Therapy reaches the tours that cannot afford it

Touring is one of the few remaining parts of the music business where money is reliably made, and it is organised in a way that concentrates its costs on the people least able to carry them.

A new fund is aimed at one of those costs. Writing in the Guardian, the Radiohead drummer Philip Selway set out his backing for the Pay It Forward Fund, established by Tamsin Embleton and the Music Industry Therapist Collective to provide mental health support for musicians and crews on smaller tours.

The structure is the interesting part. The scheme grows out of the provision MITC already makes to larger tours, which is a way of saying that the service exists and has been priced beyond most of the acts who need it.

Initially £272,000 will finance 150 tour teams of practitioners over three years, delivering occupational health, mental health education and pastoral care for crews and artists on smaller tours.

That is a modest sum against the size of the touring industry, and a specific one: it funds practitioners rather than awareness, which is the distinction between a programme and a campaign.

Selway's account of why it is needed is first-hand and worth reading rather than summarising. He describes Radiohead signing after five or six years playing mainly in Oxford, then spending the second half of 1993 in the United States, and an anxiety that surfaced in his playing rather than in anything he said.

He names the mechanics plainly: emotional and geographical displacement, living on top of each other, sound check to gig to meeting people afterwards, and no way off the roundabout until the tour ends.

The observation most likely to be recognised by anyone who has worked a tour is about silence. It is difficult to raise because nobody wants to rock the boat, and because other people are going through the same thing, so raising it feels like adding to their load.

The design detail that matters is lived experience. The scheme's premise is that a practitioner who knows the industry is more use than one who does not, because the conditions being described are not ordinary working conditions and explaining them consumes the session.

What the fund does not change is the economics underneath. Small tours run on margins that do not accommodate a travelling therapist, and a three-year fund is a bridge across that gap rather than a repair to it.

Which is the honest way to read it. This is the industry acknowledging that its welfare provision currently tracks budget rather than need, and putting a modest, time-limited amount of money against the difference.