The last post I wrote for this site was last November (What? Life has been busy!) and it was about the fun time I had performing at HRH Prog in Norfolk.

It was a fun gig! I enjoyed it. Great audience, a really nice crew, wonderful bands. At the time I would have heartily recommended any prog fan attend. I’d heard rumblings of poor customer service, but to be honest hadn’t paid a huge amount of attention to them before.

I exchanged a couple of emails with the organisers soon afterwards. They asked me to play at the next HRH Prog in November 2026, and I sent them an invoice for my performance.

Then… nothing. Now to be honest, life has genuinely been very full of non musical things, so I didn’t have time to chase that invoice up as diligently as I could have. I had other fish to fry.

But then other musicians started to speak up and get in touch with each other. And it turned out that a lot of people hadn’t been paid, and not just performance fees either. Merch money that had been collected on the night also hadn’t been paid out.

Merch money not getting passed on properly is even worse than performance fees not being paid. Obviously not paying either is unacceptable, but when it comes to merch money, that belongs to the band at every point of the process, minus the percentage the promoter takes. If a promoter took in less ticket money than they expected and didn’t have the cash to pay the bands, while that wouldn’t be a good position to be in, you can imagine how it could happen. But the merch money is definitely there and it can’t be used for other purposes.

I didn’t try to sell merch when I was there, the % cut HRH wanted to take was just silly. But loads of others did.

I’ve chased that invoice and haven’t had a response. Can I live without the money? Sure. If it was just me maybe I’d write it off.

But there’s a lot of people not been paid, and while payments are slowly coming out it just isn’t good enough. This is money owed, money earned, money that people need. Even if HRH settle up with everyone, which they slowly appear to be getting round to, I wouldn’t be happy being involved with them again.

So I won’t be playing at any HRH events in the future and I would urge others not to play or attend.

I understand some people already have tickets that they can’t get a refund on, so feel they might as well use them. I get that.

But a promoter this incompetent and shady doesn’t deserve our patronage. There are plenty of better events out there.

WHY NOT COME TO MY NEXT GIG INSTEAD?

I’m supporting I Am The Manic Whale in Reading on August 20th. Tickets here!