“The hardest thing is finding new bands in Medway”

What Steven asked Colin Chapman and Robin Halls, gig promoters at Careful Now Promotions

Careful Now Promotions are Medway’s leading independent promotors of live music in Medway, having put on a series of gigs at the Oast Community Centre in Rainham that stretches back to 2018. Steven met the two men behind the project, Colin Chapman and Robin Halls, at a pub in Rainham to discuss how they met, why they started putting on gigs, and their connection to a previous interviewee.

Robin Halls and Colin Chapman of Careful Now Promotions

Where were you born? How did you end up in the Medway Towns?
Colin: Hertfordshire. I was working with a guy who had just bought a house in Gillingham. He had a spare room and said ‘you wanna move in?’ Yeah, okay. I was 20.
Robin: I was born in Gillingham. I lived near Reading when I was doing some voluntary work. I lived in London at university, and then I lived in North Shields when I was training to be a teacher, and then I came back to Medway.

What brought you back?
Robin: At the time, a job. It was a lot easier to get a job as a teacher in the south east than in the north east.

What jobs did your parents do growing up?
Colin: My dad was a computer engineer, my mum was a librarian.
Robin: Had computers been invented back then?
Colin: Early days, cutting edge stuff.
Robin: This was when a calculator took up a warehouse.
Colin: He did a lot of looking after the computers in the dockyards. He retired younger than I did. It’s not fair.
Robin: My dad was in the navy, and when he left that he became self-employed as a picture framer. My mum was in the civil service.

How did you find school and university?
Colin: Primary school I liked. Secondary school not so much (laughs). I did the 13-plus rather than the 11-plus. Did two years at a really shit secondary school and then went to grammar school, but those two years just knocked any enjoyment or learning for school completely out of me.
Robin: I can't remember much about primary school. Secondary school was deeply uninspiring. It was a local secondary school, so I’m not going to name it. Then I progressed through to university just because it was the expected route. University was also fairly uninspiring, unfortunately.

What did you do at university?
Robin: I did geography. I think I made the wrong choices to be honest. I could have made more of it, but I found it all pretty uninspiring really.

What was the first music event you went to?
Colin: The first one I went to voluntarily, as opposed to being taken by parents, was to see The Undertones in Canterbury. That was 83.
Robin: Again, you make me wonder what I’m doing in this music thing. When I was growing up, my friends didn’t go to see live music. I definitely went to some when I was at university in London, but I can't remember what they were. They weren’t big, I don’t think. The first main one I went to was in Newcastle. I went to see The Wedding Present. That would have been the late 80s.

What instruments do you play?
Colin: Guitar and bass, badly. I couldn’t profess to anything else. At primary school I was good on the recorder. All four of them: alto, tenor, treble, and the bass. Did them all.
Robin: I’ve known you for a long time and I didn’t know that.
Colin: It’s not cropped up in conversation.
Robin: I feel terrible because I don’t. I did a few years ago think it was time. I’d love to be able to play an instrument. I’d love to play the guitar, so I did play a guitar thinking it didn’t have many strings. Once I had learned the third cord, I realised I couldn’t remember the first, so that’s been put to one side. I’m not as talented as Colin.

How long have you two known each other?
Colin: I’ve been thinking about it because I knew you were going to ask that.
Robin: I think I met you at the football. We both had friends who watched Gillingham. It would have been via that.
Colin: I’ve got a memory of when we first met, and that was Chris brought you back to where we were living at Balmoral. You were selling Brian Moore’s Head.

Sorry, what?
Colin: Brian Moore’s Head was a fanzine.
Robin: Back in the day of fanzines at football, we were both involved in that. I was involved with Brian Moore’s Head, which was one Gillingham fanzine and Colin was involved with the other one: The Donkey’s Tail.
Colin: Yeah.
Robin: Our paths crossed in the sense we both did that.
Colin: Brian Moore’s Head was really good and won national awards. Donkey’s Tail was shit (laughs). We just wanted to do one because we could.
Robin: They were different in nature. If you bought both you could have read both and not felt you were reading the same thing twice.  

Was there enough going on with Gillingham to warrant two fanzines?
Colin: No. There wasn’t enough going on in football to warrant the thousands of fanzines that sprung up. It was about opinions.
Robin: Because it was quite a new thing back then, popular amongst supporters, we sold quite a few. People would buy it.
Colin: Like all these things, it started off down the pub after a few beers. Gillingham’s crowds at that time were 2,500 or 3,000 on a good day. So, we launched our first fanzine with 1,000 copies! We sold about 2-300 of them and just had boxes lying around.

What happened to Brian Moore’s Head?
Robin: After about 50 issues, I stopped because I had had enough really. The other people were really invested and carried on for another 50 issues. Then it went online for a while, but it isn’t really maintained. I still have an ongoing fondness for any paper-based fanzine.

