms, and to survive we have to engage with the younger audience by matching the level of quality they are used to from their favorite bands, YouTubers, podcasters and so on. If you fail to do that, and your promotion looks cheap, dated, and lazy by comparison you will not get this group out. If the promotional material looks poor quality, people will assume the event will be of low quality also.
Four band logos on a black background with a date and time doesn’t tell the audience anything. 99% of people won’t know who the bands are, so won’t turn out, however, if you are running a Black Metal night, you can promote that first and foremost and target Black Metal fans in the local area and that is the draw, rather than the bands who won’t be known to the audience. Bands themselves are also naïve in thinking that people know who they are. Sticking your name and a date/time on a Facebook event is not enough information.
Speaking of bands, many are just as guilty of failing to adapt to the times and sometimes fall into the trap of repeating the same mistakes and then complaining it’s not working when nobody attends. The question bands need to ask when a gig fails is, did you do enough to let everyone who might be interested in that area that the gig was on?
It’s hard work being a band in 2022, you not only have to write the music, rehearse, pay for the recording, self-release, and so on, you have to be a promoter as well and you have to keep up with the times. You may feel that you don’t want to do the promotional side of things, and that’s fair enough, but understand if you leave it to others, the results could well be poor.
Bands have to understand that a gig isn’t just a place to perform, it’s a market, it’s your market stall, your performance is an advertisement to encourage people to buy your CDs, vinyl, shirts, and so on from the merch stand. If you are going to quibble about spending a few quid on promotion then why are you printing merch? Would you rather lose a little money on the promotion in the short term and play to a packed venue and potentially sell a ton of merch, or keep that £20 and play to a handful and sell next to nothing? If you are aiming to “go-pro” then you should treat all of this as a business anyway. Advertising is essential for any business and it costs money and takes time to do.
The price of gigs is important as well, especially with a cost of living/fuel crisis squeezing UK residents harder than ever post-pandemic. People’s money for living is not going as far, and thus if you charge over a fiver for events you may restrict your audience further. If you are a bit more established you may get away with charging a bit more, but that depends where you are a lot of the time too. Especially when staying home is free, and people have so many other options now. As stated previously, many people’s habit is to save and go to a bigger festival, so you need to figure out how to draw that audience to your event as well.
Think of it this way, if you were to pay to download a game, would you pay over a fiver for something you had never heard of? Would you pay upwards of £10 to go see a film when you didn’t know what it was or even who the cast was? Would you pay over £20 to see a football match where you didn’t know which either team was or who was even playing? You probably wouldn’t. You need to apply this logic to promoting your music and events.
As well as advertising and pricing, the timing of the event is also important. If you are an unknown band (or are promoting unknown bands) then you need to choose a night of the week the most natural audience will be available to see it, you need to communicate and stick to the start time and it needs to be days/times most people are comfortable coming out. If you have a more popular band on, you can get away with a different day of the week as they will naturally draw people out. If not Friday/Saturday nights are your safest bet.
The quality of the sound is another big issue. Venues need to pay for a good PA and maintain it with a sound person who knows how to operate it. If you do all the work to promote the show, get a good turnout and people pay a fiver to get in and it sounds awful, that audience will not come back and you will have lost all that hard work. That also goes for the quality of bands you book, if they aren’t up to the audience’s taste or expected standard those people you worked so hard to get out won’t likely come back.
Consistently poor sound will result in a dwindling audience. People are used to a higher standard of audio quality these days, and your sound/stage setup needs to meet their expectations if they are going to continue to pay to get into your venue and thus continue to buy drinks. Gigs that have no audible vocals, too much bass, and a ton of feedback are all too common and it drives people away. Also, offer earplugs for loud events, it is cheap, and your audience will appreciate it! Also, hire a good soundperson, not just rely on a mate.
A clean venue also helps, if your toilets look terrible, are broken, and stink that will put people off going. A messy, dirty, old venue won’t encourage a new audience out, keep it clean looking, keep it modern, if it’s a music venue, make it the focus of the venue, not a side attraction, especially if you are booking originals bands.
Also understand while there is some crossover, original bands and covers/tributes have different audiences and tastes. Covers bands can be quite happy to be paid to be just the live music for that night in the pub or venue, however original bands want an engaging audience, potential new fans, and people who will buy the merch. While being paid is good, to be background music for a nights drinking with a disengaged and disinterested audience in a pub isn’t worth it for the originals band. Of course originals bands can avoid this by trying to draw that audience out themselves, but it is something to bear in mind.
So what can be done to improve event turnouts?
