A gig’s a gig

As a gigging musician, I’ve done my fair share of gigs in churches. Probably over a thousand. Definitely hundreds. Function bands, jazz quartets, chamber stuff, funerals, dep work for choirs whose regular bassist had double-booked themself and needed a body in a suit. Some venues still operating as churches, some only a shell. From beautiful, ancient cathedrals belonging to established faiths, to modest churches with modest reach.

Anglican, Church of Scotland, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist. Various flavours of community church with a penchant for planting in former 1960s office blocks—vaguely municipal, fluorescent-lit, musico-acoustically dodgy. The PA system is usually too quiet or too loud, the vestry coffee is variable, and there’s always a slightly feral, unkempt man called Brian who has Strong Views about nothing of interest. (I’ve never not met Brian.)

No big deal

This is what working musicians do. Churches are infrastructure: they have rooms, they have power sockets, and—for reasons partly liturgical and partly sociological—they tend to support live music in a way that many secular venues have stopped bothering with. You take the gig, you set up, you play, you pack down, and you drive home through whatever weather Scotland has decided to inflict that evening. The doctrinal flavour of the place barely registers. It’s a venue. Most of them blend into one. The function gigs in particular are indistinguishable in retrospect; somewhere between 2010 and the pandemic, endless renditions of Fly Me to the Moon dissolved into a single composite memory of damp-carpet-smell, well worn pews and ill-adapted green rooms (i.e. no green room). But every so often you get a gig that stands out as one of the better ones, and a few months back I did one of those.

It was in Edinburgh, in a venue covering the entire top floor of an industrial unit, the ubiquitous Scottish purveyor of scalding-hot sausage rolls beneath, a creche and a physio practice sharing the building, a nail salon and the usual lumber yards and car mechanics ranged across the rest of the estate. The venue had laid on food—actual food, not a plate of curling sandwiches in a grimy back room. The audience listened. The tech crew were professional and visibly interested. It was a decent gig, and on the drive home I caught myself thinking I’d happily play there again. By the parochial standards of small-room jazz in Scotland in the mid-2020s, this was up there.

The gig had been filmed. Standard practice now for venues trying to build a profile: couple of cameras, clips posted on YouTube and Instagram, the band gets exposure, the venue gets content. Nobody thinks about it for more than thirty seconds; you sign the form, you forget the form (or there is no form), and a few weeks later a clip appears in your feed and you decide whether to share it.

I was chatting at a rehearsal with another musician, catching up. I mentioned the Edinburgh date—good gig, he agreed. And then, almost as an afterthought he mentioned that the guy who runs it, or is involved, or somehow teaches there or something, used to be quite involved in the Free Church. Or still was. He wasn’t totally sure.

That was the whole exchange. He moved on to something else. I think we ended up talking about preamps.

But it lodged. The thing I’d filed as church based out of an industrial estate, no big deal now niggled. The kind of churches I’d been doing gigs in for years—broadly Church of Scotland, broadly liberal, broadly we’ll-all-just-rub-along Scottish protestant default—aren’t conservative evangelicals. A Free Church background in someone connected to the place doesn’t necessarily mean the church itself sits in that tradition, but it points somewhere different. The smaller, sterner, theologically uncompromising end of the landscape. The end where things tend to be taken seriously.

What you find isn’t hidden

I didn’t think about it again that night. But sometime over the next few days I found myself looking up the church.

What you find isn’t hidden. The church has a website, and on the website is a page about what they believe. Like a lot of church websites, it’s well laid out, friendly in tone, easy to navigate. There’s nothing furtive about it.

The church is part of FIEC—the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, a network of around six hundred and fifty independent congregations across the UK. FIEC has a doctrinal basis that all member churches agree to, plus three “ethos statements” on gospel unity, women in ministry, and marriage. These aren’t private convictions. They’re written down.

The marriage and sexuality statement is the one that sits hardest. After a fairly standard preamble about scripture, it gets specific:

Sexual activity is a gift to be enjoyed only within (heterosexual) marriage and that, outside of this setting, it is sinful; marriage involves a man and woman, bound together in covenant relationship—a relationship that cannot be redefined.

And this:

None of our churches or accredited pastors would in good conscience be able to perform, bless or host same-sex marriage or wedding ceremonies.

Then, further down the same document, the line I found hardest to read past. After noting that “many Christians struggle with sexual temptation (whether same-sex attraction or heterosexual)”, the statement commits to fostering “gracious support of one another in such struggles.” Elsewhere, grace is offered to “repentant sinners—including those for whom sexual sin has formed a major part of their backgrounds.”

