A FRENCH GIG? NON!

Just came back from investigating the possibility of doing my debut gig here in France: a performance of a new version of Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll at a local venue - a rather fine small cinema, with a good big screen for showing the bits of rare footage.

However, as anyone familiar with French bureaucracy will be unsurprised to learn, it's set up to be impossible - or at least, impossible to make a profit. First, ten percent of the ticket price has to go to the French version of PRS. No matter that 80 percent of the event is me talking and it only uses five or six song performances - no matter that this is in marked contrast to a DJ who plays dozens of records per evening and contributes very little else - the deal is the same. (And if you're a musician performing your own songs, PRS takes that 10 percent and eventually gives you back... half of it! Most of the rest goes towards social security - presumably to help all the musicians who can't afford to do gigs.)

The hire charge itself is pitched so high that you'd have to sell an awful lot of seats before you could hope to break even, and this hire charge only covers the cinema and one technician; it doesn't include any front-of-house staff or publicity or even the supply of the tickets.

Naturally, there are rules about creating your own tickets. First, you have to be a registered tradesperson to be legally entitled to sell tickets for anything at all - which is OK in this case: Sarah and I are both registered as writers with the French authorities (though not allowed to join France's writers' union because we didn't earn enough in royalties from books in the previous tax year) - but then you are only allowed to print individually numbered tickets, each of which must consist of three parts (ticket, stub and "Control", the last of which must in each case be retained for a year).

Nor can we sell beer or wine at the gig to augment our revenues, because only the mayor of the commune has the necessary kind of licence to be able to sell alcohol on the premises, even though the commune only owns the building and the cinema within it can only be hired from a different outfit altogether.

By the time we'd complied with all this, and spent a couple of weeks distributing flyers, writing press releases and so on, it's more or less certain I'd fail to make any money.

At last I see the sense behind the gaffe in George W. Bush's memorable remark that "the trouble with the French is, they have no word for entrepreneur."