Demand a fairer deal for live artists

I've literally made it so easy for you

Kate Nash would be in £50k of debt from her last tour if she hadn’t financed it with her “Butts 4 Tour Buses” OnlyFans campaign. She talked to the The Guilty Feminist podcast about the extreme to which artists are personally paying the costs of making work, not getting paid to work (great episode, listen here) and makes a call to action: everyone write to their MP asking the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to do something about it.

I’ve drafted a letter you can copy and paste straight to your MP. Will take you less than two minutes! Maybe a bit longer if you tweak it to add thoughts of your own.

Resist the hypernormalisation of Kate Nash’s butt

I’m really bored of getting fobbed off when you start talking about sustainability in the arts, or told “ah, but, you know, arts, it’s complicated” - because I don’t think it is complicated. Either people are paid enough to keep working, and they can work, or they’re not paid enough, and you have problems.

I also have to chime in as your friendly local retired stripper and point out: Kate Nash can make bank in a short time on OnlyFans because she is award-winning, No.1 single-in-the-UK-charts Kate Nash. She’s transferred that huge pre-existing fanbase and its hungry parasocial horn onto another platform, and monetised it very effectively. Not to in any way undermine this action - in case I haven’t nailed my colours to the mast clearly enough, sex work is a job that must be protected whatever people need it for. But I’ve just gotta flag that sex work is not, for most people, that scale of an immediate cash injection (or, contrary to popular belief, an easy job.)

I really rate Kate Nash and I think she’s rad for using this as an opportunity to highlight how broken things are, and demand urgent intervention. It’s also, tactically, not a bad time to poke the current Labour government about why a high-profile artist is needing to sell pictures of her butt to break even, as they have a general anti-sex work stance. This is, overall, bad - and as soon as they start making any noise about e.g. The Nordic Model of sex work (watch why this would be a bad policy here) we’re going balls to the wall for full decriminalisation and sex workers’ rights. But Kate Nash is sincerely asking why the meat of creative work is so undervalued that even an established artist can’t break even without a cash injection from elsewhere. And if we’re going to tell women and girls that we’re valued for our ideas and creativity, that’s an empty promise unless we can see the receipts.

Have a listen to Kate Nash’s The Guilty Feminist podcast interview where she lays it all out really clearly, and it’s worth having a shot at flooding an MP’s inbox with emails. Despite understandable cynicism about the government, this kind of stuff does get their attention, and it has worked before.

Accountability pledge from me (I really love to see the receipts.)

Obviously I’m salty about this because the broken, exploitative model of live entertainment directly hits me and my friends. It’s very painful watching people I care about and really admire professionally get marooned in shame, confusion, and sometimes outright physical illness from not being able to stay in our business without debt or advanced financial gymnastics.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’d move forward with another project, and if I do another live show, my plan is to publicly publish my budget from the start to the end of the process. This will probably means it takes much longer for e.g. a production company to work with me as, in general, a lot of these organisers don’t love publicly sharing how little money their artists are taking home - or, when they’ve fucked up, how often it falls on the artist to front a few hundred or few thousand pounds here and there to soak up the damage. But I think this might be a cool way to a) protect myself from exploitation by holding the neatly and consistently updated receipts up in public view, and b) create a template that other live performers can use for their work.

Don't hold your breath as I am a pole comic, so, I’m already pretty niche, on top of being a pain in the butt about stuff like this. But I’d like to do this. I’m very lucky at the moment to be on an artist residency project where we’re looking very closely at not just the what we do but how we’re doing it, and my big HOW demand is: with financial transparency.

Alrightey then, peace and love to Kate Nash’s butt.