Jamie Butterworth - Sound Maestro and Tour Manager/Supernanny

Jamie Butterworth is a Tour Manager and Sound Engineer who’s worked with numerous acts including Mylo, Martin Grech, world music bands the Afro Celt Sound System and the Doll Foundation, The Real Tuesday Weld, Grand National, Amy Studt, classical violinist Sophie Solomon and Magoo.

SISSY: How did you get to do sound and tour manage?

JAMIE: I started working for a local crew company, we would build stages, hang lights and set up backline, you had to be a jack of all trades. To cut a long story short I was offered a job upstairs at the Garage in London as one of the house sound engineers. Through contacts I made there, I was asked to sound engineer for touring bands. I ended up tour managing because people like to save money; they’d rather have you do two jobs than one!

SISSY: Did you get any training to be a sound engineer?

JAMIE: I did a degree in popular music at Leeds University and I also went to Kingsway College in London (famous for educating Johnny Rotten, Jah Wobble and … Jamie Oliver) before that. I was a guitarist at the time, and I played in a band called Omni for a while after that.

SISSY: Did you have any success as a musician?

JAMIE: Close… but no cigar! I got bored with chasing the dream; record deals and stuff, trying to write hit songs and having record companies saying ‘it’s good but can you change this or that’… what’s the point?

SISSY: What style of music did you play?

JAMIE: Kind of rocky but weird with lots of strings; our main influences were probably Bjork (we had a female singer) and Faith No More. Our drummer Scott now plays for Imperial Leisure and Ruth the singer still writes stuff.

SISSY: What does being a tour manager entail?

JAMIE: A lot of preparation! You get given a list of gig dates from the band’s booking agent or manager and the tour manager’s job is to turn those dates into a tour; book flights (if necessary) and tour buses or splitter vans plus if you’re playing somewhere like Brixton Academy or big shows like that then you have to arrange the PA, lights and crew. You’re also in charge of the budget, doing the accounts, booking hotels and generally looking after the artist on tour. It depends a lot on what level you’re doing it; on the very basic level, i.e. small venues, you have to deal with the in-house promoters of the venues to arrange riders and food whereas with a bigger tour all that is arranged through an agent like SJM so you just liaise with their rep. In an ideal situation, a tour will have a tour manager to look after the artist, hotels and finances; a production manager to look after the PA, lights etc; two sound engineers, one to do front of house sound and one to do onstage monitors for the band and a couple of Techs for backline and drums. Sometimes though, at a lower level, one person ends up doing the whole lot.

SISSY: Do you prefer the bigger budget productions?

JAMIE: It can be good, working with someone like Mylo where the budget is big enough to basically build your own show from start to finish. But it’s also nice to go back down again and slog it out with a band in a splitter bus.

SISSY: Can you describe a typical day on tour?

JAMIE: Usually you have to get up early, before everyone else, make sure the crew (if any) are together to go to the venue and set up. Then the crew will do line checks to make sure everything is working. Meanwhile there’s accounts to be done every day, itineraries to be worked out, guest lists to be compiled, interviews the artists needs to attend, problems to be solved and tea to be drunk. Then you have to go back to the hotel/tour bus and make sure the band are up and ready in time for soundcheck, make sure they have enough money so they can eat, basically it’s like being a babysitter or a nanny… it doesn’t matter how civilised and capable a human being is, as soon as they step on the tour bus they become completely incapable of functioning like a responsible human being!A tour manager also has to be like an oracle because you have to be able to answer every question. You may spend hours writing tour itineraries and making them into little books for everyone so they have all the relevant information at there finger tips, yet they’ll glance at it and say ‘that’s pretty’ then discard it. Then they’ll proceed to fire questions at you so you have to know it all off by heart!

SISSY: Is being a tour manager a well-paid job?

JAMIE: It can be, although the work isn’t always constant so you have to take that into account. It can range from the bottom end where you do everything for £100 a day, up to big productions where you can get £500+ a day or more just for tour managing.

SISSY: Can you tell us a bit more about how you learned to do live sound?

JAMIE: I studied from the age of 17 or 18 but most of my experience comes from working.

SISSY: What tips can you give?

JAMIE: If you want to be a sound engineer, learn to EQ!!! If you’re doing the EQ, it’s good to have a piece of music that’s well produced and that you know really well so you can hear when you’ve set the rig up to sound right.
The most important thing about being a sound engineer is understanding frequencies; knowing what each frequency sounds like and making a venue that could be horrible because of its natural acoustics, sound great. You also have to understand and be sympathetic to the music that you’re mixing. Sometimes it’s not necessary to mic everything up individually; it’s about getting a good overall sound and sometimes less is more. You have to be sensitive to the situation you find yourself in each day and be adaptable.My advice to anyone who wants to be a sound engineer is the first thing you should do is go and work for free; get some work experience at a venue. Go in to a venue and ask if you can help out and learn all the various aspects of the job like how to mic up and how to patch everything, how to EQ a rig. Watch the soundman do a few gigs, then maybe they’ll let you do sound for the first band on one night and you could end up working there. Also, try and get friendly with a new band and do their sound, maybe for free at the start so when their career takes off, they’ll take you with them.