You need to target the correct demographics for the events you are running. Use keywords and targets that relate to the bands/events you have booked. Target the local area, don’t be so broad brush, keep it as defined as possible. Use Google Ads, Meta Business Suite, and TikTok promotions to target your audience on social media. Be as clear as day with the communication. Tell people EXACTLY what the event is and what the bands may sound like. You can target an audience’s taste right down to the genre and the bands they like, and even directly to the postcode areas where the venue is.
In terms of free promotion, have a well-designed professional poster/s to be sent to the venues ahead of the gig, design flyers for handing out in that town, or use a mailing list to send them to those in that area who you know might like the event. You need good branding and good image quality. Do not ever use jpegs for images as the quality is atrocious, and if you are doing anything with audio, NEVER use mp3’s as they sound terrible.
Use an emailing tool like MailChimp to send email reminders promoting the show and encourage as many pre-sales as possible. Bandcamp allows bands to export all their sales and Excel can separate the sales right down to the postcode area. Be good at data management and it will pay off.
As for Facebook, you can still run Facebook events, but remember to invite the people who might actually attend the event, sometimes people either invite no one, or blanket invite people 100’s of miles away from the venue which is just lazy.
It takes a combination of tools to make an event a success.
Understanding your audience is also important. Trying to promote an NWOBHM event to the under 40’s that isn’t say Iron Maiden won’t be as successful, in the same way promoting a Metalcore gig to people over 40 isn’t likely to be successful. Know your audience, know who might like the music, and work to get those people out. Don’t waste your time and money on people who will never attend the show. Don’t believe everyone is going to like your music/event just because you do. Some people do like everything, but they are a minority.
Ultimately if you are not spending to advertise, aren’t communicating to anyone directly what your event is when it is, and doing the bare minimum promotional wise then you will not get a good turnout. The scene isn’t dead, many are doing very well right now, but they have adapted to the times, they know their audience and they working hard to get a good turnout.
I realise I have written a lot of thoughts down here, so I will stop but I hope my blog post has been useful to you!
Kaine’s second album The Waystone is close to selling out on CD for the 4th an final time. The Waystone is still the bands best selling album which released 6 years ago in 2014. The band in this era completed two tours, a UK tour and a Britain and Ireland tour supporting Mordred. Kaine also played Wildfire Festival 2015 in Scotland alongside Diamond Head, Tygers of Pan Tang, Holocaust and more.
The album has already been removed from streaming platforms such as Spotify and will be members only on bandcamp after the final 6 copies are sold. You can order one of these CD’s from here, which are cheaper direct from the band than on reselling sites. There is also a handful of patches available to buy on the merch section of Bandcamp.
Anthony Murch (Guitarist for The Rock Dinosaurs and It’s Not A Phase Mum) has done a play through on his new YouTube channel AHM Music of the song Iron Lady from the 2014 album The Waystone.
Anthony Murch was the lead guitarist in Kaine from 2012 to 2015 performing on the Falling Through Freedom and The Waystone albums. He has since appeared as a guest on stage with the band and a guest solo for the single version of Black on Reforge The Steel.
To mark 5 years of The Waystone album we’ve done our first official patch to accompany the new Waystone EP which will be recorded later this year.
This patch is high quality, full colour and features the original “Evil Eyes” t-shirt design. Each patch comes with a free download of The Waystone album. Limited to just 50. Members get 10% off all orders.
The removed artwork that used Kaine’s The Waystone artwork
Qwertee has now removed the t-shirt following the bands legal threat from earlier today. Kaine will soon be releasing a new 5 year anniversary t-shirt from the album and a new EP.
Kaine’s album artwork from The Waystone (and t-shirt design) has been used without permission by Qwertee, a mass t-shirt printing company. The company has ripped off the artwork and design for their Waystone Inn shirts and hoodies (seen above).
The original shirt
Qwertee is based at Qwertee, Block 3, Harcourt Road, Dublin, Ireland and their Company Number is 476522. Former lead guitarist Anthony Murch (who performed on The Waystone) brought the image theft to the attention of the band this morning when the product had been advertised to him.
The original album artwork by Silencer8 which was commissioned by Kaine for the album
Qwertee artist Noreu is claiming to have designed the artwork on their website. This has come as the new line-up of Kaine looks to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the album with their own limited edition t-shirt release and EP. – https://kaine-metal.com/2019/06/19/kaine-to-record-the-waystone-e-p/
Dan Mailer, who helped found Kaine back in 2009 as the bands original bassist and co-vocalist will be rejoining the band on stage at it’s tenth anniversary show next April.
While in the band he released two studio albums, performed on a live album and featured on the band’s first two major tours, one of which being a Britain and Ireland tour alongside American Thrash Metal legends Mordred, and Wildfire Festival where Kaine played alongside Diamond Head, Lawnmower Death, Tygers of Pan Tang, Holocaust among many others. He also had the honour of replacing former Bruce Dickinson bass player Chris Dale, while stepping in to play bass with Monument on the 2014 Monument tour.
