How Music Works: “I was going down a path I knew wasn’t going to be secure”

Andrea Keogh can recall the moment she decided to swap studying psychology for promoting music. “I remember thinking I was definitely going down a path I knew wasn’t going to be secure,” says the booker and promoter.

Anyone who works in music (or the creative arts as a whole) will be familiar with that thought process. Sure, it would be easier to get a more reliable stable career, but the love of the craft drives the person over the edge into the unknown.

For Keogh, it was the experience of organising charity gigs for Chernobyl Children International and Habitat for Humanity that gave her the bug. Having grown up on a farm in Kilkenny, music hit in her late teens and early 20s when Keogh was spending more time in Thomastown, a place with a musical reputation thanks largely to the pub and venue Murphy’s.

Along with Eva Lynch who ran the venue, Keogh started putting on gigs full-time in Thomastown in 2009. She worked on the Happy Valley Festival where she got to meet artists from all over Ireland like The Man Whom and Graham Smith. Soon, she was organising nationwide tours with for The Man Whom and Smith’s act Chris Campbell.

“That spiralled into me deciding it was what I wanted to do,” Keogh remembers. “I loved putting on gigs, from programming to the actual day of the show.”

Keogh pursued a course in Public Relations & Event Management at Fitzwilliam Institute in Dublin (“very hands on”) shortly afterwards and has gone on to book events for the Odessa Club, Button Factory in Dublin, the Set Theatre and Langton’s in Kilkenny and festivals including Kilkenny’s TradFest, Kilkenny Arts Festival and Coughlan’s Live Music Festival in Cork.

Now based in Dublin but with the majority of her work in Kilkenny, Keogh’s daily tasks include event management, curation, programming, booking tours, publicity, social media, marketing and strategy planning, Despite the busy schedule, job security is not one of the perks of being an independent promoter so future planning is key.

“I’m booking tours for next March and April and I won’t see a return from them until probably June by the time everything turns around. It can be tough and stressful wondering how you’re going to pay rent as you don’t always have regular work coming in or you don’t have a retainer.”

Keogh says if she sees a quiet time ahead, she will create work. This summer, that meant a series of gigs at St. John’s Priory, a beautiful church in Kilkenny featuring Mick Flannery, Heathers and Talos.

Keogh says that promoting gigs in Kilkenny is very different from a city like Dublin. It’s a smaller pot of people so you’re relying on repeat visitors, which also means that being aware of what festivals are on the calendar nearby or nationally. Yet Kilkenny is known for festivals, whether it’s Cat Laughs or Tradfest, which helps.

The city also has some key people who are keeping live music prominent. Keogh names John Cleere and Willy Meighan of Rollercoaster Records (“the ringleader”) as hard working local heroes.

It was Meighan, along with others who decided to start up Alternative Kilkenny Arts Festival (AKA) of music, theatre and visual art to bring in some more under the radar artists like Rusangano Family, Mmoths, David Kitt, Mixtapes From The Underground, Yorkston Thorne Khan and Icelandic electro-pop partiers FM Belfast. The festival is running now until August 14th in parallel with the Kilkenny Arts Festival, a deliberate synchronised scheduling.

“It means people can go to an exhibition earlier in the day and a gig at night-time,” offers Keogh.

Keogh booked FM Belfast having seen the band three times at Iceland Airwaves one year. “They are just such fun - they’re a real party band.”

Convincing an audience to see a new act is part of the job of promotion but Keogh agrees that there’s a big divide between the artists playing successful gigs and the airplay those same artists receive.

“A lot of the acts that do well just don’t get radio play. Homegrown independent music doesn’t get the coverage. It’s disheartening when there’s an amazing artist who maybe isn’t that well-known among a broader audience, and there’s five or ten people in the room. Radio support would help in that regard.”

Not all bands are as proactive as the likes of Dublin experimental band Meltybrains?.

“We booked them into Set Theatre two years ago and they brought a bus load of people with them from Dublin,” recounts Keogh. “The Kilkenny people saw that and more people came out. They’ve been down twice since.”

Keogh doesn’t regret leaving the psychology studies behind. Her passion is promoting she says, despite the uncertainties.

“I’d love to run my own venue. Maybe somewhere remote. A place where it’s a journey, an adventure for artists and guests to go to.”

[ akafringe.com ]

[ kilkennyarts.ie/programme/fm-belfast ]