Trust fund? From what I'm aware the UK has no trust fund for musicians, you can apply for one if you are a part of the Union (which I am) but only if you do so many gigs a year, which we didn't we did two UK tours of 14 dates.
basically had to pay for all the merch and fuel, food etc for 2 UK tours off our own backs.
By our own backs I mean almost entirely mine.
CD's alone were £1000 (for 1000) as it was the only logical way to buy them and make profit, idea was on the long term.
Fuel driving around the country was insane. We did 28 dates across both tours and covered from coast to coast (north coast in Scotland being the exception, but we went to Nottingham).
I think we did something nuts like 3000 miles per tour, can't really remember now. But we stayed at each of our houses closest to cut costs on hotels etc.
Then you add in feeding a crew of 7 / 8 (band, driver, photographer), T-Shirts, Badges, Stickers, banner.
Was a hell of a lot of work put into it with the goal on the long term. 1st tour was a financial disaster, 2nd one was almost breaking even. So if we kept going I have no doubt we'd have pulled it together, but it fell apart due to Osku heading into Military and just enjoying it so much he kinda fell out of love with creating music as heavily as we were.
Just rotten luck as opposed to bad planning imo, but everyone makes mistakes. At least I'm pretty certain that we didn't piss money away, we just invested in the long term plan of 5 years. We went 2 years and fell.
So eh, shit happens, I respect the other guys decision to do what they want in life, which is why now I seem to be the only one still making music out of the 4 of us.
Cheers!
-Joe
