On the night before Bonanza Festival kicked off a couple of weeks ago (review here), I was in the bar at Rio Hostel drinking a beer when I got talking to two guys, one of whom turned out to be from my hometown of Birmingham. We exchanged anecdotes and discovered he grew up on the road where my secondary school was. This Birmingham chat turned into a weird kind of refrain during the rest of the festival, as I then unexpectedly bumped into another Brummie DJ friend and encountered several other people with some kind of connection to the city. Indeed, over my subsequent travels around South and Central America, this discussion about Birmingham and its musical reference points (or lack thereof) popped up again and again. One person was a big Black Sabbath fan. Another had been to the NEC. Most had heard of UB40 or even seen them play; very few, I was sad to note, knew about Jamelia.

Anyway, another question that came up in my conversation with those two guys at the Rio Hostel bar, and which comes up often when people find out I’m travelling around DJing, was about how the money works. Do I get my travel paid for? And other expenses? Or do I have to pay everything out of the fees I receive for playing? I told them what I tell everyone: it depends. But on tours like this one that involve several different promoters, long-haul flights, gigs of wildly varying type, and many in-between periods where I am not necessarily being hosted by anyone in particular, more often than not the simplest approach for all concerned is to agree all-in deals and I just sort out the practicalities myself. That’s how this tour panned out, and I figured it might be interesting to do a bit of a summing up, so anyone curious can see what goes into — and comes out of — this kind of operation.

(I’d like to mention upfront that two of these gigs were booked by my agent Gio, who is no longer my agent but is still a great friend. Thank you Gio!)