Threatin: The fake band who created a tour without an audience
At its worst, internet culture can feel like a grift. A squabbling, squawking shower of careerist hacks desperately trying to “control the narrative” on whatever brush with reality they actually have because “the narrative” is all that matters nowadays. It doesn’t matter how much of a loser/boomer/criminal (delete as applicable) we look; we’ve always got “alternative facts” that show we were right and cool the whole time. Ignore the fact that nobody showed up to our headline tour.
One almost can’t blame them. It can’t be a coincidence that the rise of the content creator/influencer has come with the fall of job security for an entire generation. Spending an entire career at the same job, let alone company, is an idea so outdated in can only truly be communicated via telegram, so in the absence of any real employer that folks can count on to take care of them, all we have is our branding.
All we have is the ability to look as if everything is going swimmingly and that any diversion from that is a carefully concocted artistic statement to that effect. One of the best examples of this came way back in the heady days of 2018, with arguably the most bizarre music news story of that year. It began, as many news stories did back then, with a Facebook post. Famed Camden metal venue The Underworld did as they basically always did: posted about the gig they’d hosted the night before.
However, this was a very different type of post. No praise for the band, no videos of excitable fans or photos of Ibanez shredding guys in black. Instead, it was something different. Something quite venomous was posted directly to the headlining band’s Facebook page. “What happened to the 291 advanced ticket sales your agent said you’d sold? THREE PEOPLE turned up.” Turns out they weren’t alone. A few days later, the band “played” The Exchange in Bristol. After a promoter claimed to have sold 182 tickets, the actual turnout was… well, it was one of those numbers. And it wasn’t eight.
What the hell was going on? The “band”, a vaguely metal solo project hilariously called Threatin, were scheduled for a ten-show European tour. It was soon becoming clear that the number of tickets sold for the said tour might actually be less than the number of dates on it, yet every date had paid the venue hire fee in full, so the show had to go on. That is, until about halfway through the tour when the hired backing band quit. Frontman Jered Eames tried to struggle on playing to a backing track, but the final shows of the tour were mercifully cancelled.
So, what on earth happened? Even if the hire fee was paid in full, these venues don’t hand out bookings to anyone with a couple of hundred quid to hand. Thus, people began to notice the online world Threatin had created for himself. A Facebook page with over 40,000 likes. YouTube videos with thousands of views and comments. A record label, promoter and PR company he was signed to. All created by Eames and his wife and propped up by a small army of online bots he’d bought.
Eames himself kept quiet on the whole thing, only one cryptic tweet acted as his statement on the matter “What is Fake News? I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion.” Then, helpfully, Eames’ brother Scott posted the entire backstory for all to see. It turns out he’d always been this brutally lame, unholy crossbreed between Marilyn Manson and Alan Partridge, who hadn’t spoken to his family since 2012. This was his nauseating attempt to break into a music industry that had, deservedly, kept him at arm’s length.
Depressingly, that’s not the end of the story. There was a follow-up gig at The Underworld one year to the day after the initial catastrophe. It’s a gig so unbearably cringe that it must be intentional, except that’s so much worse than if it was a genuine, The Room-style attempt at profundity from a man blissfully unaware of his apocalyptic lack of talent. Hannah Mylrea covered it for NME, surely a music writer’s equivalent of dying for our sins, and (thank Christ) that does seem to be a series wrap on Jered “Threatin” Eames. A man who set out for Andy Kaufman-esque subversion and mystery but forgot one crucial part of the man on the moon’s scheme. Andy Kaufman was talented.
