Ah, yes: the payment thing.

When I ran a folk club back in the early 70s, I would book an act, agree a fee in advance, sign a contract, and have the agreed amount waiting in an envelope, to pay them before they went on. If I subsequently didn't cover that fee on the door, that was my problem, not theirs. No reason for them to go short.

But the number of clubs where I played, where the organiser tried to pay me short of the agreed fee because he hadn't taken enough on the door to cover it, and would often really seem quite aggrieved when, producing my copy of the contract that he had signed, I would point out that that was his problem not mine, and he shouldn't have agreed a fee if he wasn't able to guarantee the ability to pay it...

~M~