The last time I went on tour was in 1991. I was 17 years old and my hair metal band Silent Cry had just released our first album. The highlight of the schedule was playing to a packed gymnasium at my high school – and literally blowing the front off the stage with some over-enthusiastic pyrotechnics. We hoped it would be the start of something bigger, of course. We had an eye on that all-important record deal that would open the door to a life of rock n roll, and all of those other things that promise to go with it. It didn’t quite happen that way. I don’t blame the fireworks that saw our big gig coming to a dramatic end before we’d even finished our set. I blame Nirvana.
When Nevermind came out, it single-handedly murdered my beloved hair metal genre overnight. Nobody was interested in my style of music anymore, and so I sadly packed away the eyeliner and zebra-striped spandex and decided I should probably go back to college. Fast forward to (holy hell) 25 years later, and I’m still waiting for that second chance to tour with a band. That is, I was… up to about a month or so ago.
Because that’s when the opportunity of a lifetime came up. An up-and-coming band with a frontman that I’m a huge fan of, invited me to go on tour with them. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance and (after some serious work convincing my very understanding wife) arrived in Scotland ready for three days and nights of eating, driving, sleeping and spending pretty much every waking second with Stevie Pearce and The Hooligans.
Stevie and I had met in true rock n roll style around a year ago, just after I moved to London. He plays guitar for one of my favourite bands, Warrior Soul, a legendary name from New York’s 80s psychedelic punk scene. I photographed a Warrior Soul gig, found myself chatting to Stevie and mentioning that I’d effectively travelled over from San Francisco for the show. Next thing I knew, I was invited backstage to meet the singer Kory Clarke, and had a great night drinking and talking with the pair of them. That’s when Stevie asked if I’d do some photography for his solo project – and my relationship with The Hooligans was born.
I was as thrilled as that 17-year-old spandex-sporting kid about the tour – but I was also intrigued. How much would have changed in the last quarter of a century? What’s it like to be on the road in a constantly connected, always-on musical world where record labels don’t matter anymore?
In a way, my being there was part of the new musical landscape. Once upon a time, an up-and-coming band on tour would have just one audience: the one in front of them on any given night. Today, it’s different. The shots I’d be taking of Stevie and the boys where for the thousands more following their story on social media, as well as those at the gigs hungry for more content to keep their experience going. That’s the exciting thing about music at the moment. There is no gatekeeper to a wider audience. The only person mediating your relationship with your fans is you – and there’s a huge amount of scope for creativity in how you do it.
That’s why heading out on tour wasn’t just exciting for me as a music fan and a concert photographer. It was also a great opportunity to test myself (and to learn) as a marketer. I’d be applying my storytelling skills to an area that I’ve always been deeply passionate about. And I’d be soaking up the experience of one of the purest forms of content creation around: the sheer energy and wild empathy that goes into making music for a live crowd.
That’s why this B2B marketer went on tour. Here’s what I learned from my three days on the road:
…In fact, when you think about it, that’s pretty much the definition of authenticity. Nothing impressed me more than this band’s determination to leave it all on the table, no matter what the situation. They played to a small room with exactly the same energy and passion that they would play to a festival crowd. The kick-off show was incredible: great crowd, great venue, great after-party. The second night had a smaller crowd, but that didn’t change the mentality of the band to blow the roof of the joint – and from my point of view, it created brutally honest images that did real justice to the reality of touring and the way you have to open yourself up to create an atmosphere.
All in all, my experience with the band got better night-by-night. It wasn’t just the fact that we bonded quickly. The energy they kept digging deep to bring was infectious. It was inspiring as well. Let’s face it, as a marketer there should never be an opportunity to engage with an audience that you don’t pour your heart and soul into: a presentation, a conversation, a blog post. If you believe in your brand and what you are doing, then you don’t just turn it on for the big occasion. Building engagement often takes commitment and energy – you can’t just sit back and expect the audience to come to you.
Rock stars are natural networkers. It was Stevie’s interest in others and instinct for connecting with them that brought me on tour in the first place. And when you talk to musicians (I’ve been lucky enough to interview Jay Jay French of Twisted Sister and Brad Gillis of Night Ranger on The Sophisticated Marketer’s Podcast recently), it’s amazing how easily the conversation can turn to other musicians they’ve worked with or know. This is an industry filled with connections. However, as in any profession, an extensive network isn’t enough. To navigate a performing career, you need some relationships that go deeper. You need mentors.
One picture that I’m really glad I captured is a shot of Stevie talking intensely on his mobile phone, in a bench in a corner of the pub. It was just before he was due to hit the stage for the first gig. The phone had buzzed with a call from Jizzy Pearl, the legendary frontman of bands like Love/Hate (a huge hard rock act in the early 1990s), L.A. Guns and Quiet Riot. In my eyes, Jizzy Pearl is rock royalty – but he’s also Stevie Pearce’s mentor, checking in on him before an important night. Their relationship goes back to Stevie supporting Jizzy on a UK tour – and it’s one that’s been nurtured and valued ever since. This shot resonates with me because it’s a reminder that you can’t find success alone – and that’s certainly been a theme of my own career in marketing. I would never be in the position I am without the folks who helped me along the way. Maria Pergolino and Jon Miller at Marketo, Ann Handley, right through to my current boss at LinkedIn, Nico Lutkins – and plenty of other colleagues. As you scale your contacts and grow your professional networks, it’s vital to keep time for these most important relationships.