Read that one through twice. Same-sex attraction sits inside the category of “sexual temptation”, comparable to other appetites to be resisted. It’s a “struggle” the institution will lovingly help you with. It’s a “background” you’re invited to repent from. What’s on offer isn’t “we accept you”—it’s “we accept the version of you that has stopped being this.”

A separate ethos statement, on women in ministry, does its own work. The headline position is the traditional complementarian one: pastor and elder roles open only to suitably qualified men; women’s roles affirmed as significant but confined to areas like care, hospitality, and the teaching of other women. The reasoning, biblical and well-rehearsed; the implications spelled out plainly—no women pastor-teachers, no women elders, no admission to the FIEC Pastors’ Network without subscribing to the position. My wife—who is, to my shame, considerably more proactive and engaged than I am on questions of equal rights—would have read this in thirty seconds, known what kind of institution we were dealing with, and boycotted the gig. Quite possibly picketed it. I’d been standing in their venue, oblivious, playing my bass.

Within the same women in ministry statement, on gender:

God created us male and female, and calls us to live according to our gender identity which is inseparable from our biological sex determined at conception. Our gender may not be changed or reassigned.

This is not vaguely traditional. This is codified, plainly and openly. What surprised me wasn’t the existence of the position—I knew, broadly, that views like this existed in evangelical Christianity. What surprised me was the absence of any softening. No euphemism, no “these are sensitive areas we approach with care”, no implication that the position was held privately and not for public consumption. Just the lines, in full sentences, on the open page. After reading it, you can’t quite plead ignorance.

How to square

The gig had been a good one; I don’t want that to get lost in the grumbling. The food (did I mention the food?), the audience, the tech crew, the people—none of that had been a performance. But I now had a complete picture of the institution whose name would shortly appear next to mine on the internet. An organisation whose published positions sat at the far end of the spectrum from what I’d assumed a “church gig” meant.

The video was due to go up shortly.

What stopped me from filing all of this away under “unfortunate” was who else had played there.

The venue programmes consistently. A real listings page, regular concerts, a recognisable place on the Edinburgh circuit. Most of the names you’d expect to find at a small jazz venue of that level—players mostly based in or around the Central Belt, some established, some less known, but generally the better (whatever that means) end of the Scottish scene. Nothing unusual until I reach a name on the bill I have to read twice: an artist whose bio gives they/them pronouns as plainly as any other professional detail.

Recall the FIEC ethos statement, in writing: “gender is inseparable from biological sex determined at conception [and] may not be changed or reassigned”. The artist’s bio, on the other side, is no less plain. Both documents are on the open internet. Both can be read in under a minute.

Which means the organisers knew exactly who they were booking—in a scene this size, they could hardly not have. There’s no due diligence failure here, no one’s hidden anything. Someone on the church’s end made a decision to book this artist; the artist accepted; the gig happened. And it wasn’t their first time playing there; I had an ambient awareness of that from the venue’s own promo videos over the last couple of years.

That repetition is worth thinking about. The fee for the gig I did was, to put it politely, okay—enough to feel paid, not enough to feel courted. Which is to say: the room isn’t paying for the music the way a venue chasing a premium act would, nor playing the generous patron, and yet the programming is real and it recurs. So the return that sustains it isn’t mainly the night’s economics. For a room attached to a mission, the obvious reading is legitimacy: not necessarily anyone’s aim, but the work the booking does—getting people through the door who wouldn’t otherwise come, on the back of musicians whose presence signals that this is a place where the wider arts scene is welcome. A small outlay for an outsized signal.

But legitimacy is too cold a word for what the night was. The welcome was genuine—none of it had the texture of a performance—and that, I’d now say, is the point: the sincerity is the method. The warmth isn’t a cover for the doctrine; it’s how the doctrine goes looking for you. They liked the music, plainly, and would book whoever could play it and draw a crowd (background and beliefs no object) and the musician, flattered and busy with the business of being a musician, is the last to notice the business of being used. What I still can’t square is the rest of it: the same musician they were so glad to welcome for a gig would not, as a member, be encouraged to be who they are.

Looking begat digging

How the church itself would square all this, I’d assumed I could only guess at—we welcome everyone, we don’t require agreement to enter, a gig isn’t an endorsement. As it turned out, I didn’t need to guess. But I only know because I went looking. And then well past the listings page, into a podcast made for people already inside the faith, the kind of place a booked musician would never think to look. There, the director of this concert series lays it out plainly: the gigs are missional work, a way of getting artists who’d otherwise never enter a church through the door, in the hope that they come back, come to a service, and in time come to faith. The artist knows it’s a church, and that the hosts are believers. What isn’t said—at the booking, or anywhere the artist would actually hear it—is that the welcome is the opening of all that. The booking does its work whether or not anyone names the aim. (Incidentally, why the artist said yes is theirs to know; I’m reading the venue, not them.)

