What to know
- Toronto up-and-coming alternative band Spring Colours just finished a four-date tour in Toronto, Hamilton, Montréal and Ottawa.
- As a small band, they learned the art of DIY touring, including booking venues, booking transportation, and remembering to take care of themselves while on the road.
- Spring Colours is playing two more shows in Toronto in May. One’s at Dance Cave on May 14 and the other is at Supermarket on May 23.
For a small band to go on tour, it takes almost a year of planning, stable day jobs, and a delicate balancing act between making money and keeping prices cheap.
Just ask Toronto five-piece Spring Colours.
The self-dubbed chiptune, indie, and noise-pop band has been steadily making a name for themselves in the city’s alternative music scene. They released their debut album, The Courage Cloak, at the end of March and recently got back from a four-date tour in Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, and Montréal. They’re playing a few more dates in Toronto this month.
As an up-and-coming band, the members of Spring Colours often have to handle the logistics of putting together shows by themselves, including booking, transportation, and merchandise. Now Toronto sat down with the band to learn more about how they put on their recent tour.
DIY touring is a risky business
As a small band, touring is mostly a DIY endeavour. Without a promoter to help with booking venues and handling the administrative stuff, like emails, Spring Colours had to front personal money.
Thankfully, the five members all have stable day jobs that cover the bills, so the financial aspect of touring wasn’t as impactful.
“A big thing with DIY is definitely putting that financial risk on yourself, because it’s just the five of us in this band. We put down personal money to secure the room. That was the big thing,” David Dellio, the band’s guitar and synth player, explains.
“We’ve done a lot ourselves, and we’ve done a lot with promoters. Promoters typically front that cost and get you the room. You get less of a payout, but then you have [to handle] less of the logistics.”
The cost of booking a venue, says vocalist and guitar player Lukas Lyjak, can range from free to $500, with the higher end eating into how much artists earn at the end of the day.
In a perfect world, they would play in free DIY spaces, but Lyjak says the logistics of Spring Colours’ performances don’t always allow for that.
“We’ve gotten really good at it, and we’ve gotten very flexible. But we do need a certain number of outputs to run our synths and microphones,” he explains.
Like every touring artist, Spring Colours is always aiming to make a profit after each show — or at least break even.
But as a smaller band, Dellio says they can’t set ticket prices at an unreasonable amount. After balancing costs versus profits and how much people are usually willing to pay, the band settled on approximately $20.
“It makes people want to come out and spend their night there and have a good time without feeling like they’re breaking the bank,” he says.
At the end of the day, after splitting the profit with the three or four other bands on the bill, the $100 or so the band comes home with “covers the costs to get to the venue and back.”
Start way earlier than planned
Spring Colours booked their four-city tour for the last week of April. But they started planning it back in August, eight months before hitting the road.
The band’s other synth player and vocalist Amani Sabry, advises artists to start planning earlier than they think.
“However much time you think you would need? Double that. Book a year in advance and send out feelers as soon as you can,” she says. “It’s boring, it’s not fun, it’s lame. It’s not the romanticised version of tour life, but a lot of it starts off as spreadsheets.:”
She says any promoter or venue booking agent would be more than happy to tell you their situation and how far in advance you should book things if you really want a certain spot.
Additionally, car rental companies usually need quite a bit of advance notice to rent out vehicles like sprinter vans, as most of them are now reserved for Amazon delivery drivers. The band says there’s no fix to not having reliable transportation to haul instruments and gear from venue to venue.
Take care of yourself
Lyjak says the band played Hamilton and Montréal back to back, which took driving the hour from Hamilton to Toronto, waking up early the next day, and then driving the six hours to Montréal.
“That takes a physical toll on you. Obviously, I’m not gonna say take a break every single night between shows, because that’s economically not feasible,” he explains. “But if you’re not paying the cost through your body, you’re paying the cost through your wallet.”
Without a tour manager to dictate every waking moment of life on the road, Sabry says it’s important to take care of yourself, especially your voice. She says she let the “rock and roll lifestyle” get to her head.
“I wasn’t taking care of my vocal strain in between shows. By the last show, my throat was a bit burnt out,” she warns. “Take care of yourself when on tour, especially if you’re playing so many shows back to back.”
“Taking it easy is important because if you’re already spending all this time and money on logistics and figuring everything out, you might as well be good to go for every show.”
Spring Colours will be performing at the Dance Cave with Gully Boys on May 14 and at Kensington Market’s Supermarket on May 23. They’ll also be participating in an album listening experience hosted by Spin Class Local at Danu Social House on May 10.