One of most common mistakes in content marketing is to confuse the concept of a story with the function of a plot. We claim we’re telling a story when all we’re really doing is talking about something that happened (this is the crucial difference between stories and anecdotes, as described by Seth Godin). Truly compelling stories have many dimensions: layers of meaning, different perspectives from which to view them, nuances that challenge you with different interpretations of what you’re seeing. I knew that this was the type of story that I wanted to tell with Stevie Pearce and The Hooligans. I also knew that the only way to tell a multidimensional story as a photographer, is to plan and anticipate those different dimensions in advance. Before the tour, I mapped out the different types of visual story that I wanted to tell. The results proved the value of planning the different ways you’ll tell a story, before you start telling it.
First and most obviously, I needed to capture the collective image of the band and tell the story that both themselves and their fans consciously buy into. This wasn’t so much about capturing a moment as making the all-important moments of the tour work in service of the story we were telling. I didn't script what was going to happen – but I did have a script in my mind that I could mentally fit these opportunities into as they arose.
Next were the behind-the-scenes moments: the opportunities to give fans a ton of extra value, whether they were at the gigs themselves or following the tour remotely. These were the shots from backstage, loading up the bus, after a show, meeting the fans, talking about the gigs. They would provide people with the equivalent of the access-all-areas pass: extending the story, delivering the bonus footage, providing a more intimate view of the band.
Finally, there were the relatable moments. I knew that these would require the most skill to capture – but they were also, in many ways, the most valuable. Relatable moments are similar to behind-the-scenes shots, in that they often show the band when they are not performing. However, not all behind-the-scenes shots are relatable. They become so through tiny, candid moments when the person in the shot is no longer defined by being a musician – but by being a human being with the same emotional experiences as you, the audience. These are the shots that show friendship and good times, but also challenges and exhaustion. They humanise the experience of touring and enable fans to project themselves into the picture. You can’t possibly predict when they are going to happen. You just have to tune your radar in advance, to stay alert to them when they do.
I’m convinced that this same relatability is crucial to any form of content marketing. It’s the moment that you step outside of the message that you are there to deliver, drop your guard, and share something that everyone in the room (or in the audience) can identify with. It’s the opportunity to create a human connection that then puts everything else that you say into a different perspective. Just as with a band on tour, I don’t think relatable moments work anything like as well when they are contrived. You can spot a mile off when a keynote speaker is deliberately trying to get you on their side through some half made-up story. Such moments have to be natural, have to be authentic –they often spring to mind unbidden when you least expect it, and when you are right in the middle of creating content.
If I had to pick one shot that I’m most proud of from the three days on the road then it would be the apparently surreal one of Stevie Pearce watching TV on a tour bus. It’s so powerful, and so perfectly captures the experience of being on tour, because of the power of juxtaposition.
We were on the bus back to London from Edinburgh when, for some reason or another, we started watching YouTube clips of the legendary landscape painter, Bob Ross, who hosted a series called The Joy of Painting on PBS back in the 1980s. Listen to that resonant voice discussing the finer details of oil painting and you’re suddenly in another, very meditative world. Stevie plugged his tablet into the TV and suddenly we had a hard rock band, crammed into a tour bus, craning their necks so as not to miss the important points of how you apply brush strokes to a canvas. You couldn’t imagine something more completely offsetting the chaos and unpredictable nature of life on the road. I look at this shot, and I can just feel the pace of life slow down.
Contrast and the completely unexpected are two of the most powerful forces that you can have working for you when it comes to content. It’s easy to fall into the trap of endlessly serving up what you know others expect you to serve up, telling the story they expect to be told, delivering the ideas and content that they expect to hear from you. However, human attention is actually heightened by something that it’s difficult for your brain to make sense of at first glance – when it doesn’t quite stack up in the way that you expect. A big, hairy, leather-clad rock star patiently watching an oil painter at work from 30 years ago certainly falls into that category. So too does the unexpected stat that you position in someone’s feed, the position you take on an issue that’s contrary to the headlines that everyone else is writing, the funny video you create to promote a piece of serious research.
As with all of the other storytelling lessons that I learned in my three days on the road, this one talks to the importance of staying creative, and staying alert to seeing and communicating things in new ways. That takes a commitment to your craft and a real passion for it. And there’s no better inspiration for that than gigging with Stevie Pearce and The Hooligans.
Stevie Pearce and the Holligans are on tour now and their new record which you can get here is brilliant. Photography of course by yours truly.
Topics: Content marketing Trends, tips, and best practices LinkedIn Ads
Related articles