A second use, and it’s the one that made me wince: the room isn’t only reaching the artist; it’s using them to school the congregation. Part of what the gigs do, by the organiser’s own account, is give churchgoers supervised proximity to secular creatives—a chance to practise relating to the kind of guarded, jaded type they’d otherwise never share a table with, and to watch that type disarmed over a shared meal. I don’t think any of it is meant unkindly; the warmth is real on both sides. But it’s hard to unsee once you’ve seen it: guest, target, and teaching aid, in one booking.

The whole arrangement—the welcome, the food, the gig as a way across some threshold—assumes a particular person on the other end: a wary secular artist, vaguely suspicious of churches, who softens on contact. Most of the time that person is imaginary. The musician in front of them is indifferent—in and out of churches for decades, not crossing a threshold but loading in. I don’t see the institution; it doesn’t see me either.

But the softening artist isn’t pure invention. They’re me on a worse year. When the work dries up, or my head goes, the warmth lands differently: a room that feeds me and claps for me starts to look less like a venue than an answer. That’s when the institution does see me—when its offer turns, briefly, plausible. A welcome pitched to land hardest on the most worn-down isn’t quite hospitality; it’s the oldest recruiting move there is.

And where the wariness is settled rather than circumstantial, the room misreads it anyway. It pictures a fixable misimpression: someone who took a dim view of church third-hand, and will revise it once they meet the warm, lasagne-bearing reality. Come and see for yourself; we’re not what you’ve been told. But that gets it backwards. The blind spot is reading wariness as ignorance, something hospitality can correct, when it’s a judgement already made on the evidence. Call me a bleeding-heart, Guardian-reading snowflake if you must—I’ll wear it—but I didn’t get my reservations second-hand, and a warm room doesn’t answer them. They’re the published positions: gay people invited to repent, trans people told their sense of themselves is void, women kept from the pulpit. You can warm me to a building and the people in it. You can’t lasagne me out of thinking the doctrine is wrong.

The shrug

Am I being naive? Naive bassist clicks on a venue’s website and is stunned to find views there. Cue collective shrug from the rest of the profession. We all play with people whose politics, theology, and general worldview we don’t share. We’ve always played in rooms whose owners we’d disagree with. Most musicians don’t do any due diligence on any gig, ever. Myself very much included, until the moment I just described. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s just how the field has to work.

One version of the shrug I do want to push back on, though: the one that says I should have expected strings simply because it’s a church. I’ve played hundreds of church gigs, and the majority carry no pointed agenda at all. The church has a room and a piano and a willingness to host; the congregation likes the music, or likes the company, or both; you play, everyone’s glad you came, and nobody is angling for your soul. It’s the let’s all rub along model, and more often than not a quietly generous one—a room offered as a service to the place it sits in. That’s the norm, by a distance—which is exactly the problem. Not checking wasn’t naive so much as reasonable, right up until the once it wasn’t. A venue running a conversion strategy looks, from the load-in, identical to the several hundred that don’t. The base rate is the camouflage.

The question had stopped being should I have done that gig? and become why does this happen, and how widely?

A phrase sits patiently in the wings, poised for just such a question. A gig’s a gig. It’s a maxim, of sorts, and bears a heavy load. You’ll hear it (or a semantic equivalent) in green rooms and dressing rooms and car parks after the load-out, usually in response to someone querying a booking. The promoter is a bit dodgy? A gig’s a gig. The fee’s lower than it should be? A gig’s a gig. The room’s a hostile acoustic in a barn outside Aberdeen on a Sunday in November? A gig’s a gig. It’s a shrug as much as a phrase. It’s how working musicians signal to one another that they’re not going to make a fuss about something.

It is what it is is a closely related shrug, and arguably the worse of the two. Where a gig’s a gig at least implies an active decision, it is what it is drifts closer to wilful acceptance—the world is what it is, don’t look at it too closely.

Those phrases have honest content. That worse year I mentioned earlier—when the work dries up—is most of it: the economics of the working musician’s life are, by any reasonable standard, terrible. There aren’t enough gigs at the level the players are at; there’s even less public funding than there used to be; the per-gig fee in real terms is lower than it was in the mid-2000s; teaching plugs the gap for many but is also undercut and increasingly precarious. The result is that almost every gig matters more than it should, because there isn’t a comfortable cushion of other gigs to absorb its absence. “Beggars can’t be choosers” is a phrase that has migrated, slightly, from one moral register to another. We’ve made the calculation that turning gigs down on grounds other than diary clashes is something we mostly can’t afford to do.

