Barry Hogan - Director of Concert Promoters, Foundation, Spring 2000
By: Toby L
Common perceptions of concert-promoters, then; old men in Italian suits that just put on any shows as long as they make money, is that what you think, huh? Well, these types exist, but at least one man's certainly got his motives right - Foundation boss, Barry Hogan.
Our preconceptions are knocked for six as we enter a small, but convenient North London office, one almost bare, bar a few posters and a large collection of CDs and vinyl. Pavement's 'Major Leagues' is not so much blasting from the stereo system: more oozing out of the speakers, whilst four people hold down the jobs of, presumably, 'concert promoting'. Suddenly, a tall, thin, 27-year old man approaches the opposite side of a table - an accessory covered in past music-weeklies - before pushing a swivel-chair into place and sitting down. His brown hair seemed brutally wild and uncared for; occasionally, Barry would stroke it into a position he deemed as acceptable, before undoing his work several minutes later and repeating the action.
During the course of the meeting, Hogan reveals a richly music-filled past. His simple motives of becoming a concert-promoter weren't to give the best talent out there a deserved break or to bring their music to a wider audience, but instead, after managing a band that no one would have, Barry felt he it was his duty to organise their gigs. Inevitably, this built up and after working for Polygram, his company Foundation has gone on from strength-to-strength to its thriving present-day. Obviously, there isn't much more of a story; as mentioned before, Barry's only 27 years old, though there was a time when he was in collaboration with his Mum and worked in her bedroom, for the simple reason that 'she had a phone.'
Foundation would be best known for catering in the 'avant-garde' indie genre, never tempted to stray to the larger acts to gain its dollars. Bands such as Tortoise and Stereolab are the bands that they like, and these are therefore the bands they promote. Simple. Despite offers to merge with larger promotion companies - you know the ones they'd be - Hogan prefers to 'keep it real' and stick to what he enjoys: an admirable philosophy in an industry that's certainly no stranger to corruption and selling out.
But what does the job actually entail?
'It starts where an agent of a band will approach us, as we're concert promoters, to say, 'There's an artist coming through and we want to put a show on,' Hogan discloses. 'We've cornered a certain field in the market where we only do leftfield shows or the 'cool stuff', some might say. You'll get an agent that will come to you and say, for example, 'I'd like to put Godspeed You Black Emperor! on at the Astoria and we want to put them on this date,' and what we do is check with the venue to see if the date is available and, if it is, then you hold the date and get the costing of the venue. You'd then create an offer to send to the agent. 'The way of creating an offer is you set up a ticket price and work out what your greatest potential of sales would be. So, say it's 2000 capacity, times £10 a ticket, deduct the VAT and then you've got your net figure. Once you've got your net figure, you take off all your costs from the show and what's remaining is what's split between you and the band. Generally, the band takes 80% and that's if the agent is fair.'
Barry then notices our eyes rolling at the surprisingly large figure and comments,
'Whoa, it gets better than that! If the agent is a... you know what, it will be 85%. There have been cases where some people have played Wembley Stadium and it was 102%! The promoters would have simply made their money on the merchandise and the car parking, where they could make £5 on every car that parked. It does vary agent to agent, but you can do flat guarantees if it was a festival, like some people may get £1,000,000 for doing one, but have no percentages on top. 'What we basically have to do, in turn, is create advertising schedules, flyer campaigns and basically make people aware of what's happening. This way you can sell as many tickets as possible. Some shows are harder than others, but sometimes you just put an advert in and it sells out straight away; Oasis are like that, Belle & Sebastian are like that. Then you get certain bands where you have to work your finger to the bone, because not that many people may care about them; we may do, but not everyone else does.'
As mentioned, there does seem to be a lot of activity in the operation that centres over the more obscure acts...
'Yeah, people like Godspeed You Black Emperor! but we have done things for Jurassic 5 and Red Snapper and it's basically our record collection more than anything. If we're into it, we'll work our skins off to make it work, but if we think they're crap, we won't bother, or generally won't even take it on, it's got to that point. I don't see the point of putting a band on just to make money, because if we wanted to do that, we'd do things for larger acts.'
So, do you actually get many offers from various larger acts?
