Knockoffs with…Gareth Lewis and Aaron Sandow
This week CityMag stops by UniBar to chat to the duo behind it and the Beer & BBQ Festival about how the local music scene is changing.
WHERE: UniBar
DRINK OF CHOICE:
AS: Guinness
GL: Black and Tan
HK: Whatever cider’s on tap
Gareth Lewis is the director of General Admission Entertainment (which in a former life was the licensee for Parklife, Soundwave and Future Music Festival, among others), co-owner and booker at UniBar and co-founder of Beer & BBQ Festival.
Aaron Sandow is the managing director of UniBar, co-director of General Admission Entertainment and co-founder of Beer & BBQ Festival.
HK: This year will be the last Beer & BBQ Festival of its kind, and you’ve been at it for 10 years. How has curating a lineup changed in that time?
GL: At its heart, it’s always been kind of an extension of our own tastes, but it’s a much bigger and more diverse kind of beast of a lineup than it has ever been, which is great.
We’ve always tried to hit two or three different markets. Friday night is more the heritage rock and roll stuff, so Wolfmother this year is the epitome of that, and then Saturday nights traditionally being the ‘current’, for want of a better term, with the Chats headlining.
The curation side is what we spend six months of the year planning that before we announce and it’s a massive part of the festival because it gives us a chance to give so many local bands opportunity as well, we’re really passionate about that, obviously, with the venue, and have always worked with South Australian artists, putting them on the same bill, announcing at the same time as the bigger artist, has always been a real consideration of ours.
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HK: When you’re booking local bands, what are you looking for, and how do you know if they’re ready to hold their own on a lineup with higher-profile artists?
GL: There’s wildly different degrees of being ready. Most of what we book is local, so Future Sounds, a festival version of our residency program, coming up, there’s four local spots and we look at bands in their infancy, starting to move tickets, going in the right direction.
There’s no magic pudding or anything for it, and it’s not a science, but trying to catch them on a trajectory where they’re really hungry, and there’s only so far you can take it just by being a local band in Adelaide but if you’ve still got that buzz, and you know, you’re branching out to more than just bringing your friends along to shows, then that’s an interesting time.
AS: Full disclosure, I’m not super involved in the band side of the operation, so what I do is event management, site management, building the shows, doing all of that stuff. The interactions I have with bands, I enjoy bands that come to a show and come to a gig that they’re playing, and they come with a really professional outfit, they come with the intention of taking it seriously and wanting to do it as a job, because it is fun and it’s a fun environment to work in.
Backstage areas can be fun, but it’s also a workplace, and there’s a lot of people and a lot of moving parts…when you see that quality in a band, from my perspective, I’m like, ‘OK, cool, they’re taking this seriously, they want it’.They have their act on stage, but they have their professional act in the work environment, which is so not sexy, un-rock-and-roll, but I like seeing that in young kids.
GL: Good tech specs.
AS: Yeah, they’re up front with their documentation…
GL: They don’t clog up a loading zone…
AS: They’ve got the financial aspect of the band all sorted out, they’re ready to go!
AS: But this is all stuff that it’s very easy for a band or an artist to get a really bad reputation if they drink too much, if they acted like a dick backstage, if they’re rude to people, like that shit’s not cool. When the bands are taking it seriously that creates a nice working environment.
HK: So championing those emerging local artists has always been something you guys have done but balancing that with headliners, have you found it’s harder to secure those sort of bigger name headliners in the past few years?
GL: I wouldn’t say it’s harder. It’s definitely more of a negotiation between events and agents and artists, and their managers.
The cost of touring a band here is more expensive because of physically putting people on flights to get to Adelaide, costs more to be putting up bands in hotels, there are barriers financially to doing that, and especially those mid-tier artists, which we love, touring artists haven’t been in before, like Dick move is on the lineup this year from New Zealand. They’ve never been to Adelaide before, but they’re only coming from Auckland, and that’s an expensive thing to do, so those mid-tier artists, they’re never going to sell you the bulk of the tickets to make it back, but they’re the things that make the lineup exciting.
