'It’s F*cking Insane’: Top Aussie Promoters On Struggles Of Planning Events Around COVID

“We’re trying to basically cram six month’s worth of work, in terms of planning and building a festival, into literally five weeks; it’s fucking insane."

That’s Ben Tillman, the promoter behind beloved NSW event Yours & Owls. Tillman and everyone else involved with the festival have spent the past six months working tirelessly on a COVID plan (“I think we have something like a 600-page document”), liaising with high-level consultants, lobbyists, union groups and more to get State Government approval for their 2021 event. This week the festival got the green light to go ahead – only three weeks out.

“We had a tentative approval maybe five-six weeks out, so it’s just another risk that you have to add to the already risky game that we’re playing, which is like, ‘Ok, is there going to be a COVID outbreak?’, weigh that against all the regular risks of running a music festival, and add that on top of an uncertainty of whether or not you’re going to get an approval,” Tillman says.

“So five or six weeks out we made the call, ‘Ok, we need to start work, or it’s physically too late to do all the work that we said we would in the COVID plan.’ And so we just went ahead and started doing it and with that means you start incurring the costs, so it’s been really stressful.”

Live Performance Australia (LPA) chief executive Evelyn Richardson emphasises that “there is high risk involved”.

“We’ve got a patchwork of restrictions and processes across the states and territories, so we haven’t got harmonisation, which does make it really challenging, particularly because the industry is largely a national touring industry,” she says.

“We do a matrix update on density restrictions and border restrictions that changes sometimes a couple of times a day.”

“We’re really hoping that the public understands how hard it has been."

Alongside Yours & Owls shifting venues to Wollongong Dalton Park (two mins down the road from its usual site, Stuart Park), the festival’s 2021 setup will include an Australian first, with the introduction of two revolving stages in the middle of the event site, which will be split into four separate zones.

“It’s just what we’ve had to do to get something approved, and the alternative is nothing,” Tillman explains.

“We’re really hoping that the public understands how hard it has been and just the real facts of, it’s literally this or nothing for a year, and I guess, at the very least, it’s going to be super memorable because you get to go to a festival in amongst a global pandemic when there’s nothing of this scale really happening globally.”

Anyone lucky enough to experience live music again since the pandemic began will note how different the experience is, but for promoters across the country, both those booking major festivals and tours, the amount of work that goes into delivering a show is astonishing, with Tillman noting that 95% of his time is spent navigating COVID.

And it’s not only time consuming, there are extra costs involved with COVID compliance.

Yours & Owls is one of two major music festivals in NSW to get approval, with Easter Long Weekend event Bluesfest being the other.

“We started to see sporting events occur at very high numbers – all of sudden there’s 40-50,000 people coming,” Bluesfest boss Peter Noble notes.

“I just kept looking at them and going, ‘These guys are getting, 40-50,000 people [to] come and we can’t get any approvals to operate in live music, so there must be a different way to engage with the epidemiologists and relevant authorities.’

“So we went, ‘Ok, where’s the issue… you don’t want people dancing, you don’t want people doing certain things, so let’s find those and let’s see what we can do to work on them, where we can get to a point where you’re satisfied that we’re doing something at a COVID-safe level that you can approve.

“That took a long time, but now we’ve got a blueprint that other events can use.”

Tillman also hopes that the work they’ve put into Yours & Owls will “open up the floodgates a little bit more”.

“I think by us getting this done and out of the way, it really is going to hopefully be that kind of first test, case study event for the Government to see and trust that, yes it is safe and we can keep doing it.

“The thing that I’m looking forward to most is when that last band on the last day comes on – then you know you got there.”

"You kind of question how one rule applies to one thing but doesn’t apply to another."

While Bluesfest and Yours & Owls are looking to pave the way for Aussie festivals moving forward, national tours are a completely different matter, and while Bluesfest Touring has upcoming dates for George Benson, Patti Smith & Her Band, The Wailers and more in 2022, it’s work being done right now by promoters like Zaccaria Concerts that’s helping establish touring framework. But it’s not without its challenges

“I didn’t plan to be first out… we did two [SummerSalt] shows at Mornington and were the first promoter to do an event of that type in Victoria since March 13 [2020] – same in South Australia,” Zaccaria Concerts Chief Executive Officer John Zaccaria says.

For Zaccaria, who is currently touring the SummerSalt concert series across the country to thousands of punters at each show, one of the biggest issues is just how different the frequently changing guidelines are in every state. They've even had to postpone the Wollongong leg of the tour to next year.

The seeming willingness for Government to help also “varies from state to state”, according to Zaccaria.

“Victoria – 100%; South Australia – 100%, with challenges; New South Wales is a tough state because New South Wales Police are involved in the event approval process - no other state has Police involvement in the detail of an event; WA has stamped out festivals, but you look at some of the stuff that’s allowed and you kind of question how one rule applies to one thing but doesn’t apply to another.

“For example, you can have a beer festival [in WA] with 10,000 people, but you can’t have a gig for 10,000 people without a chair. I’m sure they’ve got their reasons and their health advice goes that way, but from someone who’s working it, you kind of scratch your head and wonder whether it’s just singling out festivals. We’re told it’s not, but from our point of view, that’s a massive backbone of the live entertainment industry.”

“There are going to be people who are going to be in very dire straits.” 

It’s the across the board restrictions, specifically relating to capacity, that’s really hurting the industry.

“The trouble is when you’re operating at [lower] capacities, or the 1 per 2 square metre rule, no one’s breaking even, so you’re still losing money and that’s not sustainable, and that’s why we need venues to be back at 100% to at lease give us the best chance of getting back on our feet,” Richardson says.

Zaccaria adds: “At a venue where you would normally have 10,000, you now all of a sudden can only have 5,000, so you’re either finding bigger venues or you’re copping the financial impact of not being able to sell those 5,000 tickets.

“How long is it sustainable? It’s not sustainable in the long term, that’s for sure… I got told the other day that we had radical hope and that’s probably the best way to describe it; it’s crazy to think about what we’re doing, but we have hope.”

It’s an uphill battle and with JobKeeper about to shut off, things are only going to get worst.

“There are going to be people who are going to be in very dire straits,” Richardson says.

“The key message, in terms of getting the industry back on its feet, what’s going to enable us to get back is really allowing us to have our venues, indoor and outdoor, and events scale and the borders open, so people can tour, whether they’re a small band or it’s a large concert tour.

“There’s a lot of people employed when we bring international artists in as well, so we really want to see that. We’re preparing for that for October.

“Those are the things that are going to help ensure that live music in the latter part of this year is fully operational.”