Musicians' Union

During the summer-long engagement, he was approached by band leader Vic Lewis and spent the next six years touring with the orchestra.

At the time, the Musicians' Union had a reciprocal arrangement that if an American band came to Britain to tour, then a British band had to go to the US.

So it was that the Vic Lewis Orchestra found themselves on tour with rock and roll stars like Chuck Berry, The Platters, and Bill Haley and his Comets.

White said, quote, We used some big band arrangements and put a backbeat on it to fit with the rock and roll thing.

But essentially, he started hounding politicians via then Twitter.

And along with his broken record campaign, the fixed streaming campaign, which was led by the Ivers Academy and the Musicians Union, basically the growing dissatisfaction with musicians' earnings which were highly impacted by the pandemic, the Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee decided to launch an inquiry into the impact of music streaming on artists.

The music streaming inquiry was a combination of collecting evidence from artists, songwriters, performers, collective organisations, record labels... collecting societies, streaming services, all coming together to have their say about how streaming works and how artists and musicians and songwriters get paid from streaming.

We talked last week about how select committees work.

I think this is one of the really strong developments that we've seen as a direct outcome from the streaming inquiry.

Songwriters before the streaming inquiry just didn't get paid anything to do that and just hoped that the song would be released and that they would eventually you know it's potluck really whether the creative process went that way and then whether the song was chosen whether the song was released you know then so many songs get made and don't actually make it to the ears of the public and now you at least get your reasonable expenses your lunch paid and some a nominal fee you know just to go and do the session so I think that is a really great outcome from the streaming inquiry.

The fifth principle is an increased session fee for pop and classical session musicians and that's negotiated between the musicians union and the BPI which essentially represents the record labels and they got an increased fee of 40% for pop and 15% for classical.

So that's also great.

And I'm like, all right, Mickie, how's it going? He goes, what's this nonsense?

I said, well, I've worked it out, that's what the Musicians' Union goes, I'm paying you 200 quid, now fuck off.

It's still a lot of money then.

That was still fine, yeah.

But, you know, you're not about to say, hang on a minute, Mickey, the Musicians' Union says you've got to pay, you don't buy it the hand that feeds you, do you? No, not really.

Some people do, but it's not a good idea.

No. That's been fun though.

Like he wasn't a registered musician in the Musicians Guild.

So or the Musicians Union.

So he they couldn't play it on top of the pops.

Yeah.

But as Portion Patrol, we got asked to do a John Peel session.

And before you could do it, because it was a BBC, you had to fill in the Musicians' Union form, you know.

Right.

So

And us being ourselves, when it had music, music instrument that you play, we put nothing.

And we sent them back.

And the Musicians' Union refused to give us membership because we couldn't play an instrument.

So we had to rewrite the forms and we were told we had to put something, so we just put piano down.

And that's how the actors...

But even now it's within the Musicians' Union, I believe, you can come in in the afternoon and play in a musical, never having been there before.

And actors were exactly the same.

And all the parts were locked up at night, so you couldn't get a hold of them.

There's also the F List for Music group.

There's the Musicians' Union that has informal networks for particular communities and groups.

So it might be that you find yourself there connecting with other people.

But also just in general, I think getting involved in any of the collective organisations that represent... songwriters, musicians, artists, performers helps you feel part of the community and then take collective action together to make the music industry better.