The Waystone, still the bands most critically and commercially successful album to date, was largely due to Dan’s contributions to the album and the overall songwriting process, which also saw the band briefly signed and professionally managed.
He has since played bass in bands such as Deep Machine, Daemona, Gabriel and Elimination as well as releasing his first solo EP, Introspectrum, and recently he has become the vocalist for long standing Heavy Metal revivalists and good friends of Kaine, Osmium Guillotine.
To buy tickets to the 10 year show please click here.
Kaine have sadly had to cancel their Scotland dates for 2018 due to a combination of issues starting the lack of availability of the Vauxhall van for the trip, work schedules (due to cancelled holiday which was out of our hands) and support bands having to unfortunately also pull out of the shows themselves. We never take such a decision lightly however, we decided given everything it would be best to leave it at this stage and look to hopefully return in future.
In addition to the cancelled Scotland dates, our upcoming dates in Coventry and Chelmsford have been cancelled by the promoters/venues.
So at the start of 2016, having already started work on songs such as Voice in Hell, Afterlife & Fall of Jericho, we returned to being a four-piece comprising of myself, now the sole original member on guitar and vocals, Chris MacKinnon, the only other guy to survive past The Waystone on drums and now sharing vocal duties taking over from Dan, Saxon Davids on lead guitar having joined us in 2014 and appeared on the Justice Injustice single and new boy Stephen Ellis on bass guitar.
As mentioned in my previous blog, the old band had essentially split up following Ant’s departure, my girlfriend had just left me and we had a month off gigging to work on new material, and that we did, we worked bloody hard. In addition to getting Fall of Jericho and Afterlife ready to be played and tested in a live setting, we also started playing a song Saxon wrote called Heavens Abandonment and one of my new songs, The Preacher Eyes around this time also, ready for our big return show at the Soundhouse, Colchester on the 5th of February. We were able to work on those songs and get them into the set in time for the show.
Kaine at the Soundhouse
The show itself was a fun one, we had Daemona (Dan Mailer’s new band), Kill The Freak (featuring the soon to be famous Conor Ridd, of Freak fame, whose success would dwarf everyone else’s form the Underground music scene) and Myopic Empire (featuring two-time Kaine live drummer James Balcombe) on the bill which was a nice way to get back into playing live, with friends and adjust to being a four-piece again. The night went relatively well, we had a decent turnout and all the bands played great. We took to the stage and had a rough set by our standards, Chris played one of the new songs too fast so we turned that into a jam, we invited Dan up on stage to do Solidarity with us, in which I managed to break a string and had to quickly adapt the song to being a string down and I just sang lead vocals for the last song. It was a bumpy restart to Kaine, but we were on our way.
After that, we played a couple of shows that weren’t that great in terms of attendance but at that time this was good for us as we were finding our feet again. Over the next few months, we continued working on material, adding in a song that Stevo and Saxon came up with called A Night Meets Death into the set while reworking and tightening up the other new songs we had. We even played Wales for the first time, at a place called The Patriot in Crumlin.
Writing the album in 2016
We survived mostly on our two residencies, one at The Soundhouse in Colchester and the Rock Den in Hatfield alongside our regular gigs at Asylum in Chelmsford. We were able to rebuild the reputation of the band at these gigs and show people that we were alive and well despite the line-up changes. People were also starting to recognise the difference in the band’s sound coming from the new material and people were really enjoying the new material.
Outside of those residencies, we were still playing all over, however, there were a few stinkers up and down the road still. Our first gig in Bolton at the Alma was pretty fun, we took a pilgrimage to the Fred Dibnah statue, a legendary British steeplejack, engineer and Victorian historian from the town, and it was our first time meeting Twisted Illusion, a band we would go on to become friends with, so much so, Stevo ended up playing bass on their album Insight to the Mind of a Million Faces, which would see them featured in Classic Rock magazine and at Bloodstock festival in the UK.
Bolton is a bit of an odd place in that, not only was the fish shop too posh for us to eat in, it had Butlers, but there was a shop that only sold settees and phone cases. I still don’t understand that.
Saxon and the Tour Van
We also had in the works our first standalone tour, in Scotland. We had first played Scotland back in 2014 on both the Renegades tour and Mordred’s Britain and Ireland tour, we were then subsequently booked to play Wildfire Festival in 2015, and our performance at that show had been so strong we had been nominated for an award for it, and thus had built up a following in Scotland. Being plagued with messages and e-mails asking for our return, we decided we would head up for a three-date tour to test the waters. We would hit Perth, Glasgow and Edinburgh over a weekend. Vauxhall were kind enough to endorse our tour and given us the van for free. Alex Smith also joined us as tour manager and roadie. The tour was a success in some ways, we had a decent turnout all three nights and a lot of fun but also lost money due to the promotional side of things, but we hadn’t run it as a money-making exercise, just to see if we could tour alone and draw an audience.