A less honest version

So far, so reasonable. But a gig’s a gig isn’t only about getting paid; it’s about being seen doing the gig. A booking with respected players is its own form of currency in a small scene—it places you in a particular musical company, it gets you talked about in the right circles, it ends up on someone’s social feed where the right people see it, and the next time someone is putting a band together your name moves up the list. The gig isn’t just work; it’s positioning. And positioning is the kind of thing a musician will say yes to without doing any of the questioning they’d do if they were just being asked to bring an amp to aforementioned barn.

I should be honest about my own case here. I didn’t check the venue before I did that gig. I didn’t check because I didn’t think to check, but I also didn’t think to check because of who I was doing the gig with. The other players were people whose work I respect and whose presence on a bill confers something. You don’t audit a room the people you rate are happy to play in. To play in that band, in that room, with those people, was a chance to be seen in a particular musical context—one that mattered to me more than I’d have admitted out loud. To be clear, I don’t do forensic checks on gigs as a rule—the most I’d usually do for an unfamiliar venue is verify where it is. What was different about this booking wasn’t the diligence I failed to do; it was the wanting. The wanting was high, in a way it wouldn’t have been for a quartet gig with three unknowns.

All of which sits inside a much wider thing musicians do: compartmentalise. We do it not because we’re morally incoherent but because the alternative—only playing with people we agree with—isn’t a working career. It’s barely even a hobby.

Compartmentalisation also has a more beautiful version. Music genuinely does cross lines that words can’t. I’ve played with people whose religious convictions, political views, and general orientation towards the world differ from mine sharply, and the music has worked, and the shared work has been a thing of value. The common language of music is one of the few common languages we have that doesn’t first require agreement on what’s being said. That’s not nothing. It’s a real argument for not letting every collaboration become a values audit.

So I can’t land on the position that musicians should refuse anyone they disagree with—a strawman that doesn’t survive contact with any working life, and not one I hold. The lesson I draw from a gig I now wish I’d looked into isn’t that I shouldn’t have taken it; it’s that the conditions under which I’d have known better aren’t the same as the ones under which I’d have refused.

The interesting question, then, isn’t whether we should compartmentalise but where the line sits, and how you’d know you’d crossed it in time to do anything about it.

I don’t have a clean rule, and I’m suspicious of anyone who says they do. But there are markers I’d notice now that I didn’t before. A codified position is a different object from the same views muttered over coffee—it’s the form the conviction has chosen for itself, and it asks to be read in that form. A generic disagreement is different from a specific collision: an owner whose politics I don’t share is one thing; a published position negating the identity of someone on the same bill is another thing entirely. And louder. And a gig in the room is different from a gig with an afterlife—cameras, clips, archived listings, your name indexed beside theirs for as long as the internet keeps receipts.

None of these will tell you what to do. They’ll tell you whether you’ve thought about it at all.

(These markers are about not-looking—findable things you didn’t look for. They do nothing for not-saying: what a scene already knows, mutters in private for years, and never says aloud, for reasons that are easier to understand than to defend. That’s its own essay, and folding it in here would short-change it. Another time.)

Identity by proximity

In due course, the video went up. The venue posted it, tagged me, and I spent a while staring at it. In normal circumstances it’s exactly the clip you share: decent music, decent players, me not visibly making mistakes. Sharing it is half the point of being filmed at all. But the circumstances were no longer normal—I knew what I knew—so I settled on the half-measure that fools nobody and resolves nothing: I didn’t share it, and I didn’t ask for it to come down. It sat there, tagged, doing whatever it was doing.

Which, it turned out, was not much. The clip got modest engagement and then floated by, the way most of this content does. Months later I learned—by some stroke of luck—that technical problems on the day meant the footage hadn’t come out well, and the whole thing was contained to that single post. The association I’d been turning over was resolved not by principle but by a dodgy camera. I’d love to report that I made a decision. Mostly the internet made it for me.

But the unease was real, and it’s the unease that matters, because underneath it sits representation without consent. The moment my name and image go up alongside the venue’s, anyone who knows what the venue represents may reasonably read me as part of that picture. He played there. He’s in the clip. He hasn’t objected. The inference isn’t unreasonable; it’s the inference any of us would make in the other direction. Association is a form of speech, whether or not we mean it to be. The video doesn’t qualify itself with my political views; it just shows me playing, in their space, on their platform.

