50 free posters for your first post-lockdown gig. Come and get ‘em
This is a very simple offer.
You’re a live performer. You want to promote your first gig since the most recent lockdown was eased. We’ll help you, with 50 A3 posters.
It’s that simple. Send us your artwork and tell us your preferred dates for the posters to go up. We’ll take care of the printing and placement (subject to availability of Phantom frames in your area). First come, first served.
There’s one free 50-poster campaign per customer. And don’t worry if lockdown hasn’t ended in your area yet – this offer will still be there when gigs eventually start up in your hood again.
Sticking up for live music since 1982
At Phantom, we’re committed to the vital task of capturing attention and turning it into an audience.
We’ve been doing it since the early 80s when we first started sticking posters on walls. These days we offer a wide range of poster formats and a nationwide network of over 6,500 poster frames around Aotearoa.
We love all the clients that advertise in our frames but we’ll always have a particularly soft spot for the arts. You guys have been doing it tough over the last few years. Now more than ever, we reckon it’s time to support the people who entertain audiences and make our country a more interesting place.
So tell people about your first post-lockdown show, once you’ve locked it in. We’ll give you 50 free Phantom posters to do so.
Find out more and book your free poster campaign by firing off an email now to anton@0800phantom.co.nz.
And if you’ve been meaning to book your vaccine but haven’t quite got round it, you know what to do. It’s the key to a carefree summer of festivals, gigs and meet-ups.
I’m writing this on the eve of Guy Fawkes’s night and yet I did this poster run a month back in early October. I flew to Seattle and the shuttle bus driver became lost getting me to a Holiday Inn. That’s strange. She also managed to incur the wrath (held back, breathing changed) of several other passengers as she went past their stops. That’s weird. Why would a person do that? I felt incredibly diplomatic as a Kiwi and we always feel the need to patch things up. I did. That’s laborious.
What do we know about Seattle? Well, it’s very easy to tell that it’s a superlative gig town. There are thousands of posters on the lamp-posts for local bands and DJ’s. Mostly these are coloured A3 photocopies. As I was putting up NZ poetry posters (mainly Nicholas Thomas, Pablo Nova, Janet Frame), a cop went past and waved and smiled. I enjoyed that. There was some kind of action in Seattle to ban postering a few years back and this action failed. Good. There is a need for expression, more so now. I think the local poster company in Seattle is called Poster Giant and it looks to me like they do a good job of handling many campaigns simultaneously. That’s required. They obviously maintain the sites.
What do we know about America? Well, just this last weekend I was in Chicago postering. As I left Chicago I noted that the main local newspaper (The Tribune) was in bankruptcy. I was now flying to Philadelphia where the local newspaper there (The Inquirer) is also in serious difficulty. It feels to me like many people in America are now expressing themselves (and their music, theatres, businesses, issues) through alternative ways and this includes posters and fliers. The old reliable stalwarts. The corporate style media has obviously failed. This corporate type of media mainly became about share prices and ignored people. In business, when you cut costs, you also run the risk of cutting your own throat. Of course, the internet features in all of this, but I think the main reason the newspapers are in the ditch is because long ago they lost contact with the population. Mr Hugh Bris came around and arrogance then ruled. Television in America is strange too, everyone has such perfect teeth. Yet there are many good journalists out of work. That’s sad.
There’s something about Seattle and Portland both being highly creative cities. Portland especially is very bohemian and reminds me of Dunedin and also of Cuba Street in Wellington. I had a great time postering in Portland.
Microsoft is centred somewhere around Seattle. Nike is centred somewhere near Portland (in Beaverton). The greatest Rock guitarist of all time, James Marshall Hendrix, was born in Seattle. That says it all. Portland has the greatest bookstore in the world, Powell’s Books and my very favourite author, Thomas Pynchon, worked for Boeing in Seattle for two years in the early 1960s. This was whilst he worked on his breakthrough novel ‘V’. I’ll bet you’ve read it and understood it. Try ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’.
But it was in Seattle where Kurt Cobain came through the ranks and changed music at a time when it was dangerously boring. When music is dangerously boring it is also bad for people. Life becomes inhibiting. Here’s what Jim Carroll (who died about a month back) said in a poem about Kurt Cobain:
“And instead you were swamp crawling Down, deeper Until you tasted the Earth’s own blood And chatted with the buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds” – Fragments for Kurt Cobain – Jim Carroll
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