Alex, selling our merch on the Scotland Tour
One night the guys got pissed up in Dave Ritchie’s house (he runs Wildfire and kindly allowed us to stay). Stevo got to the point where he couldn’t walk so I had to physically pick him up and carry him to bed and Alex managed to keep me up snoring anyway, it even woke Chris up who lobbed his shoes at him to no avail.
Live in Scotland 2016
The next night we played in Edinburgh, the guys feeling like crap from the drink and lack of sleep. I don’t drink, but suffered as a consequence of them keeping me up all night. We played Bannermans next, which is a great little venue. We were lucky enough to be able to stay in the flat upstairs, however, Matt Denny (Mordred’s UK Tour manager, who had come to see us) had pointed out it was haunted. Chris then didn’t sleep all night, and instead stayed awake in a paranoid state. I slept fine, which was surprising as I shared the same room as Alex who normally snores like a freight train at the best of times. Chris, being one of the drivers along with Stevo then had to drive home in a tired state.
We released a recording of a set from one of our August shows at the Soundhouse, which was recorded accidently by Myopic Empire for free download on the 12th of that same month which can be downloaded from here.
This would turn out to be our last ever show at the venue, we did have one further date as part of our residency but the new venue owners, after complaining about us taking a share of the bar fee to pay for promotional costs, cancelled our November date without informing us. They later claimed to others they didn’t know about the date, despite talking about it with us on the night while they advised us they wouldn’t be offering a bar split in future, to which we informed them that we wouldnt be paying for promotion out of our own pocket. It’s their loss ultimately as our shows there were always well attended and the venue did make money on those nights. This is typical of the short sightedness of a lot of venue owners, many of which will spend nothing on promotion, complain about paying bands and be equally upset when turnout is poor.
After our set at Mearfest 2016
The next big gig we did in 2016 was Mearfest at the Borderline in London. The turnout was incredible and the bands were great. Mearfest is a charity New Wave of British Heavy Metal festival, which raises money for good causes run by Brian and Claire Mear. They had sadly lost their daughter Molly, who had been born stillborn and the event was in aid of a stillbirth clinic that provides support for parents who have gone through such a traumatic experience. They very much view it as turning a tragedy into a positive and it was an honour to support that event. A year later Claire would give birth to her daughter Amelie.
Throughout the year we would introduce yet more songs into the set, after writing, rehearsing, and working them intensely. They would be songs such as Alone and A Crisis of Faith which I had written, Frailty of the Blade, one of Stevo’s songs which was originally a song called Stephens song about rape culture by a band called Drop Dead Fred that Chris and Stevo had played in, which we reworked into a Kaine song and finally The Mind is Willing, another song by Chris and the first tone he performed lead vocals on. Another song was written by Stevo around this time called Consigned To Flames of Woe, which didn’t wind up on this album and he also wrote an intro piece for Heaven’s Abandonment.
We would continue to change and adapt the songs live, both musically and lyrically to further improve them, which is why we were playing the material before the album was out. It’s how Black Sabbath wrote a lot of their early material, and how Iron Maiden did most of their first two albums and it was clearly something we also greatly benefitted from.
Later in the year we had a few more great shows up and down the country, we headlined a packed out Portland Arms in Cambridge, which I think was the first show we ever played Alone at, where the audience was absolutely mental and mosh pits galore.
In November we were made aware that the Asylum venue in Chelmsford needed to raise around £12k very quickly to remain open. The Asylum, being the best place to play as a Metal band in Chelmsford, and a cause close to us in the band is very important to us. We decided we would write and record a song to help raise money for the venue, which became Holding The Line, one Sunday I wrote the majority of the music and the lyrics, we rehearsed it on the Thursday and then recorded it live on Sunday the 20th of November. We were kindly offered the studio time free of charge by Ade Hare (Producer Falling Through Freedom & Justice Injustice) at Threecircles to help support the venue, who recorded and mixed the track and Z-Plane (mastering on The Waystone, Justice Injustice and Falling Through Freedom) mastered the track, also for free. Over 200 copies of the single were sold, with every penny going to the venue.
We rounded off the year back in Ipswich at the Swan, again a packed show where the audience was absolutely fantastic. I hope you have enjoyed the part two on how A Crisis of Faith came into existence and I will try and write part three at a later point.
