Soap Box: Johnny Foreigner - There’s No Business Like Show Business • DIY Magazine

As Summer Camp touched on in the last issue of DIY, being in a band doesn’t always equal big bucks. Often, musicians need day jobs to get by. Johnny Foreigner’s Alexei Berrow sells merch for other bands in his native Birmingham.

I’d like to take this soapbox to fire a bullet point rant at people I meet in my IRL job. I know you probably saw my name and expected some gin-soaked rant about The Industry, but it’s ok ‘cos I work in Show Business, so it’s still relevant. I am a t-shirt monkey to the stars. I’ve always ignored ranty soapbox people though, so, if I was to stand on one and spew righteous ire, I would place it in the foyer of any large arena and target specific individuals as they passed me by. This would include:

- Mothers of 8-year-old girls on Rihanna’s ‘Loud’ tour: don’t b**ch about how our security are heartless when they ask you to leave at ten to midnight. You just made your daughter watch a sex show and spent so long choosing which soft porn souvenir to buy her that 150 staff and 16998 people went home.

- The drummer and the soundman in P!nk’s backing band: there are higher paying gigs you could be working where you don’t have to suffer that kind of abuse from the talent.

- Miley Cyrus: um, your autotune is broken.

- Take That: not only do I hold you personally responsible for giving us the worst virus of our lives, I think I caught oestrogen poisoning. Also Mark, your autotune is broken.

- Katy Perry: please don’t tell your management yr going to inspect the merch and then go somewhere else. We bled for you.

- Alan Carr: you probably know Lee Evans did five nights to your one, but what you might not have been told is, during Lee’s set, you could hear people laughing.

- People who have temporal disorder: you cannot buy the DVD of the show before the end of the show. How can you be so old yet not understand the flow of time?

- Everyone who’s played at the NEC in Birmingham in the last ten years apart from Kelly Jones: yes, thank you, we would like a crate of beer as a gesture of thanks.

- Elton John: buzz my stand with that f**king helicopter one more time and I’ll shred your ugly t-shirts in the rotor blades.

Johnny Foreigner’s new single ‘You vs Everything’ is out now via Alcopop.

Taken from the Winter 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.