SISSY: Have you worked as a monitor engineer as well as front-of-house?

JAMIE: Yes, it’s a different brief to the out front sound. You can be doing as many as ten (sometimes more) different mixes for the members of the band. Each person will want different things in their monitors, and you might have to change things for different songs within the set. You have to be really on the ball and react to changes onstage. Doing monitors can be more challenging and you’re closer to the band; I like having that relationship where you’re communicating with the band throughout the show, whereas doing the front-of-house sound can be more of a solitary thing.

SISSY: Do you think it’s true that the soundman’s performance can be almost more important than the band’s performance because if he does a bad job, the whole show will suffer?

JAMIE: As a soundman, you are in a very important position because there can be up to 50,000 people depending on you to help the band get their songs across. In a sense you are there to reinforce what the band are doing, so if the band is crap then you don’t stand a chance of making it sound good! There’s also a creative element to it as well especially if you are working with an artist from the beginning. One of the things that I really enjoy is to sit down with the artist to discuss how they want their live show to sound. I spend time in rehearsals tweaking guitar amps, bass amps, discussing vocal effects, learning the songs and basically aid the artist to sonically evolve their live show. You can end having a satisfying creative input to a certain extent.

SISSY: As a former musician, do you get the same buzz from doing the sound as you do from performing on stage?

JAMIE: Definitely! And you can get a buzz from tour managing as well; To have stood out front-of-house after a show at Brixton Academy and have someone tap me on the shoulder saying ‘you instigated all this, you made it happen!”… it’s an amazing feeling! Obviously you could never do it alone, you need a good team to make it happen. It’s great to think that a few weeks before, the gig was just a date in a diary and then suddenly it’s all happening and 5000 people are going mental.

SISSY: There must be a lot of politics and stress involved in your job… how do you cope and de-stress?

JAMIE: Its very hard not to get involved in band politics! You have to always remember that it’s just a job and that you can walk away from it… it’s not life and death. When it gets stressful, find somewhere where you can take a deep breath… and drink a bottle of whiskey!

SISSY: You must have seen a few up-and-coming bands play at the Garage when you were working there?

JAMIE: Yes a few. I remember doing monitors for the Darkness before they were known.

SISSY: What’s your verdict on the great ‘did the Darkness take themselves seriously until they realised hamming it up would get them somewhere’ debate?

JAMIE: Without a shadow of a doubt, they were taking themselves very seriously! I still think they do to a certain extent but the record company has marketed them as an ‘ironic’ rock band. In America they can be serious because there’s very little irony in rock over there!

SISSY: Did you do sound for anyone else who’s famous now?

JAMIE: Keane played at the Garage loads of times before they were big. I remember when they first got their record deal and proudly came in with brand new equipment. They used to have a guitarist and sound a lot heavier back then. Snow Patrol played a few times as well around that time.

SISSY: Have you got anything lined up for the near future?

JAMIE: I’ve got more work with Sophie Solomon and Mylo coming up.

SISSY: You seem to do sound for a lot of acts who aren’t typical guitar music. Do you prefer that?

JAMIE: I accidentally started doing some of the world music bands and it’s a great opportunity because if you become a straightforward rock engineer there’s things you’ll never experience and you’ll be restricted as to what you can do. I think you get more respect if you have a more diverse CV, it’s a competitive industry so the more experience you have the more work you get. World music tends to get overlooked in the UK but worldwide, it’s a big thing so you get to travel. When I was doing the Afro Celts, we played all over Europe, Singapore, the USA and for me, that’s what it was all about. It’s great to have that travelling lifestyle without the pressures of being a band member.

SISSY: I know you’ve done the UK ‘toilet’ tour with lots of bands and must be an authority on the venues by now!

JAMIE: Bands should have a legal right to know what they’re letting themselves in for when they get a gig at these places! The quality of the venue and the treatment you get can vary enormously. Of all the small venues in the country, I love the Dublin Castle in Camden; as a sound engineer I’ve never had bad sound in there. Sometimes the sound can be the best in the most bizarre venues; on tour with Martin Grech we played the White Horse in High Wycombe. When we arrived for soundcheck, there were strippers dancing on a greasy pole! It’s a small grotty pub but the sound that night was the best on the whole tour!

SISSY: What about the legendary Hull Adelphi?

