‘My whole life crumbled overnight’: The music industry fighting to survive

To start with it was like my whole life just crumbled overnight. I went from being extremely busy, running to airports and staying in hotels and organising my life to travel all over the world to suddenly realising – what am I going to do? It’s catastrophic for the music industry because obviously we rely on making money through live performances.”

We are hugely enthusiastic about getting back to work. If we are told immediately that we can open up the gardens and do live performance then we will move so fast that no one in the opera world would believe it. But theatres, classical music, opera, dance, all the performing arts are in an existential threat at the moment. We could be losing orchestras. Unless something is done now there will be nothing to come back to.”

We’re not like a pub, we don’t have gardens and our whole business is about putting a large amount of people into a small space. We’re supposed to be able to open from the beginning of July I think. Personally, I don’t want to be responsible for someone ending up at QA Hospital being ill so unless I’m 100% sure that the logistics we can put in place make it safe for everybody then I have to really consider whether it’s worth opening or not.”