From the West End to the gig economy: how Britain's top musicians are struggling to survive
For several weekends during this summer Steve Moss would leave his home in Harpenden for King’s Cross St Pancras to embark on a 12-hour shift directing passengers to the correct platforms. “I would work Saturday and Sunday, and my wife would work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday,” he says. “We were paid a fraction more than £10 an hour. But we needed the money.”
Moss, who has two small children aged four and five, isn’t turning his nose up at such work, but only a few months previously he’d been spending most evenings a week down the road at Shaftsbury Avenue in his role as musical director of the hit new production of Les Misérables.
His CV reads like a topography of West End musical successes: conductor of Miss Saigon here; musical director of the UK tour of Mary Poppins there. He is an accomplished clarinettist and pianist, yet since March 16, when Boris Johnson advised all theatres to close, he has earned not a penny from his job.
Nor was he eligible for the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) since his earnings were above the £50,000 threshold. “It’s been impossible,” he says. “I was on the phone to my mortgage adviser the other day, asking whether I could take another mortgage holiday. His advice was to sell the house.”
His is not an uncommon story among Britain’s professional musicians, the vast majority of whom work as freelancers. Falling between the gaps of the Government’s two principal support packages – the job furlough scheme and the SEISS – players, from symphony orchestra soloists to veterans of the West End pit, have been forced to stack supermarket shelves, work on building sites and take on jobs as motorbike couriers to keep their heads, and their families’ heads, above water.
On Tuesday, 400 of those affected gathered in Parliament Square to raise the profile of their plight. Maintaining a safe distance between each other, they played 20 per cent of Mars by Holst and were then silent for two minutes, to symbolise the new self-employed grant, which pays just 20 percent of a person’s earnings, and the large number of freelancers who receive nothing from the SEISS at all.
The protest was organised by violinist Jessie Murphy, with the help of grassroots campaigns We Make Events and Let Music Live. A founder member of two string quartets who works regularly with Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Michael Bublé, she had never organised anything like this, but when her final remaining bit of work for this year was cancelled three weeks ago, taking her lost earnings in 2020 to £30,000, she knew she couldn’t take it lying down.
“I’ve been surviving on savings and money from the grant but I’m now facing a cliff edge,” she says. “I just thought, ‘We need to stand up and be counted’. Most freelance musicians earn in the low £20,000s so 20 per cent of that is not enough to live on.
"There is a perception in the UK that the arts are a bit indulgent. A hobby. But we are highly skilled professionals who help prop up multiple other industries, from festivals to cultural events to conferences to weddings. Not to mention the associated impact of live music on pubs and restaurants in the West End.”
The live music scene is fighting for its very future. Almost overnight hundreds of thousands of people, from sound technicians to video designers to the musicians themselves, many of whom have been training since the age of five, have found themselves scrabbling for alternative employment.
Marcus Bates, a French horn player on the West End musical Wicked, with 20 years’ experience with symphony orchestras across the world, found a bit of work loading photocopiers on to shipping containers, “although at my age [he’s in his fifties] it takes it out of you,” he says. The father of five is now working with a friend repointing old brick walls.
Meanwhile, Toby Coles, a trumpet player who graduated from the Royal Academy of Music and, like Bates, works on West End shows and plays with many of Britain’s best-known symphony orchestras, is working as a delivery driver for the parcel company Hermes. The father-of-one has got by, thanks to a mortgage holiday, but doesn’t know how he’s going to survive now that’s come to an end.
In some ways, though, Coles is lucky. Supermarket and delivery jobs have become scarce. John Donovan, a pianist whose musical director credits include Mamma Mia! and The Band, not only couldn’t get work at Tesco’s, he didn’t even hear back from his application. He’s since found work as a lease car driver but it’s not reliable: one day last week he earned just £30.
“We are strongly aware we are not the only ones suffering and that so many people have been made redundant,” says Murphy. “But we do feel that while there have been great innovations to get pubs and restaurants, hairdressers and beauty salons trading again, there’s been no government support to help us find a way to reopen. It’s not impossible; other European countries are managing.”
Moss puts it more bluntly: “You can sit right next to someone on a plane but you are not allowed to do so in a theatre or concert hall. No one with any power is helping us. In South Korea, theatres are using doors that have self- sanitising handles. In this country, for months after lockdown they were saying we’re not even going to talk about this until November.”
There is a palpable feeling among those affected that the government, for all its talk of the “unprecedented” £1.57 billion grant to the arts sector (which has yet to be distributed and is designed to support institutions rather than performers) has failed to understand what’s at stake.
This week, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak was widely quoted as saying in a TV interview that musicians and others whose jobs are unviable “should retrain and find other jobs”. He’s since argued he was taken out of context, but his seemingly blithe dismissal of an industry worth billions as “unviable” has infuriated artists.
“The one thing that seems to matter to this government is this phrase ‘world beating’,” says Murphy. “But the one thing we have that actually is world beating is our orchestras, our pop music, our musical theatre. It doesn’t make any emotional or financial sense to say goodbye to it. Not only that, but we are a group of really motivated individuals. We each run our own small business as one person. This government has made great efforts to be behind the small business, the gig entrepreneur, and yet we are all these things combined.”
It’s not only the arbitrary £50,000 threshold that has rendered highly trained artists almost penniless, the inadequacies of the self-employment grant, or the political failure to explore and finance initiatives that would allow concert halls, gig venues and theatres to reopen.
It’s not even the growing mental health impact on musicians. It’s the incalculable cultural value of an industry that reaches from Covent Garden to the Royal Albert Hall, from Glastonbury to Glasgow’s Barrowlands, from Spotify to Netflix soundtracks that is in danger of being lost.
Says Bates: “What we’ve got in this country is unique. My plea to the Government is please, please preserve it. Because when it’s lost it’s not coming back.”