It takes more than one band to build a festival
Fri May 02, 2008
By: By William McGuirk
In these times, popular music is about as relevant to everyday life as poetry and theatre. It will always have a place for those who truly love it, but its power to change the world has diminished. The audience has moved onto other entertainment... DVDs, Docs, YouTube... watching themselves really. At concerts, people are viewing the proceedings on their cell phones or trying to get themselves on to the jumbotron. We are our own show (no talent required). Ninety per cent of those who go are not there to hear the music but to record themselves hearing the music. The rest are usually other musicians. If the audience is the show then success would call for as big an audience as possible. That could explain why promoters are building, not around one performer, but many. Trying to keep a festival out of the red on one big name is a dangerous game. Who knows who is big anymore. The turnout for Sum 41 recently was about a thousand I'm guessing. One would imagine the Ajacian punk rockers should draw bigger. A promoter now has to add three or four bands of similar status just to get 4,000 in the barn. Bands figured this out themselves a long time ago. They are forming gangs of bands. Broken Social Scene is a festival onto itself. Book them and you also get members of Feist, Stars, Metric, The Priddle Concern, Apostle Of Hustle and Jason Collett. BSS brings its 10 per cent with it. It is its own audience. Our local equivalent in the D.Rock is Champion Heartache. A band built around Matt Holtby. Members Trish Robb and Sean MacLean are solo in their own right as is keyboardist Derek Giberson. Drummer Craig Toutant plays in a couple of bands. Billy Blasko of The Stables, who produced their debut record, is an honourary member. Brad Stella of the Music Scene seems welcome on stage when available. Brendan Lawless is also in the C.H. One could build a small festival around the Champion Heartache and, having heard each player's individual work as well as the collaborations, I will attest that it would be a lineup of class. Someday that might happen. In fact someday, somewhere it will happen. More on that next week.
William McGuirk is a freelance writer and longtime Oshawa resident. He can be contacted at wmacg@yahoo.com.