The Pub with No Fear

By Kate Love

Live Gigs in Your Living Room

Have you been missing heading down to your local pub to catch some tunes?

Live music has taken a hard hit recently with venues shut down and gigs cancelled. Musicians who usually rely on live shows or busking to make a living are having to improvise.

Local musicians Brad Buckley and his partner Debi Martin perform regularly in the Byron Shire as Distraction Duo and with their band My Addiction. The acoustic-rock duo have come up with an ingenious way to bring live music to your living room.

Here is the story of The Pub with No Fear.

We as musicians were amongst the first, if not the first, to be affected through job loss by the Corona Virus.

Aside from the obvious financial impact which is hard to deal with we also felt a great loss and in truth a deep despair at the prospect of not performing live for a minimum period of 6 months. This is what we do, all we do and how we have sustained ourselves for a very long time; personally in our case for twenty years plus. We perform from 3 to 4 times a week in varying formats. We are not casual weekend warriors. This was and will again be a true profession. But what do we do for now? Pubs and licensed venues were shut. We found ourselves floundering with no income. Social distance laws tightened constantly as this virus moved in on us and it seemed that there was no way to move forward.

But we were determined not to slip into despair. Almost straight away, by the time I made us our morning coffees Debi Martin, my partner in life and business, came up with this awesome idea to create an online platform where we ourselves, and other artists, could still perform live to an audience thereby allowing us to maintain our level of musicianship whilst also allowing us to keep our profile which we had worked so very hard to build. We needed to keep our profile alive so that people would remember us when we  returned to the proper live arena in venues as well to keep our real pubs alive! We have the ongoing support from the management of The Australian Hotel in Ballina as a physical venue to return to when this is all over.

And thus The Pub with No Fear was born. We knew it was a great name for our new venture and were really excited at the prospects of what could come from this so we got on to it straight away firstly registering the name with ASIC and then Debi moved on to create the group on Facebook. It very quickly took hold. We already had quite a vast network of fellow musicians built through years of performing and also through hosting 'Open Mic' events at venues and everyone loved the idea and were keen to jump on board. Our group has reached over 1,000 members within its first week and is constantly growing in numbers.

The concept involves the musicians setting themselves up in their own premises and streaming themselves LIVE via our group thereby adhering to social distancing regulations. All our performing members have to do is set themselves up a way of streaming themselves whether it be by smart phone or laptop or whatever way they choose, and then they simply push a LIVE button in our group and our audience members can then tune in to it online. They can set up a Paypal link if they choose to give their audience a chance to tip/donate to the artist based on their performance. People tuning in can make those donations whilst also sharing their appreciation through online real time commenting which the musician can see scrolling through their feed as they perform.

We have set up time slots throughout the week with the weekend prime time slots devoted to full time pro musos who have found themselves out of work. We are extremely devoted to the growth of our industry and so other times were set up earlier in the week to give up-and-coming artists an opportunity  to also be seen and heard.

Support live music and tune into The Pub with No Fear.