You’re in a band. It eats your life. You’ve seen Blur’s ‘Starshaped' tour film twelve times. You’ve flicked through ‘The Rolling Stones: A life On The Road’, and ripped pages out in the library on your lunch hour. You’ve played the local pub sixteen times in the past four months, and locals set their watches by your set. You still live with your parents. You hate your job. You need to breath. It’s time you got out. It’s time you went on tour.
And you can. And you can do it without an agent. Without a manager. Without a record deal. All you need is yourselves. And this is how...Think of it as the twelve steps to the Bridlington George and Dragon...

1. Start booking the tour really stupidly fucking early, ie at the very least five months in advance. I remember the morning my final essay was due at University in Manchester, I dug out my guide sheet form beneath a pile of dirty socks to have a look at the questions, and the first line was something like “Don’t leave your dissertation to the last few months before deadline. You will need to spend at least twelve hours a week on it for the whole academic year.” Point is, if you want to be on tour in October, it’s no good phoning the last few venues in mid September. They will laugh at you.

2. Have a single or a new demo or something ready as you leave, but don’t worry about getting it in shops, just sell it at gigs and through the post. This way there’s something to send to radio stations and journalists, and, more importantly, there’s something people who catch a few songs at some bar in Teymouth can take home. People are much more likely to remember you if they’ve got your songs to play in the car.

3. Sound professional . Never never never phone a promoter and say "Hi, this is Dick and The Dicks, I’ve never really done this before, but could we have a gig?"...Always say "Hi, Quentin Smyth here, manager of Cambride Indie band Dick and The Dicks, wondering if there’s an address I can send you a copy of the band’s forthcoming single on just-made-up-a-name-on-the-spot records?" or some such. This is the only way of promoters will take you seriously when you start begging for petrol money

4. Plan exactly where you want to play and when, so you can call and say "Have you got a second slot on Wednesday 8th December?"

5. Plan the tour by kitchen floors - so, a week on the South coast, sleeping on Eric’s floor, then a week around Bristol, sleeping in Sonya’s garage, then a week around Sheffield...etc.

6. Have a spiel for the phone calls, with a couple of impressive things to say in order to blag £50 out of the promoter if they’re feeling stingy – for me, the line about being on John Peel and Steve Lamaqc did us the world on good.

7. Send out twice as many demos as you need dates. Calling some stranger in Cardiff and trying to get them to guarantee you £25 is quite intimidating, but only if you allow yourself to take rejection personally. If you send out more demos than dates you need, it’s not nearly so bad.

8. Write every detail down when dealing with promoters. I’ve a lot of respect for promoters, who generally put a lot of work into something for which they get no thanks at all, and there are a few saints out there, but most promoters wil never, never, never phone back, return emails, remember who the fuck you are, or what your CD was like, so write down every date you phone them, and if they’re being lazy, say "Thanks for your time, I’ll call you back a week today, on Tuesday 16th July", and next time say "Hello again, Quentin here, manager of The Dicks, we spoke on thr 9th of July, is it possible we can book a date at The Dog and Duck?".

9. Take whatever money you can get. I was shooting in the dark booking our first tour, but I just made figures up – usually took £50, sometime took less, sometimes had to accept fuck all because there was no venue in that town prepared to do anything but a door deal – Leicester, Bradford, London, Cardiff...

10. Plan ahead. Worth stating again – start stupidly early, because the moment you’re up against the clock, you start losing sleep.

11. Don’t have any kind of half way decent social life or job. Incredibly useful bit of advice – since doing something like this tour will eat every penny and minute you have, and will inevitably lead to you being sacled when you go on tour, on no account have an okay job, don’t have any friends who you might be tempted to go out for an ale with when you could be re-typing your booking plan and phoning Todd at the Islington shit heap on a Thursday night; do not, on any account, have a girlfriend, or any sembalance of a life, so it feelslike a big thing when you go to play six people in Darlington on a Tuesday evening.

12. Don’t let any fucking thing put you off or knock your spirit. Get it booked, get on the road and have the greatest time in the world.