Three Reasons Your Band Will Break Up

Yes, your band will split up, and we know why   23-May-12

Bands are like marriages, there is rarely a time when everybody is happy, and most of the time you’ll end up getting a divorce. A bit dramatic, but I’ve been in six bands in my life, and on average each one lasts around two years. 

Coincidentally, this is the same amount of time it takes for married couples to ‘give up on romance’ according to The Daily Mail, so we can probably disregard that then.

Throughout that time I have learned every ‘typical’ personality you will find in a band, I’ve been offered good record deals only to have the singer go awol and quit, and I’ve discovered that even in covers bands there can be artistic differences.

I’ve seen a pattern of three common reasons that almost any band will break up, and this isn’t just for unsigned bands, so don’t think you’re safe rockstars!

1. Girlfriend managers

Yes. Girlfriends. You know the ones, they come along with their woman parts, and they smell all nice. What man can say no? I can safely say that none of my significant others has caused a problem for any of my bands. That’s probably because I’ve only just got to the point where I’ve settled down and found a woman who will put up with my first love, the guitar.

In an all female band, boyfriends might be a problem, I don’t know. What I can say, is that the best band I was ever in had a complete line-up of single men. We were a terrible band, but we got along great and we thought we were good. We were also free to smell as bad as we wanted to.

So there’s a few different types of girlfriend, here they are:

• Bassist’s girlfriend - she’s alright, in fact she’s pretty much one of the lads.
• Drummer’s girlfriend - bit annoying, she won’t let him practise anymore, but he still goes to band practise
• Guitarist’s girlfriend - terrible, he never comes out for drinks anymore, and he brings her along to band practise
• Singer’s girlfriend - f***ing catastrophic, she keeps telling him to go solo, we’re beginning to wish he would.

This is an open message to any guys in bands out there. If you have a girlfriend and you notice you’ve been doing any of the following, then you need to give up guitar and start wearing thongs:

• You brought your girlfriend to band practise, ever.
• You haven’t written a decent song for a while.
• You go home five minutes after the set is finished.
• You drink lemon tea before going on stage.
• You demand a break in the middle of touring to go home.

Women are wonderful, just wonderful. So much better than men in almost every way. I would put my neck on the line and say that women are far more intelligent than men, they are less likely to be a serial killer (always an advantage I find), and as I mentioned before, they just smell nice. You can’t put a price on that. Mmmm smell.

Women should by all means be the manager of a band, they get stuff done, men fall over at their feet. Girlfriends, however, should not be the manager of their boyfriend’s band. In my experience, this will result in their boyfriend being put first rather than the band, particularly if he is a singer.

Just to be clear on this one as well, if there are any guys out there who have a girlfriend in a rock band, then just leave it the hell alone and let her get on with being a rock star. Being a manager is a hard job, you have to break the band’s balls sometimes and make sure they are keeping a limitation on the amount of stupid stuff they do.

You have to shout at them when they’ve played badly, and you have to try and organise the least organised people in the world – musicians.

It’s so much harder to do this if you are in a relationship with one of the band members, and it will absolutely cause tension. 

Don’t do it!

Next page: The guitarist hates the singer