Our band has been going over 10 years and we've never had contracts apart from one or two stray bookings where we've been hired via an agent. All we do is ask that people give us as much notice as possible if they have to cancel - and we've never cancelled a gig ourselves.

In all this time, the number of cancellations has been very small - perhaps less than 1 a year. Oddly enough, we had two cancellations at fairly short notice this September, which was annoying because we could have filled the slots twice over. Inevitably, the question of contracts arose and, once again, we rejected the idea given that the overall paperwork to be created just wasn't worth it - given the ratio of bookings fulfilled to bookings cancelled over the years.

We're quite a busy band but - so far - bookings have been relatively trouble-free over quite a long period of time.

Just our experience - others may take a different view.