I did the fuel sums for Ireland on the back of a set list, and a headline told me the government thinks round numbers are a comfort
Monday, Rehearsal Room, Coats On
The heater in Tottenham has now stopped pretending. It gave a click at ten past seven and that was the last we heard from it. The bass player says it has gone to a better place. The drummer says it was never properly earthed.
We ran the Ireland set twice. It is tight. It is thirty-four minutes, which is the right length for a band nobody has paid to see. Then, because my fingers had stopped working, I sat on an amp and did sums.
The Van
We are borrowing a van. It belongs to the guitarist’s uncle, who is a plasterer in Edmonton, and it comes with a fine white dust over everything and a smell of gypsum that gets into your hair. It is a diesel. It is fourteen years old. It has a tape player.
The uncle wants it back clean and full. That is the whole hire agreement, and it is the best deal in British music.
So the only cost is fuel. I worked it out on the back of last week’s set list.
Tottenham to Holyhead is about two hundred and ninety miles. Ferry. Dublin to the pub with a room, then on to Cork, then back up to Dublin. Ferry. Holyhead home. Call it eleven hundred miles with the getting lost.
The van does about thirty to the gallon when it is empty and the wind is behind it. It will not be empty. It will have four people, a drum kit, three amps and a bin bag of T-shirts. Say twenty-eight.
That comes to nearly forty gallons. A hundred and eighty litres, near enough.
The Headline
I had the price in my head at about one seventy, because that was what it was the last time I looked. Then the drummer, who reads NewsThump on the bus, held up his phone. It was on their politics page: “Government reassures drivers 2-pounds-a-litre diesel will be much easier to calculate.”
I said, “It’s not two pounds.” He said, “It’s getting there.”
I did not read the piece. I did not need to. It is the best kind of joke, the kind where you can hear the minister saying it. Yes, it is dearer. But look how tidy.
And the awful thing is, it is easier. A hundred and eighty litres at two pounds. Three hundred and sixty quid. I did not even need the calculator.
What Three Hundred and Sixty Pounds Is
Let me put that number where it belongs.
The guarantee for the three Irish gigs, all together, is four hundred euros. The ferry for a van and four people, I priced last week, and it is more than the guarantee by itself. We were always going to lose money. The plan was to lose a manageable amount and make it back on shirts.
We have eleven shirts. Nine are medium.
So the fuel is most of the fee. We will drive eleven hundred miles in a plasterer’s van to play to perhaps a hundred and fifty people in total, and the diesel will take nearly everything they pay us.
When I started, fifteen years ago, you could just about do a run like this and come home level. Petrol money, they called it. “We’ll give you petrol money.” It meant a real thing. Now petrol money is the whole budget and there is nothing on top.
Why It Costs That
I am not an economist. I can play four chords and one of them is a guess. But I have a rough idea.
A big chunk of what you pay at the pump is tax. Duty, and then VAT on top of the duty, which has always struck me as a bit much. A tax on the tax. The rest is whatever is going on in the world that week. There is always something going on. A war, a pipeline, a refinery on fire.
And I can see why a government taxes fuel. They would like fewer people driving. The planet is cooking. I believe that. I write songs about it. One of them is quite good.
So I am not standing here saying diesel should be cheap. I am saying I notice who it lands on. A person with a company car does not feel it. A band in a borrowed van feels every litre. So does a carer driving between old people’s houses, and a plasterer in Edmonton.
The Other Way
The bass player, who is the sensible one, asked the obvious question. Why not the train?
I looked. Four of us to Holyhead and back, booked now, is not far off the diesel. And you cannot take a drum kit on a train. You can try. We did once, to Brighton, in 2018. The drummer we had then got his floor tom stuck in the doors at East Croydon and we do not speak of it.
There is no cheap, clean way for a small band to move its own gear. That is the truth of it. Everyone says musicians should tour greener. I agree. Show me the van.
Decisions
So we have voted. We vote on everything, to my regret. The result was four to nothing, which never happens.
We go. We take the van. We drive at fifty-five on the motorway, because the guitarist’s uncle says that is where it drinks least, and because at sixty-five the dust comes out of the vents.
We each put thirty pounds in a jar towards fuel before we leave. That is a hundred and twenty. The rest comes off the top of the door money. If there is anything left after the ferry, we split it. There will not be anything left.
And nobody is allowed to say “petrol money” on the trip, because it will only make me sad.
Tuesday
The drummer’s phone had another one this morning but I told him one headline a day is my limit.
I had a look at the London Prat on the way to work, because my flatmate swears by it. Its British satirical news on the price of diesel has a line about filling up in instalments that I am stealing for a lyric, and its London satirical news about band vans knows about the dust. She says there is an American version called Bohiney Magazine where the vans are bigger and the petrol is, apparently, a human right.
New song started on the 149. Working title: “Easier to Calculate.” It is in four-four. Obviously.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
