ISSUE 4 - JUNE 2022
All that went by the wayside. We did a lot of Liam Harbison rescheduling of shows in the hope that they’d go ahead, only to have to cancel again, so it was it was a logistical nightmare. We’ve been constantly trying to re-check availability for different venues for further down the line. Not every artist will be touring every year but because of the pandemic everyone is up against a two year backlog of touring demand. Right now there are simply too many bands chasing too few dates. It’s not just us that’s inconvenienced by this, either. There’s a team of perhaps 15 people on the road with us but there’s maybe another 20 on top of that because we’re hiring buses and trucks to transport gear around, there’s equipment rental, catering and the myriad of other stuff that you have to put in place for a tour.
It’s also very frustrating for fans who have made travel arrangements and booked hotels, only to be told it’s not going ahead because of another lockdown. We wanted to avoid that disappointment for everyone, which is why we never announced the big European tour we had booked for the end of 2020. Hopefully, it might actually might happen this year. During COVID we did a number of things to keep us busy and in touch with fans. We did a couple of live streams shows and we had 30,000 or 40,000 people watching them. Then, as the restrictions started to ease we could get back together again in our studio space in Swords. We were also able to do some corporate engagements around last Christmas which were live streamed to employees around the world. So we’ve kept ourselves busy as well as working on new material. This is the longest break I’ve had in a considerable time. And it has been
particularly special as my wife Carina and I have just had a baby, Vinny, and I’ve been here and able to watch him growing up and helping her out at home. That’s been a huge plus for me. On the work front, we’re now dipping our toe back into things and not getting too ahead of ourselves. We have some festivals booked in this summer, with shows in Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland as well Ireland and the UK, but fewer than we would do normally. Hopefully come September/October, we’ll be doing our own tours again around Europe and booking stuff for America, Australia and Asia
Vinny May, Mark Prendergast, Steve Garrigan, Jason Boland
MY WEEK IN WORK: VINNY MAY
MARCHING TO THE BEAT OF THE COVID DRUM
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The early months of the year are really a downtime in advance of the summer festival season, with a lot of meetings and emails going back and forth about bookings for the coming months and next year. It’s the boring side of what we do! But if it’s a show week, or we’re on tour, it’s very different. As well as the four band members we have a big team supporting us. It includes our day-to-day and tour managers, legal people and accountant. Someone in the band has to keep on top of the business side of things and I have that kind of head. It leaves Mark [Prendergast] and Steve [Garrigan] to focus more on the creative side of song writing day-today. And when we’re on tour we have people looking after equipment, sound lighting and so on, a party of about 15 or 16 in all, so there’s a lot of logistics involved in literally keeping the show on the road.
I’ll generally check emails throughout the day and respond to things as and when they come in. But we’ve surrounded ourselves with some pretty good people to sort the wheat from the chaff, you could say, and that lightens the load for me a good bit. Over the years they’ve developed a good sense of what we will think of something before they bring it to us for a “yay” or “nay”.
The pandemic was something that we really weren’t prepared for. In a normal year we might be away from home touring for anywhere between 100 to 200 days, typically on five or six week tours in Europe and four weeks in the US. Our last trip in Southeast Asia, which included Australia, was for five weeks. Summer is a bit more relaxed because we’ll be doing festivals which mainly happen on the weekend.
We have a booking agent who looks after invitations coming in worldwide, apart for North America, and we have a separate agent for the US and Canada. They’ll field offerings from festivals, put together routings for our own headline tours and liaise with booking agents in different territories. Those proposals will then come into our manager and then we’ll have our say on what we want to do.
When COVID first hit we were just finishing off our fourth album, which was slated for release in May or June. To support the release, we had promo events booked for radio and TV around Europe, as well as shows. That included a seven week European tour followed four weeks in America, which would have brought us right up to Christmas.
FINGAL CHAMBER - NETWORK MAGAZINE
FINGAL CHAMBER - NETWORK MAGAZINE
Formed in 2011, Kodaline is a Swords-based rock band which tours extensively and to date has four albums to its name. Drummer Vincent May, who also looks after the business end of the band, tells Network Magazine that, as might be expected given the nature of the business, there’s no set routine to his day but a lot of variety.
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