Has there been a Careful Now zine?
Robin: We have done four paper-based music zines and given them out at gigs. We haven’t sold them.
Colin: We had a gap, we hadn’t done them for a while. I say ‘we’. I don’t do them.
Robin: We are conscious not to put them out in electronic form. If you want to read it, you have to get your hands on it. We did 100 of the last one, which isn’t bad. They are all gone. (pause) You can tell Ed that I’ll subscribe to Local Authority when it’s a cool magazine I can receive in the post.¹
Colin: I do remember that at the last gig, Ed was sneaking Local Authority flyers into the fanzines.²

What was your first full-time job?
Colin: I worked for BT. I passed my O-Levels and then I started as an apprentice at BT. I left BT two years ago. I did 39 years.
Robin: I worked for KCC. Did some admin work, just to clear my debts really. Then I did some voluntary work and then decided to train as a teacher, I guess the first proper job was as teacher, which I am still doing.

In what subject?
Robin: Primary. Not really specialist, just teach everything badly.

What additional roles, paid or unpaid, do you do?
Colin: Full-time dad (laughs) takes up most of my time. I’ve just gone onto the committee at the Oast house. I was a school governor for about 12 years. Is Careful Now Promotions a role? More of a habit.
Robin: I’ve been on the committee for the Oast for a couple of years. Certainly no school-based roles.

What does the average day entail?
Colin: Well, I’ve worked from home for donkeys’ years. So, take my wife to work, do a few jobs around the house, cook the evening meal, and then do whatever needs to be done. Mostly tasks around the house. Then hopefully get out for a beer and a gig, as often as humanly possible.
Robin: The teaching day, so class based most of the time. Pretty early start which goes into most evenings and weekends. It’s not a 9-3.30 job like some people think. During term time, it’s pretty full on. Weekend gigs when we can, and the occasional sporting event.

What was the first music event you organised?
Colin: I was in a band when I was 16-17, and we did some local gigs. That was probably the first thing. We just hired a village hall, had about 50-60 people turn up. Basically the entire sixth form. 
Robin: Well, probably the first gig that we did, I would say.

What led to the formation of Careful Now Promotions?
Colin: (pauses)
Robin: I’ve been trying to think.

I wasn’t expecting this to be the difficult question.
Colin: I’m waiting for Robin. It’s his fault.
Robin: Well, we used to go to Indietracks, which was a music festival in the Midlands which unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore. One of the bands who played there called The Thyme Machine. I think at one point there was an offhand comment, and you can’t pin this on me.
Colin: (laughs)
Robin: We said come and play. They had humorous lyrics.
Colin: They were fun to watch.
Robin: They had a CD of football related songs that was really good. I’m sure we just said to them ‘Come down and play in Medway.’ At some point, they contacted us, and said ‘Right, we will come down and play. Could you sort it out?’ So, we had a chat and thought let’s just do it. We knew that Ed (Jennings, Editor of Local Authority and former gig promoter) had put on Trust Fund at Riverside One. We talked to Ed about that as a possible venue, and that became quite easy to organise. I knew someone at one of the schools I worked at, one of the dads. I knew he was into music, and would do all the sounds for the PTA fairs. I managed to get his contact and asked would you do sound for a music gig. He said ‘Yeah, that’s what I do.’ So, we had managed to get a sound person and a venue. The band came down and did the gig, and it was fun. We enjoyed doing it.
Colin: It was great.
Robin: Especially as afterwards we got to have several drinks with the band, late into the night. We thought ‘Yeah, we will do this again.’
Colin: And then they knocked the venue down (laughs). The only thing I remember is you turned up at my doorstep one day and said ‘We’ve got to put a gig on, on the 4th of July,’ or whenever it was.
Robin: I don’t know how many people attended that first gig. 30?
Colin: 35. More than we thought.
Robin: Mainly just everyone we knew we could ask. We liked it and decided to do it again.
Colin: That was six years ago. We didn’t do anything for a year because there was no venue.
Robin: What was the second one then? How did that come about?
Colin: That happened, as all things CNP, by accident. Sort of forced upon us. The second one was the beer festival at the Oast house.
Robin: Oh, that’s right.
Colin: I live four doors up from one of the organisers on the committee. He just said, ‘You do gigs, don’t you?’ We’d done one. They were doing the Beer and Music Festival and wanted us to do the music. I said we could probably do that. We did the music on the Friday night. We got four bands to play. That was 2019³. That went okay. We were looking around the building, somebody showed us the bar. We thought that could work, and we just started putting on gigs there. The rest is history as they say.  
Robin: We thought let’s put on gigs in Rainham because they usually happen in Rochester and Chatham. Let’s see if it works.
Colin: We had looked at all sorts of venues across Medway. It just didn’t add up. They wanted £200, and we just thought we were never going to be able to do that.
Robin: The Oast were very accommodating. They wanted to see it used for live music.
Colin: Most of our crowd do like a few beers. That puts a lot of money over the bar, which has gone down well with them. At the moment the relationship seems to work.