HK: We wrote a story a little while ago when the market was quite saturated with all of these different types of festivals, there became a trend of different acts being outbid, and certain festivals overpaying for artists led to overcharging for drinks and trying to recoup that money in other ways. How is that something that you guys have avoided?
GL: We deliberately kind of don’t play in that bidding war market for artists. We are really proud of the fact that we curate lineups that other people aren’t necessarily putting on and we worked in that touring festival market for a long time as well for other people, like on Groovin the Moo and Soundwave and Parklife and all those kind of festivals and watched those festivals all eat each other, basically, and it’s kind of a race to the bottom by paying so much money for artists.
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AS: We were strategic in the way that we look at our headliners, because it’s like we’re competing with that headliner potentially doing their own national tour, so whether we can snag the Adelaide show as part of the tour, or we catch them when they’re sort of off cycle in their own tour.
GL: If we were bidding against Live Nation…
AS: It just wouldn’t happen.
HK: You guys have those three pillars: the booze, the barbecue, the music. Thinking about other festivals, how important is it to hit a niche or a trend in your lineup, like Laneway bringing Charli XCX to Australia? Is a big player enough, or what does a festival need to do these days if they’re not pulling a big headliner?
GL: I think it’s been moving that way for a little while, and Laneway is kind of an outlier, because I actually really rate their curation and the way they book into the future. So they’ve kind of bucked the trend a little bit, because they book purely on what they speculate is going to be popular and how it’s going to go. So, they don’t necessarily have to worry about putting great booze in people’s hands and making this amazing on-ground experience.
There is a trend from WOMAD to Harvest, even Splendour in its dying days had sort of discovery areas and much better food and food elements and that kind of thing.
I think gone are the days of working Soundwave Festival, where it’s just like stages, put up fences, throw the toilets in there, and here’s a bit of dead grass and some cans of Jack Daniels.
AS: Fairly cold…
GL: Yeah, fairly cold Jack Daniels. I think those days, everything’s been moving away from that for a long time.
AS: In those scenarios, you’ve got to give the consumer a bit more credit and just have a bit more thought about the customer experience. I think a lot of modern festivals are doing that, it might be via lineup, or it might be the discovery areas, or it might be just the small niceties that they put into the show, you do see that changing in the in the way that they’re caring for the customers that are coming in, the old school days of just ‘pack a park and see what happens’ are kind of over.
HK: What is the landscape looking like outside of festivals? Live venues are facing their own challenges, there’s a parliamentary inquiry looking into that, but how are you feeling about the industry at the moment?
GL: I think it stabilised a bit, I think it was kind of dire nine months ago, it felt at its worst and it’s certainly not all beer and skittles out there. Our venue has had to readjust and we’re in a really fortunate position that we have some day-to-day trade, Monday to Friday, when the students are on campus about half the year, so that kind of helps us keep the lights on.
That model of the venue is basically getting the booze sales and the band takes the door, just doesn’t work anymore. So, making sure there’s a decent enough split for the venue is key, and that’s why we encourage all of the promoters, and especially the local promoters, to come through and put on shows and not undersell their ticket.
We don’t want people paying 10 bucks a ticket anymore, because it’s a big production. You gotta have a sound guy, you gotta do security. We pay a fortune for production and that kind of thing. People have to value the gigs they go to. It’s a bit of a battle, but I feel like the worst of it has plateaued. The whole industry is in desperate need of support, but it’s just about reshaping how you make money and how you break even as a business, and each business is totally different in this market.
HK: Let’s finish it off with some rapid-fire questions. Favourite spot to get a drink in Adelaide?
GL: The Exeter
AS: Cranker
HK: Favourite place to get a sandwich?
GL: The tuna melt at Penny University
AS: Banh Mi on Hanson Road
HK: Favourite SA bands?
GL: Tonix!
HK: Well, obviously.
AS: Lola are pretty good as well, Signals are one of my favourite bands
GL: Free Golf, Jongo Bones & The Barefoot Bandits, Brad Chicken & The Bootstraps