Our manager told me yesterday that we have inadvertently accepted a gig sponsored by Relentless, which is in turn owned by the evil overlord Coca-Cola, and said festival is less than 2 weeks away. If the offer had been for the Coca-Cola Boardmasters Festival, it would have been an instant no but it wasn’t and maybe we should have done our research but we didn’t, and now we are in the awkward position of deciding what to do.
Now for those who don’t know, this is a problem for us, Pip’s “Thou Shalt not buy Coca-Cola products” line in Thou Shalt… isn’t just a controversial demand made to make us appear more interesting, it is a belief, it is something we both adhere to not matter how much I miss Dr Pepper & Cherry Coke. You see Coca-Cola aren’t a good company, now no multi-national company can be said to be angelic but Coke really take the biscuit, their rap sheet highlights include the murder of 8 union leaders in Columbia and the use of polluted water in India.
So what do we do, festivals are massively expensive things and corporate sponsorship is how a lot of festivals survive, think of Reading & Leeds festival, the headline sponsor for years was Carling, a beer company, more than 30000 people die a year in Britain from alcohol related diseases but you don’t hear of anyone pulling out because its the Carling Weekend. Corporate Sponsorship cannot be avoided but as a band we do have options:
1. We could play dumb and pretend we didn’t know thus taking the ignorance is bliss route and do the show with blinkers on.
2. Play the show and talk openly about the issue.
3. Cancel the show.
Now of those 3 options only option 2 makes sense to us, option 1 is sadly the standard route but we don’t want to be those guys, also me writing this blog kinda destroys the credibility of route 1. Option 3 has potential but 2 weeks before the festival all we’ll be serving to do is let down the people that are coming to see us and the damage will already have been done by association. So option 2 is the only way.
So if you want to find out just how evil Coke are head over to Knowmore’s Coca-Cola Company Page or the mildly aggressive KillerCoke.org.
cheers
d