'Oh yeah! All the time,' he exclaims, guffawing. 'They see us coming through as the 'new team of promoters' and they want us to be up there because we deal with agents on things like Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips and we do their London shows. That same agent may do stuff like Beastie Boys, for example, though we wouldn't necessarily get offered that. We do get shouts from larger people, but I've built up such a wall around me that if people come in and say, 'Will you do this,' I might not do it, as I don't work the way all promoters do. 'That's the reason why we've cornered a particular market so that way a certain kind of people will come to us and have a certain amount of respect for what we do, because, if you look in the 'NME' for example, our adverts stand out from a lot of others. We were some of the first people to be using colour every single week through the avant-garde stuff. Our flyers were the first to be in colour all the time, they (other promoters) always do it now and the colour posters in the outlets, they never had them before, but they do now. We've been approached by larger promoters to become a part of them and (laughing) there have been f**king big offers, but, no, I'd rather give up than do that, because it would be defeating the object of what we started out doing. To me, getting involved in stuff like that is no different to getting involved with an office job that you're not really into.'
Obviously, one of the main points of discussion is the festival that Barry created, based in Camber Sands. Camber Sands is your typical, British, sleepy seaside town that's therefore no stranger to greasy cafés, tacky slot machines and sand that covers the entire main roads, but right down in the middle of the place is a huge holiday-camp resort, which is the site for the unique event. The festival, named the Bowlie Weekender in 1999, featured acts from all across the indie-spectrum including performances from the pre-mentioned Belle & Sebastian, Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips, bands that have, since their performances, reached the peaks of the powers. There's no doubt that this new format of good toilets and somewhere decent to sleep (the chalets) is appealing to festival-goers and the whole event was a huge critical success, and became the discerning people's choice.
Yet who chose the idea of holding the festival at Camber Sands... in a holiday camp..?
'It was Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian, as Stuart used to work in Butlins and he wanted to stage a festival, possibly like the Southport Soul Weekender, but with bands he liked. I was approached by Belle & Sebastian because we worked with them before and when we approached Butlins, they weren't very receptive, but Pontins were and had the only available camp at the date and time we wanted. I've picked up that people have tried this idea out, but it's never worked in the past and when we pulled it off and made a success in the first year, it was a big surprise to a lot of people.'
However, a dramatic turn of events occurred and Barry, in his excitement of how well the show went, immediately got to work on the follow-up festival. Soon the second 3,500 capacity festival was set, this time named All Tomorrow's Parties, featuring yet more exclusive performances from the leftfield genre. Sadly and unpredictably though, it didn't reach a sell out and, despite press-reports emphasising heavy failure, the show did sell around half the tickets.
Why do you think the original All Tomorrow's Parties couldn't go ahead?
'Well, it was on September 17th, a date I'll never forget and I think it was just the wrong time of year as it was very close to the other festivals. I went into it without having a secure, big headliner, because Sonic Youth were very close to doing it, but couldn't because they had equipment stolen, but they did say if you redo it, we'd love to play. 'I'm glad this year sold out so quickly, because we had a mountain to climb and when it went down before, no one had faith in us (this time). All the agents wanted their money up front because they didn't think we'd be able to see this through, but, with the help of Mogwai and various others, we managed to pull it out of the bag. We now get bands approaching us to play; For Carnation were one of them, and Wire were approached initially, but couldn't play, but they then came back and asked to do it. People like LaBradford approached us, as did many of the bands and most of them seemed to fit nicely in the festival. 'There were some real jokers who asked to play too... We also got many unsigned bands approaching us to play and they became very persistent in trying to get in there, but the problem was, you can only have x amount of bands on two stages, through a short period of time, so it was too difficult to make a third stage just for them. There is the element where you could put them on at the bottom end of the bill, but I had no choice but to make this year's event as strong as possible so I wasn't taking any chances.'
Some people complained that there weren't enough tickets for the festival this year...
'Well, you could say that it is pretty exclusive, but, to be honest, where were they last September? All these people have sort of said, 'Oh, there's not enough tickets,' when, last year, there was just too many! So, it's first come, first served, but we have made sure people know about it. We took an ad out on Christmas talking about it, there were e-mails and mail-outs. The reason we put our first ad in at that time was so many young people that might not necessarily be able to afford going to the festival could have been given money for Christmas so at least they could put a bit of money towards getting a ticket. It is possibly expensive, and when I was about 17 or 18, I'm sure I would have said, 'I'm not paying that,' but it's so expensive to run.'
Although Barry may consider a band to be massive if they have sold only about 5,000 records, it's impossible not to admire him for his persistence in what he believes in and his loyalty to only supporting music he enjoys.
If everyone else in the music-industry stuck to their beliefs and resisted the urges to sell out, then the fat, bald men that were talked about at the beginning wouldn't exist. As Barry says,
'The thing is, I'd rather do that phrase 'less is more' by doing less shows, but shows that are of a more unique, better quality...'
Since this article, All Tomorrow's Parties has become a global force to reckon with, staging additional events in the States and - soon - Asia.
Artists in this article: Barry Hogan