I just got this email from John Hole, who used to run the street performer agency, Crowd Pullers. It closed in 2010, after 22 years of getting events for buskers in the UK. I asked John to send us some info about CP, and here’s the text. Incidentally, his book, A Kiss for the Catcher, is out now (for only 86p!)…

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“Originally I worked in repertory theatre, running two venues from the sixties through to the early eighties. Then I found myself running the Arts and Entertainments section of a big west London borough. During that time we began to find ourselves using a number of street performers at various big community festivals and music events etcetera. When the political complexion of the Borough changed after about five years and the money began to run out in 1988 I was very unsure what to do next.

Anyway, devil-may-care, I set up Crowd Pullers to market the work of the sort of street performers that I had got to know and like at Hammersmith. At that stage there were hardly any other agencies doing that kind of work. In fact the whole world of the performer on the street was fairly secret and opaque.

Crowd Pullers immediately became busy – we were seen to be an organisation that bookers could depend upon for a high quality of performance (and, indeed, the acts we were selling were absolutely phenomenally talented and responsible – real real magic). Early on, for about two years, there were actually two of us in the office and we were sending acts all over the UK and frequently abroad to places like Quatar, Dubai and Spain and Germany and Singapore etcetera etcetera. We provided acts to animate the big UK Garden Festivals, for product launches, publicity events, community festivals, private parties, shopping malls etcetera etceta.

In the first 15 years of the operation an agency like Crowd Pullers was really the only place that a booker could reach the acts and feel secure about what they might be getting. In the final seven years, suddenly it was possible to reach performers much more easily through the internet, and in doing so a booker did not have to pay my agency percentage or the VAT. I was, however, able to continue, as I still had a large number of bookers that continued to turn to Crowd Pullers to organise their performers. Indeed, in spite of being retired, the Lord Mayor’s office in the City of London continues to ask me personally to provide the performers that they require for various events!

However there is no question in my mind that the internet has changed things very significantly now. If a booker is looking for an acrobat, a juggler, a stilt walker, a contortionist, a close-up magician, an instant caricaturist, a silhouette cutter, a hula hoop performer, a trapeze act or whatever, they only have to click on to Google these days and 25 will turn up. And some of them will be truly excellent (and some of them won’t be!). So my overall feeling is that to set up and run that sort of agency now would be ever so much more difficult. It’s never a good idea to compete with google.”