JAMIE: It’s got a certain character about it that is special… don’t eat the curry though! The guy who runs it feeds you curry and it’s a bit dodgy! But seriously, he does an incredible job; he’s devoted his whole life to that venue. In London, we’re spoilt because any band can get a gig and there’s loads of places to see up-and-coming bands. But in Hull, there’s only the Hull Adelphi.

SISSY: What are your favourite big venues?

JAMIE: Brixton Academy because it symbolises success to London bands and it has a magical vibe, and, just to sound pretentious, the Olympia in Paris! That’s one of my favourite gigs because as well as sounding great, the backstage area is brilliant; lots of rooms where you can hide away. When you’re on a long tour it’s really good to have somewhere you can chill out and do all the paperwork.

SISSY: Has the impact of the internet on the music industry had any effect on your area of the business?

JAMIE: The only thing I’ve noticed is that there seem to be bands that have loads of money pumped into them but they only ever do one tour then you never see them again! I think that nothing has really changed except that the internet has made A&R men lazy; they’ll wait until a band has done a lot of work themselves before signing them now. I think the internet has made everything easier; I don’t know how people tour managed before the internet! If someone wants to know what the PA is like in a venue, I can find out on line. And being able to email when I’m on tour is indispensable.

SISSY: You must have witnessed a few good rock & roll escapades involving sex drugs and rock and roll! Can you tell us any?

JAMIE: Well, a cautionary tale involving drugs was one artist (who shall remain nameless!) got so out of his head in Spain that he started walking out into the sea… and kept walking. He had to be rescued otherwise he’d have disappeared! Another time I was with a band when one of them racked up some lines of cocaine at the back of the bus and decided to carry them to the rest of the band at the front of the bus. Unfortunately, they forgot that the skylight in the roof was open, so because we were travelling at 80mph down the motorway the cocaine was blasted all over the bus!

SISSY: In your experience, are drugs still a problem in the music business?

JAMIE: Well there’s no point being in the music business if you’re a prude but personally I don’t do drugs. I have a few drinks sometimes, but there’s a time and a place for it. A bit of sex, drugs and rock and roll won’t hurt anybody; its only when it starts to be abused that the problems start. Pete Doherty is the classic example of when it goes wrong… it’s like he can’t control himself for long enough to remember why he started playing music in the first place. It wasn’t about heroin; it was about being in a band, writing songs and getting an opinion or a story across to people. I don’t recommend that people get out of it before going on stage because it can all go horribly wrong; party after the show when you’ve earned it. In a way, I think there’s probably as much if not more drugs consumed in the city by business people than there is in the music business these days! A&R people are only likely to take drugs because they need to stay awake and go to gigs every night, and musicians tend to use it to keep themselves vibed up because touring can be incredibly boring at times. You’re spending hours, days and weeks with the same 5 people on a tour bus and once you’ve learnt all about each other what do you do? You have to try and create your own fun.

SISSY: What are the relative pluses and minuses to touring in various countries?

JAMIE: In America, the union system can make things a bit difficult. Obviously, they don’t want British crew to come over and take jobs that could be done by Americans so it can be hard to get a work visa because it costs a lot and smaller bands can’t afford it. Belgium and Germany are probably the best organised and the most efficient countries to play in whereas Italy is the worst place to play from the technical point of view… they have great food and wine though! You do the soundcheck then go to dinner for 6 hours and they ply you with grappa so you practically forget you’re there to do a gig! You get an eight-course meal but the equipment doesn’t work and no one knows what they’re doing.

SISSY: So finally, are there any do’s and don’ts for touring?

JAMIE: Don’t shit in the tour bus… in the toilet or anywhere else! Try and change your clothes regularly and have a shower at the venue… most of them have one. Because you’re all living in such close proximity it’s only polite to try and not smell! And eat healthily! It doesn’t matter how much you drink etc., if you eat well you’ll have the stamina for the tour. All MOTO service stations have a Marks and Spencers now… use them! Eat a salad instead of a Ginster’s pasty; avoid those at all costs because they’re dangerous… more evil than any drug! And when you’re touring in France a good tip is… make sure the beer you buy from the service stations actually has alcohol in it: I was driving through France on the Mylo tour and the band needed beer because they were all really hung over. So we bought some, and then some more, and some more. They wondered why we weren’t feeling drunk until they realised it was non-alcoholic beer. Another good tip is when crossing European borders, make sure there are no drugs in the bus because you may well get searched and if they find a trace of something using the sniffer dogs, then you’ll all end up being strip-searched in intimate places! Hide it in the drum cases because they’re more likely to look up your bum first!

We finish the interview at that point and have a few beers with Jamie and some of his friends. He really is a wicked soundman, we’ve been to a few shows where he was in charge and it sounded amazing. If you want to contact Jamie you can do so at soundhooligan@hotmail.com