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Threatin hopes to turn failed tour into documentary

By | Published on Monday 17 December 2018

Threatin

Threatin’s Jered Eames is planning to make a documentary about his disastrous UK tour, which collapsed earlier this year after none of the American band’s fabricated fanbase turned up to any of the shows.

The subject of a possible film arises in a new interview with Rolling Stone, which contains Eames’ first public comments about the incident besides a tweet claiming that we’re all “part of the illusion”.

In the article, Eames continues to present what happened as being what he had planned plan all along, despite that stance not entirely adding up. He then says that he hopes to use footage shot by his wife on the tour to make a film explaining exactly what went on behind the scenes.

Threatin were six shows into a European tour when people started noticing online complaints from venues. Those venues were annoyed that the band had claimed to have almost sold out shows in the run up to the tour, but had then actually played to virtually no one on the night.

As media picked up on those complaints, it then became apparent that the band’s 38,000 Facebook fans and numerous YouTube likes and comments were largely fabricated. As were the band’s record label, booking agent, management company and two music websites giving the act positive coverage. As the story unravelled, two of the session musicians hired to back Eames on the tour quit and the rest of the dates were pulled.

“I knew people would look at it and go, ‘looks good’, and move on”, he says of the fake websites and fans. “I’m just trying to manufacture the bandwagon effect. The fact that people look at these numbers that are so easily fictionalised and hold them as any kind of merit – that shows a huge flaw in the music industry as well”.

It may well highlight a flaw in the modern music industry, although it also shows that it’s actually quite hard to “manufacture the bandwagon effect” and then build an actual touring business on the back of it all. Because for Eames, the bandwagon remained firmly locked in the shed even after he’d shelled out thousands of pounds hiring venues and travelling to Europe to play in them. Unless you buy the idea that the actual aim was to have a failed tour and then fuel the bandwagon with the public interest that generated.

The cost of all those venue bookings and plane tickets brings us to the other big previously unanswered question of the whole story: how did Eames pay for all of this? Simply by living frugally and building up enough savings over the course of decade to do so, he says.

Having already spent more than $10,000 recording an album which, he admits, only sold a couple of hundred copies, hiring the venues for the tour alone cost another $5000. “I’m not some fucking rich kid”, he says. “All this is, is good money management”.

You can spend your Christmas break debating the merits of that last statement. For his part though, Eames plans to use similar tactics to promote his next album, proclaiming that “fake news is easy to manufacture”. Or, as was the case here, real news about a fake tour.

Still, the column inches that fake tour debacle caused could now be capitalised on. After all, he wasn’t being offered Rolling Stone interviews prior to the European trip. So maybe we will be hearing more from Threatin in the future. Or could Eames instead be about to experience the diminishing returns of flash internet fame.

Perhaps a collaboration with Rebecca Black is on the cards.



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