Niall Horan announces show to raise money for his crew

Singer Niall Horan has announced a one-off live streamed show, with proceeds going to members of his road crew.

The pop star has been working with some of his team since One Direction’s first tour in 2011 – and he says the pandemic has left many of them stranded.

“My stage manager is working on a building site currently,” he told the BBC. “A couple of lads are working in Tesco and Sainsbury’s.

“If there’s no touring, they don’t have a job. They’ve been left behind.”

The star and his crew were supposed to be on tour for six months this year, visiting Australia, Asia, Europe and America.

But while Horan used lockdown to write new songs and play radio sessions, he realises others don’t have that luxury.

“I’m obviously one of the lucky ones, but not everyone is as lucky as me,” he said. “I’m a 27-year-old dude, I live with one person, my cousin, in the middle of London. I’m fit and I’m healthy.

“Our crew members are the ones that have basically been forgotten about. Furlough doesn’t touch them – and they are the ones who have mortgages and families and homes and lives to pay for [but] they haven’t got any funds to do so.”

The idea of a live-streamed fundraising show arrived last month, and the star hopes to sell between 60,000 and 70,000 tickets to watch online – enough to “pay all of my crew”.

“I felt it was absolutely the least I could do, was stick a gig on,” he says. “And I urge all the other artists, including friends of mine, to do the same.”

No audience will be permitted into the venue, and the concert will not be available on-demand after it has taken place.

Road crew are the backbone of the live music industry – building stages, sound systems and lighting rigs, and ensuring bands sound as good as they can every night.

Their jobs were essentially wiped out by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has seen thousands of concerts, tours and festivals cancelled.

A report to be published later this week by the UK’s Live Music Group says “the live business is shrinking four times faster than the rest of the economy”, and predicts the majority of jobs may be gone by the end of this year without help.