Sometimes, it’s the little things that make you realise the extent of the chaos Brexit will wreak. Last week, at the World Metal Congress – a series of panel discussions in London about the global heavy metal industry – one of those little things was brought to light. As the talk turned to Brexit, Vicky Hungerford, who books the annual Bloodstock festival, noted the calls she had been getting from bands from outside the UK. This year, she said, bands were asking a favour: could they have later stage times? At festivals, she explained, it’s common for artists who are criss-crossing the summer circuit to arrive shortly before they’re due on stage. This year, though, those who have to travel from abroad are worried about increased bureaucracy and huge queues at ports and airports. No one wants to do the first slots at a festival anyway; now they fear they won’t even be able to get there in time for them.
That’s not likely to be a problem this year: current transit arrangements should remain in place until the end of 2020, while the eventual nature of the British departure from the EU is negotiated. But it will after then, and no one can prepare, because no one knows what form that departure will take. “It depends on what Brexit is,” says Tom Gray of Gomez, who gave evidence to the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee for its recent report on live music. “If it’s something where we have to leave the customs union or have tariffs and have to use the carnet system, then we’re fucked.”
The uncertainty, though, has already started to affect parts of the music industry, whose CDs and vinyl are mostly pressed in Europe. “When I get records from the US, they can take ages to get through customs,” says Jon Tolley of Banquet Records in Kingston upon Thames, who has been involved in the Entertainment Retailers Association’s discussions with record labels about Brexit. “And, if that’s happening with every record that comes in, I don’t know how we’ll deal with it.”
Some record shops were told by Warner Music, who keep their stock in French warehouses, to place orders by the morning of 25 March to be sure of receiving that company’s releases for 12 and 19 April – 12 April being the day Britain is currently due to leave the EU.
The fear for record shops is that they are a long way down the major labels’ list of priorities. “They aren’t going to change their business models for our sake,” Tolley says. “Warner aren’t going to move their warehouse from France for us. I think a lot of shops aren’t aware of how damaging this could be, because it’s a fight for survival as it is, and they don’t have the bandwidth to think about five years down the line.”
Release campaigns will have to be lengthened to get stock into shops for release day, and, with production costs having already increased for UK companies because of the fall in the pound, tax and customs costs set to increase, and retail margins on CDs already low, there will be a knock-on effect. In short, physical music is going to become more expensive.
Brexit’s greatest impact on music, though, looks likely to be on the live sector, both on British musicians going abroad, and on foreign artists and fans travelling to the UK. Take the carnet system. This allows people travelling on business to take merchandise from one country to another, where freedom of movement and goods does not apply – as it may well not for British artists travelling to Europe, post-Brexit. A carnet currently costs £325.96, but that’s not the end of it: it requires the holder to list everything they take into a country. For a touring artist that covers every guitar string, every drumstick, every cable, every T-shirt, every button badge. That has to be checked by customs officials on the way in, and then the same thing happens on the way out. It’s not just money, it’s time – which on tours run on shoestring budgets is another cost.
Huge groups will have the resource to make this work. “It will be a hassle, of course, but ultimately, we’ll find a way to deal with it,” says Jamie Oborne, who manages the 1975. But smaller artists may find it crippling. The guitarist and songwriter John Smith estimates half his income comes from playing around the EU. “I’ve spent 12 years building a following across the continent. At the moment we enjoy freedom of movement. I can move around the continent with a guitar and suitcase with very little obstruction. If we lose this right, the next logical steps are border checks, carnet forms, work permits and heightened security measures. I have to do all this outside of Europe, particularly when I tour North America. It’s costly and time-consuming. All those extra hours of waiting around in an airport, or having my guitar case emptied on the side of the road at the border, these are things I could do without.”
As well as carnets, musicians will need visas, too. The industry has been calling for special musicians’ visas, but there’s been no response from government. That despite the UK music industry being a multi-billion pound business (and despite the government’s own boasts last year of the creative industries being worth £101.5bn). The visa issue will have a huge impact, warns Sammy Andrews, the founder of the industry group Music4EU. “We are about to suffer heavy losses for work for our UK road crew and engineers,” she says. “The people that make shows possible. Our lighting technicians, the sound engineers, guitar technicians, drum technicians, the roadies and the tour managers. Having to get extra visas for them means for certain that many bands will use local crews and not employ people from the UK for those roles, and this could have a devastating impact on that community. We know this for sure because it happens already for exactly those reasons outside of the EU.”
Tom Gray warns that Britain is facing a perfect storm of musical crises: not just Brexit, but also the declining revenues from recorded music, the continuing closures of small venues and the loss of music education programmes in schools. “Kids simply aren’t going to be able to go into music without the bank of mum and dad behind them,” he says.
The problems will not be confined to British artists. UK Music, the lobbying group for the live and recorded music industries, estimated that, in 2017, the UK attracted 810,000 “music tourists” from overseas; faced with harder travel and entry, that figure is likely to fall. That’s the least of it, though.
In the classical sector, venue bookers are starting to report that musicians are beginning to demand payment in euros, making them more expensive to book as the pound falls. John Summers, chief executive of the Hallé orchestra, says the end of freedom of movement “will have a profoundly negative effect on the orchestral life of the UK”. UK orchestras already pay less than their European counterparts, which are more likely to be subsidised; that disparity, he says, will be widened by the costs of coming to the UK to study in a conservatoire. He warns of a big fall in the number of European musicians coming to the UK to learn and study, and says the reasons are not purely economic. “Some of them have told me they just don’t feel welcome in this country any more.”
The European classical world is hugely integrated; it’s not just musicians and singers visiting other countries for concert tours, they might also be members of orchestras or companies outside their own country. After Brexit, that will all change. “At present, a French pianist can come over on Eurostar to St Pancras, step on to the stage at Kings Place and perform with no charges and no bureaucracy,” says Helen Wallace, the programme director of Kings Place in London. “If European musicians start needing visas and other permissions – such as certificate of sponsorship and so on – the cost of the time spent on administration, aside from the extra charges, would present further barriers to booking these artists. When it comes to ensembles and orchestras, multiply the problem – and the cost – by 50 to 100. Someone will have to pick up that bill.”
The irony is that, for now, some people are doing very well out of Brexit. One major label executive – who is personally strongly opposed to Britain leaving the EU – notes that their company has made extra profits because the weak pound has increased the value of its sales in the UK. Another label boss whose greatest income comes from the US says the value of his company’s dollar payments has increased. But both accept those are ridiculous exceptions, not the rule.
For most people in music, the situation is one of grim uncertainty. “I haven’t taken any gigs in Europe for the next few months, because I just don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Matthew Herbert, whose Brexit Big Band have just released their album The State Between Us, on what was originally intended to be Brexit day. “I’m going to the US and to Japan instead.” He can’t believe the people pushing Brexit through, in the name of British identity, don’t understand what they’re doing. “The creative industries are seen as a luxury, and they’re not. They’re at the very heart of British identity and the British economy. We’re not being given a viable future.”
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