How to start a function band in the UK

Starting a function band is two jobs at once. The first is musical and obvious: find players, learn a set, and get good enough that a room full of people who did not come to see you will dance anyway. The second is administrative, nobody mentions it at the first rehearsal, and it decides whether the band is still going in three years — who is in charge, what you charge, how the money is divided, what happens when the drummer cannot make the 14th, and whether anybody can find the venue's postcode on the morning of the gig.

This is that second job, in roughly the order it comes up, for a musician or a small group about to start taking money for weddings and corporate work in the UK.

What is a function band, and what is the work actually like?

A function band plays at other people's events rather than putting on its own: weddings, corporate parties, birthdays, balls. The repertoire is chosen to fill a dance floor rather than to express anything in particular, the sets are timed around somebody else's schedule, and the job includes arriving early, dressing as asked and stopping when the venue says so.

Two things surprise players who come from originals bands. The first is how far ahead it is booked: a wedding band is often confirmed twelve to eighteen months out, so next summer's diary is being decided now. The second is the shape of the day — you might play for two hours and be on site for six, loading in during the afternoon, sound checking before the guests arrive, then waiting somewhere while people eat and speeches run late. A corporate function is usually tighter and more punctual, and pays for that punctuality.

None of which is a complaint: it is reliably paid live work, and the bands that enjoy it are the ones that planned for the waiting.

Who is in the band, and who is in charge?

Four or five players is the common shape: drums, bass, guitar or keys, and one or two singers. Four is the smallest line-up that reliably works a floor; five gives you a front person whose hands are free. Horns and extra keys make a band sound considerably bigger and make every date more expensive to staff, so carry them as something a client pays extra for rather than as standing members.

Decide early who is in the band and who is a regular stand-in: they are paid differently, and the distinction gets bitter if it is left vague.

Then decide how the band is run. There are three normal answers, and all of them work:

• A bandleader. One person takes the enquiries, says yes, books the deps and pays everybody. Fast and clear, and entirely dependent on that person staying enthusiastic.
• A self-managing band. The work is divided — bookings, money, material — and decisions are made together. Fairer, slower, and it needs the division written down or everything reverts to whoever answers messages fastest.
• A manager. Somebody outside the line-up finds and runs the work and keeps a manager's cut of the fee. Worth it when they genuinely bring bookings; expensive when they do not.

Whichever you pick, write down four things before the first paid gig: who can say yes to a booking, who holds the money, who sends the paperwork, and how a disagreement gets settled. The mechanics of the fee, the cut, travel and the split are laid out in how the money works, and they are far easier to agree in the abstract than after a good gig with an awkward number at the end of it.

What do you play?

A function band's material is measured in sets rather than songs. Two sets of an hour, or three of forty-five minutes, is what most venues expect, driven by the curfew and when the evening guests arrive. Learn more songs than one night needs: repeat bookings and two-night weekends punish a band with exactly one set.

Build the list so it works in the room: slower material while people are still arriving, the obvious floor-fillers held back, and a couple of endings you can reach quickly when a coordinator starts making a winding motion at the side of the stage.

A wedding brings three extra questions you should have answers to before anyone asks:

• The first dance. Will you learn a couple's chosen song, and by when do you need telling? Some bands learn anything, some offer a list, some play a recording and come in afterwards. Any of those is fine — not having decided is not.
• Requests. Do you take them on the night, in advance, or not at all?
• The do-not-play list. Ask for it. It is shorter than you fear and saves one very specific kind of disaster.

Write the keys, arrangements and endings down somewhere that is not one person's memory; the first time somebody is ill, that document is what makes the night survivable.

What kit do you need, and what will venues ask for?

You need a PA that suits the rooms you actually play — buying for a marquee when you work hotel function rooms is the classic expensive mistake — plus backline you can carry, lighting so the stage does not look like a corner of a function suite, and a bag of the boring spares: IEC leads, a DI box, batteries, a spare snare head, gaffer tape.

Two pieces of paperwork get asked for over and over, usually a few weeks before a date:

• Electrical testing records. PAT testing is how bands show their gear is being looked after. There is no fixed interval; most gigging bands work on an annual test plus a visual check before every use. What a venue wants is a register: each item identified, who tested it, the result, and when it is next due. There is a fuller account in PAT testing for bands, and a blank register to start from — spreadsheet and printable — on the band equipment and PAT register page.
• Public liability insurance. PLI covers damage or injury arising from what you do on site, and plenty of venues will not let you load in without seeing the certificate. Keep a copy where whoever answers the emails can find it.

Write your rider too, even if it is two paragraphs: what you need on the day in the way of space, power, parking and somewhere to change. It stops you discovering at four o'clock that the stage is two metres wide.

How do you get booked — an agency, or yourselves?

An agency sells dates to clients who go to it rather than to you. It brings volume and takes the selling off your hands, and keeps an agency cut of the fee for doing it. The trade-offs are real: a smaller share, less say in what you are booked for, no direct relationship with the client, and money that often reaches the band weeks after the event because the agency collects first.

