Why you need to put on a guerrilla gig
A rare Friday night plan for my ageing diary and within a few hours, the sun is setting behind Buster and The Pigeons as they stand across a concrete block, tucked under a bridge and jutting out slightly into the Thames Estuary.
The burning ball of flames in the sky has turned the atmosphere in this part of the world unbridled umber, and the salt of the sea gently lapping the pathway filled with a group of beer-swilling locals feels like a welcome seasoning at the end of a barbecuing day of intense heat.
When the world feels so bleakly close to collapse, and with the cost of living making every single minute of oxygen feel like a £1 coin falling out of your lungs, moments like this are hard to come by. A band have decided to forget TikTok, to ignore the ‘proper’ way of promotion and instead found a generator, picked a location and threw together a guerrilla gig. It’s free, it’s fun, and, ultimately, it’s idyllic, and let’s be honest, not much about the music industry is right now.
It is incredibly easy to become disheartened when looking at the state of play for most musicians trying to make it in a world that has long since forgotten the grassroots movements that made it. Record sales are nonexistent, and most major labels, the ones mostly capable of providing a living, are more concerned with virality than artistry. But I won’t bore you with another diatribe of why TikTok is happy to blow the smouldering ashes of an industry into the ether, and instead offer some genuine advice for any band hoping to make an impact: put on a guerrilla gig.
The Sex Pistols, The Libertines, Skepta and even Geese, with their recent free show, can all attest to why putting on a performance on your own back can have a dramatic impact on your presence as a band. But, marketing aside, for most bands enjoying the greenest of salad days, it offers so much more. Speaking to Buster Meaney after the show, he explained that while the notion of doing “real gigs” is, of course, part of the road map for any band as young as his, they’re not even a year into the group, the reality was that they were a troop who revel in their “misfit vibes” and “don’t really like doing things prim and proper”. So instead of waiting to be invited to the local indie club for a support slot, Buster and his band began making videos promoting an impromptu show in front of the sunset.
Things slowly gathered pace online, but as the big day approached, it was hard to know if something like this ‘could’ happen, let alone if it would. Leigh-on-Sea, the gig’s locational host, is certainly charming, and not without its bohemian elements, but the very real prospect of a police presence in such a public spot is a genuine threat to proceedings.
Running late, amps and instruments in hand, but setting up and entertaining the small crowd of people who had begun to assemble, the band began to realise that this might actually happen. A gig built off their own back, with their own wits and just a little bit of light persuading of friends and family, could unfold into something truly magnificent.
Soon enough, as the busy pathway, full of revellers heading to pubs or leaving the beach, began to swell, it became clear that not only would the gig Buster had waited “six months” to get the band to agree to go ahead, but it was gathering interest. The first song moves into the airwaves with a degree of shyness that is hard to ignore, but as the booze flows, the sun creeps behind the horizon, and things begin to take off into a new area of interest. The crowd grew as the Jamie T-flecked permutations of growing up in a world that seems intent on not respecting its inhabitants erupted into song, and now, they had “30 people now sitting here, sitting down, choosing to watch us,” what’s more, “No one’s left. No one’s booing.”
That feeling grew, and the infectious energy of spontaneous happening became impossible to avoid. It was a crystalline cacophony of humanity. You know the moment I’m talking about, too. I felt it the first time I heard a crowd sing a football song in unison, and you have probably felt it during your gig-going lives. When a crowd silently connects to imbibe in Dionysian revelry.
The fact is, Buster and The Pigeons may have been a band to a handful of people at the start of the evening, but by the end of it, the entire town was buzzing with what had transpired and quite possibly proud of the five people who had taken to that makeshift stage in the sea. It was a trick so beloved that they even repeated it a few weeks later.
If you’re a marketeer or just interested in the upsides of such a venture, then they appear to be quite obvious. Obviously, Buster and The Pigeons have gained a small army of fiercely supportive fans with just a couple of quite wonderfully balanced performances. But what’s more, the group also demonstrated exactly who they were and what they were about. Their choice of venue and time, something that would have been largely out of their hands in the grasp of a promotions company, showcased their laidback sound perfectly. Add to this that the group quickly passed 10k listeners on Spotify following the guerrilla gigs, and it starts to look like a truly shrewd move. But it’s worth more than that.
Pick up an amp, get some acoustic instruments too, find a calm spot, put out a few Instagram posts and find yourself a small group of beer-bringing friends willing to make the journey, and you have yourself something far more important than marketing: you have a memory waiting to lodge itself in your brain forever.
Sure, there is a beauty in stadium-sized crowds singing in primaeval chorus, but the true essence of what makes our hearts beat in time is the connection we get from witnessing it happen in front of our very real eyes. I will bet you anybody that witnessed the events on those summer evenings as Buster and The Pigeons serenaded a town and a few truly bemused dogwalkers has not only told all their friends of the experience but has found a new place on their playlist for the band. It might not be a pandemic of virality that can land you in those stadiums, but it certainly has the common touch that spreads faster than algorithms.
So forget writing a song with a chorus so infuriatingly catchy that enough people will hate-watch it to send your video views into the millions. Don’t be so concerned with finding yourself a support slot at a local show or flinging demos at a record exec. Get some friends together, fake a stage and find yourself a guerrilla gig, or as Buster says, “Not really much to do on a Friday night in my hometown other than go to the pub. So being the solutions-oriented person I am, I thought, ‘Why don’t I find a generator, come down here with the band, put a gig on and give people something to do?’ And we can all just go to the pub after anyway.”
