Revenge of the Psychotronic Van

There are many, many more important things to donate money to that our band and our van, but lots of you lovely people have been kind enough to express an interest in helping us out and suggested setting this up. We really appreciate the support.

Here is the official statement. More info can be found at www.revengeofthepsychotronicman.com

Some of you may have heard that our van broke down on our way home from our recent tour. Today we received the news we were expecting, but dreading. It is going to cost us £2000 to fix it. Please feel free to share the following statement if you would like to help us out. We were reluctant to put this on a public forum, but we are now in a difficult position.

We don't have that sort of cash available, despite making some money on tour, so this money will have to go on Andy's credit card. Last year, Big Hands got some shares from his work and bought the van with them for £2800. The plan was to pay this back by gigging as much as possible. We've not paid him this back yet, as we've now had to have two major pieces of work done on the van, which has cleaned us out of all the money we've earnt from gigging. This new debt will be on top of that. So as you can imagine, the band has gone from a position where we were just about covering our costs, to being massively in debt in the space of a year.

We really can't continue gigging as frequently as we have done recently without the van, and unfortunately the only way to even attempt to get some of this money back is by getting out and playing more often. We considered writing this van off as it has been a liability, but have spoken to a few mechanics and they recommended that we'd be better off putting the cash into van where we knew that certain things are definitely in working order due to paying to have them fixed, than it would be to get another second hand van, with potentially more problems.

So we have given the go ahead to have it fixed, which is a massive risk, but after how amazing our tour was, we really didn't want to have to stop doing Revenge for financial reasons. But unfortunately, this is last chance saloon, we can't afford to lose any more cash. We just need to get out there gigging as much as we can and hope we can get a couple of years out of the van without too much more expenditure.

Unfortunately, all of this could have a big knock on affect for TNSrecords. The label (and all small labels) sells far less than most people realise. Both Andy and Bev are owed money by TNS. Now that Andy has debt from both the band and label, he'll be unable to cover any shortfall on TNS releases until some of it is paid off. That means that in the short term the label will have to reduce releases to what we have already been agreed to put out (two of our four upcoming releases have luckily already been paid for - we should just be able to scrape enough together for the other two we have organised). With this new debt alongside the TNS debt, we really are at a point where we simply can't afford to take any more risks on releases until we have the money to pay for them physically in the bank. That means that we can’t really take on any new bands atm.

So, we hate to plead poverty (we were genuinely very reluctant to put this information into the public domain), but we really are struggling a bit now. If you felt like helping out, it would be awesome if you could grab some Revenge merch off the TNS site. We have loads of Revenge t-shirts/hoodies/sweaters in stock (tnsrecords.co.uk), so this would be the perfect time to grab something if you were in the position to do so and wanted to help. Please check out the link. If anyone has any ideas of how we could raise some funds, we are all ears.

It's becoming increasingly hard for small bands such as ourselves to survive, so I really can't encourage people enough to support the DIY bands you like (not just us). I know we are probably preaching to the converted, but we really can't overstate how much your support is needed and appreciated.

Cheers

Andy, Matt and Big Hands