This Is Tmrw: New bands, new music, new promoters

For some time I've been thinking of writing about how promoters work. But I haven't got around to it. Why? partly because it's complex and secretive - and not everybody operates, shall we say, fairly. Few promoters will offer up financial details, obviously, and that's something I'd really like to write about. 

So I am grateful to Julia Gilbert and the This is Tmrw team for stepping up to the plate - and we didn't really discuss money anyway. Like musicians, promoters do gigs for different reasons. Here's two teams taking parallel directions with different approaches. Both of them share some problems and have some solutions. Both are idealists. One team does it for love; one for love and, with a bit of luck, money. Both are important to the music infrastructure of the West Midlands. 

Casino: Fourteen years of one step forward, two steps back.

A revised and expanded version of this post 

is included in the new Radio To Go ebook, Survivors 

Casino are still swinging. Their number might be coming up. At last. 

Photo from Jo Ostermeyer

For someone who has taken way too many false turns, who has run into endless broken promises, who’s gone back to square one far too often, Adam Zindani is remarkably chipper. Casino, one of the two bands he plays in, command great local loyalty. They deserve it, they're a fine rock band. But their story brutally illustrates just how much the record industry has changed around them during their fourteen years. From mega-deals to fighting to hold on to artistic control and self-production – it’s all there.

In many ways Casino are carrying on the great Birmingham rock tradition, even if the band members weren't even born when the original 70s metal monsters roamed the land. Strong songs, good players, they look the part: all this has attracted regular interest from big music biz players … who then, regularly, don't follow through.

I’m interested in their durability. When the record industry was imploding in the face of web competition, they threw a lot of bands overboard, destroying careers at random. They did that to Casino, several times. In response, the band has been jumping hurdles just to stand still, for a long, long time.