Booking yourselves means being findable and being quick: a page a couple can send to their partner, video that sounds like you on an actual night rather than in a studio, an honest answer about whether you are free, a price, and something in writing. The booking tools on this site do that part — a public page that knows your diary, quotes that turn into confirmed gigs, and invoices with the deposit and balance already worked out. If you would rather build the paperwork yourself, the musician's invoice in the UK sets out what an invoice has to say.

Most bands end up doing both: their own enquiries first, agency work to fill the gaps. Whichever way a booking arrives, reply the same day, put it in writing — a booking agreement covering date, times, fee, line-up and what happens if somebody cancels — and take a deposit rather than holding a date on goodwill. A date held but not confirmed is TBC, and the band should be able to see which any given Saturday is.

What should you charge, and how is it split?

There is no right figure, and the useful question is not "what do bands charge" but "what is this price built from". Count what actually moves it: how many of you there are, how long you play, how far you are travelling and from where, what you provide in PA and lighting, how hard the load-in is, and what day of the week and time of year it is. Price the extras separately — a DJ set between your own, ceremony music, an acoustic duo during the drinks — rather than absorbing them and wondering later why the long days pay the same as the short ones. The Musicians' Union publishes recommended minimums for engagements of different kinds; the MU minimum is a useful floor, worth reading at the source.

Agree how the fee is divided before the first gig, not after it. The arrangement most UK function bands land on runs in this order: start with what the band actually receives, take off the agency's commission or the manager's cut to leave the band pot, take everybody's travel out of the pot next and give it back to whoever made the journey, then split what remains equally between the players who were there. Each person takes home the equal share plus their own travel.

The order is the whole point, and it is what new bands most often get wrong: split first and settle travel afterwards, and the player who drove a hundred and forty miles each way has quietly subsidised the one who lives round the corner. How UK function bands split gig money works through it properly, expenses and common mistakes included, and you can put your own fee, postcodes and line-up into the band pay split calculator to see what each person ends up with before you agree to anything. What it looks like from a player's side — and what they are entitled to see of the working — is how band members get paid.

Deps, from the very first gig

Somebody will be ill, or double-booked, or at a family wedding of their own, sooner than you expect. A dep is a musician who stands in for a member on a particular gig, and it is entirely normal on the function circuit — the bands that handle it badly are the ones that had not thought about it.

Start collecting names now, while nothing is on fire. A dep pool of two or three players per instrument, who have seen your set list, turns a crisis into a couple of messages. What is a dep? covers the etiquette — who asks, who confirms, and what a dep should be told before saying yes. The money side wants a band decision: usually the band pays the member as though they had played, and the member pays the dep what the two of them agreed. What a dep actually costs you works that through with round numbers, including whose journey the travel is worked out from.

The day itself

Everything the band needs on the day belongs on one page, in the same shape every time. Call it a day sheet and send it days in advance, not the night before.

• The venue's full address and its postcode, plus where the van actually goes.
• The call time — when to be there, not when you start playing — and whether it differs for whoever brings the PA.
• The sound check: when, and whether it has to be finished before guests arrive, which at a wedding it usually does.
• Set times, and the time the venue says you stop.
• Dress.
• Who is on the gig, any dep included, so nobody is a surprise.
• One phone number for somebody at the venue, and one for whoever runs the band.

The point is not the document; it is that nobody spends the afternoon answering the same four questions by text.

Keeping records from the first gig

Start on gig one. Reconstructing it later is miserable, and most of what you get asked about afterwards is something you either wrote down or did not.

Per gig, keep: the date and the venue with its postcode, what the band was paid, what came off before the split, the miles each person travelled and from where, any expenses with the receipts attached, who actually played, who was depped and by whom, and what was paid out and when. That is the raw material for a statement each player can check for themselves, and the difference between a straightforward end of the year and a weekend with a shoebox.

Individual players want their own version of the same thing, across every band they play in and dep for — their own diary, their own travel and mileage, their own receipts, their own monthly total. That is what the musician's side of this site is for, and it costs a player nothing.

The ten-line checklist

• Agree the line-up, and who is a member rather than a regular stand-in.
• Agree how the band is run: a leader, the band collectively, or a manager on a cut.
• Write down who can accept a booking, who holds the money and how a disagreement is settled.
• Build more set than one night needs, and write the keys, arrangements and endings down.
• Decide your first dance policy, your requests policy, and ask for the do-not-play list.
• Buy a rig that suits the rooms you actually play, and keep a register of what you own.
• Get public liability insurance, and start the electrical-testing records before a venue asks.
• Decide how you are getting booked, and put every booking in writing with a deposit.
• Agree the split — cut off, travel out of the pot, the rest divided equally — before the first gig.
• Collect deps' names now, and keep a record of every gig from the first one.

Get those ten done and the band is a business, not a group chat. The playing was never the hard part.