It can also run the other way. Not only others reading endorsement into my being there, but me, in good faith, supplying it. In the weeks before I became aware of all this, that’s what I did. That rehearsal chat where the first thread came loose: I was mid-recommendation at the time. It’s the most efficient advertising an institution could ask for, and it costs nothing, because it runs on exactly the not-looking I’ve been describing. The not-looking isn’t only a private lapse. It’s useful to someone. That’s part of why this article exists. The shrug depends on staying off the record—muttered, never written down. This is on the record. Whatever else it is, it isn’t a shrug.

Changing the arrangement would take enough of us asking the questions—enough that, in time, the asking becomes unremarkable. (An idealist’s proposition, I concede.)

Which leaves the question I haven’t yet answered. Would I have done the gig if I’d known? I don’t know. And I’m wary of the version of myself who would give a clean answer to that.

The heroic version is: I wouldn’t have done it. I’d have spotted the FIEC affiliation, read the ethos statements, declined the booking, and explained politely why. The cynical version is: I’d have done it anyway. The economics, the standing, the rest of the band, the fact that it was a good room—all of that would have won out, and I’d be in exactly the same spot. Both of those are easy to write because they tell tidy stories. Both of them also flatter their narrator. Heroic-me feels good about himself for refusing; cynical-me feels worldly about the impossibility of refusing.

The actual honest answer involves an unflattering middle. If I’d done the diligence the night the gig came in, I might well have shrugged—I’m sure it’ll be fine, the players are good, it’s one date, I can manage my own associations—and taken it anyway. That version, where I knew the substance and went regardless, is at least as likely as the heroic one. Maybe more so.

What I can say with more confidence is that I’d have asked one of the questions I now know to ask, before committing (notwithstanding the insidious wanting, which can still snuff out the question before it surfaces). Whether the asking would have changed the answer is a separate question from whether the asking would have happened.

So I’ll leave the question where I found it. Would I have done the gig if I’d known? I don’t know. But the version of me who didn’t know didn’t get to ask the question at all. The version writing this does. That’s not a moral; it’s just where I am.

Postlude

A couple of months after that gig, I was asked if I’d be free to play a Hanukkah service in a synagogue.

This was during an especially difficult period in the Gaza/Israel news cycle. The bombings were daily. The discourse was at its loudest in every direction. And here was a gig at a Jewish religious occasion, with everything that might carry.

I sat with it for a couple of days. Some of the same questions I now knew to ask started to surface. If I do this, and people see I do this, will they read me as having a position I don’t actually hold? Do I have a position? Truthfully? Some questions I’ve had years to think through, and I’ve come down somewhere. This isn’t one of them. I know where the floor is—the killing of children, on any side—but above that floor I’m not sure my views on the wider conflict are formed enough to merit a public statement of any kind, by gig or otherwise. So what’s the responsible thing?

I worked through it the way I think a lot of people have, in one direction or another. The Jewish community in Scotland is a tiny minority of an already small population, the great majority of whom are not connected to the Israeli government in any direct sense, and many of whom hold their own complicated views about it. Declining to play a Hanukkah service to make a point about something happening 3,000 miles away felt, on reflection, closer to the WWII-era logic that lumps every German citizen in with the Nazi state. I am, for whatever it’s worth, an eighth German myself.

So I did the gig.

Aside from the slightly unsettling police presence outside, it was, of course, a perfectly nice evening. Good people, warm room, attentive listening, pillowy-soft challah. For a while I all but forgot to be conflicted about being there. Until, walking back from the toilet between sets, I noticed a plaque on the wall. The plaque held a small piece of metal—a fragment from an Iron Dome interceptor. The accompanying text was, as best I can reconstruct it, a statement of thanks to God for the protection of the people of Israel. I stood and looked at it for longer than I probably should have. Then moved on and played the second set.

But it lodged. The room I’d just spent the last two hours playing in was, in addition to being a synagogue and a community space, an institution that displayed on its wall a piece of military hardware as an object of religious gratitude. That’s a specific and not at all neutral artefact. It made the booking complicated in a way I hadn’t anticipated when I worked through the question.

Did it make the decision wrong? I genuinely don’t know. The arguments I’d made to myself before the gig were still arguments. The minority community context still held. But the venue contained material I hadn’t factored in, and I hadn’t factored it in because I hadn’t been there yet. It turns out (shock, horror!) that the real world is granular and no amount of pre-gig diligence would have surfaced that plaque. You can’t Google a wall.