‘No one’s tried this before’: a new live music roster aims to ensure opportunities for disabled musicians | Music

Musician Andrew Lansley hid his autism diagnosis for 10 years, scared of losing opportunities to perform if he asked for the adjustments he needed regarding lighting and noise controls. Now, the double bassist has created the UK’s first roster of disabled musicians, aiming to get artists with disabilities on to lineups and address the career barriers they face.

Launched today, the UnMute roster has been developed with the hope it will make promoters, venues and festivals more comfortable in booking disabled artists.

Disabled musicians are paid about £4,000 less per year than non-disabled peers, research shows, and almost six in 10 (57%) reported facing career obstacles due to their disability.

Just one in three (31%) disabled musicians are open about their condition with everyone they work with, the Musicians’ Union (MU) found in 2024. Four in 10 disabled musicians do not share their access requirements with venues, according to 2024 research by Attitude is Everything.

Lansley is now creative director of the UnMute roster. “It’s not about having to tick boxes,” he said. “The disabled community wants to be seen as an investment, not a cost.”

Artists can apply to join the roster, which has been organised by event management and production company Global Local and Continental Drifts – who have programmed stages at the Glastonbury and Wilderness festivals – and developed in partnership with the MU and the charity Attitude is Everything, which works to encourage access to music for disabled people.

When acts get accepted on to the roster, the UnMute team represents them to get bookings and ensure their access needs are met – using something known as an access rider.

While rider requests are the stuff of music legend – from Metallica’s “VERY IMPORTANT” bacon to Van Halen’s infamous no-brown-M&M policy – the access rider is a more recent development, a document outlining basic needs that disabled artists can share with venues, introduced by the MU in 2021.

Lansley began working on the idea after a performance at Glastonbury in 2022, when an engineer at the festival was the only person from 30 venues that summer to ask about his access rider.

Emma Shaw, who performs as emzae, said her disability meant she often turned down gigs. Living with ME and OCD, Shaw requires two people to accompany her and carry her equipment, which can triple travel and accommodation costs.

“A lot of the time it’s just: ‘Sorry, we can’t cover that.’ So I don’t take the opportunity,” Shaw said. “A lot of us have had to shrink ourselves down and pretend we haven’t got any access requirements to be able to get gig bookings.”

Since joining the UnMute roster, Shaw said she had been booked for her first gig in London. “It’s probably the highest fee I’ve ever been offered,” Shaw said. “I hope this is part of a movement where it can just become standard over time, so that nobody else coming up ever has to have the worries that I did.”

Drag Syndrome, a drag collective made up of performers with Down’s syndrome, who have performed at Berghain and Glastonbury, announced in 2025 that they would stop booking new shows in the UK, blaming a lack of funding and a system which “fails disabled artists”.

But joining the roster has opened them up to UK bookings once more. “It’s why we’re collaborating with UnMute, so people with more experience in funding will do it for us,” said Daniel Vais, the group’s creative director. “I got so exhausted. We are leading the way, and the people that are supposed to support [us] refuse.”

Annalie Huberman-Hertz, who performs as YouGo Boss, said she hoped the roster would “show everyone what we can do” as disabled artists.

This January, the Liverpool Sound City festival agreed to introduce access riders for all performers.

Lansley believes the UnMute roster can kickstart progress. “We’re talking about a small cluster of disabled people being able to create national impact by almost using the artist roster as a guinea pig,” Lansley said, adding he hoped it would pave the way for a touring route of accessible venues. “No one’s tried this before, the knowledge doesn’t exist, so we’re kind of creating as we go along.”