10 minutes with… Weslo director Bob Lott
Bob Lott, director of the Weslo group of companies including Venue Tix and Thebarton Theatre, talked to InDaily about his decades-long experience in the entertainment sector and how the industry shapes up today.
Bob Lott started out running jazz clubs in his university days, and went on to direct one of the state's most notable venues, Thebarton Theatre. Photo: Helen Karakulak/InDaily
InDaily first visited the Weslo offices to chat with Bob in late July, and he told us festivals “are just going out of fashion”.
“I do know there are people in the industry who are getting some very good money out of government for big festivals, festivals, they’re just going out of fashion, festivals will go,” he said.
A couple of weeks later, state government-backed festival Harvest Rock was cancelled.
Weslo provides security and event management and is the major supplier of security personnel to almost all major events staged in South Australia.
Lott and his friend, the late Jerry Wesley-Smith, founded what became the current Weslo group of companies, and have been staffing most of South Australia’s events since the 1970s.
Weslo supplies security for events and is associated with Thebarton Theatre, Holden Street Theatres, Venuetix and Weslo Patrol Dogs.
Can you start by briefly telling me about how you got started in booking bands and event management?
BL: We formed an entity called Central Booking Agency and for the next 20 years, you did not work in Adelaide unless you worked through Central Booking Agency. I used to manage bands like Barnsey and Angels, and Zoot and Patsy Biscoe and a whole range of people, Bob Francis when he was singing and so on. So I basically booked Adelaide, it sounds big-headed, but it’s the way it was, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
You’re involved in Thebarton Theatre, which is currently closed for renovations. How did that come to be?
In ‘79 it was advertised in the paper that the council from West Thebarton had passed the bill to raze Thebarton Theatre. The mayor and a whole range of people rang me about seeing if we could not raze the Thebbie Theatre and if we could save it. My wife had not been long dead, I have two kids, we had a lovely big farm up at the hills, and I put that up against saving Thebbie Theatre.
Thebbie Theatre is now recognised throughout the world as one of the greatest music places anywhere in the world and it’s because, I think, because we were of the industry.
How did you determine what bands were worth booking?
Well, not just because we did it is it 100 per cent right, but it was pretty close. We used to, at the Central Booking Agency, we would have a weekend. Generally twice a year. It’d be a Saturday and a Sunday and there’d be amplifiers and drums on the stage, we used to do it at Australia Hall next to the Arts Theatre, and we would audition well over 100 bands in a weekend at least. We choose two, three maybe out of 100 bands to go on to our booking list. They would say “we’re on Central Booking Agency’s booking list, we’re now being booked by CBA!”
Now that’s not because I’m trying to make what we did sound brilliant, but you can see the philosophy behind it. You had to work to even get onto a booking list, let alone have what we thought was the specialness of being able to get over the footlights and capture people’s imagination. Now I don’t see that happening now. It could be that I’m out of touch.
South Australian festivals that have pulled the plug this year include Vintage Vibes and Groovin’ the Moo due to economic challenges and lack of ticket sales. Do you think this is a phase, or is the festival and event sector unsustainable?
I think there will always be festivals, there are still flow-ons from the dance music crazes, still clubs where dance music is key, nowhere near like it was. The reasons that these things change is that you’ve got 400,000 younger people in a city and none of them want to be exactly the same as everybody else. They all want to do something a little bit different. That’s why they wear their hair differently, why they wear different colours. That’s part and parcel of life, isn’t it? The young finding its way and so they’re not going to follow the same music form for 10, 20, 30, 40 years – they’re just not going to do it.
Do you think we’ll see them return and what do they need to succeed?
They’ll be finding the next thing. I got the head of Weslo [security] because festivals mean security staff bookings so therefore we better know what the industry is all about. So I’ve got the lady who is in charge of the security company and she found in an afternoon 20 festivals when it just exploded, there aren’t 20 festivals on now and a lot of those didn’t make it.
I remember saying to her at that stage, “we need to get in there and get in now because another two years and they won’t be there, it’s too hard to sustain”.
They [festival organisers] are not financially viable enough to make these things work. That’s why they have to go cap in hand to the government. The last festival that came through they’ve got to have two, three stages they have to have 10, 15, 20,30 different bands. Bands that are supposedly the top bands on Spotify. But in actual fact, Spotify no longer holds its position in the scheme of things.
Why do you think festivals generally aren’t financially viable?
If you’ve done a big festival, and you’ve been lucky enough to breed that success and if a certain number of dollars of it was going into an entity to help, all that will be a nice, comfortable project. But if $7 million comes in, and then next year, they’ve got their hand out, they want another $2 million to run their show then they don’t deserve to get anything. If they had $7 million dollars go through their hands, they should have been able to keep some of it aside to be able to get them into a bargaining position for the next big act for the next year.
Instead of that, they want more money, and these foolish governments thinking they are doing the right thing by the young, are just not doing it. They’re not leaving a legacy of smart management. They’re not leaving a legacy of proper management practices of, if you’ve made a profit to keep money aside to get through to the next time to give you a better chance of making a profit. And I don’t really know how I would change it. I would certainly not let bureaucrats manage it, I would never let people in government manage the business outside.
So do you think venues and festivals have to cater to the music of the day?
Absolutely, they won’t get people through the door if they don’t.
What about those that have a niche, like a venue dedicated to electronic music or alternative music?
I think that’s excellent.
So the venues can cater to communities that like that music, but they have to continuously adapt?
Absolutely and the bands have got to understand they have a responsibility to draw heads. Because if they don’t, the people that are paying them are not going to pay next week.
Should festivals try and give local acts more of a boost?
Yes, they should. But they have a responsibility then to present them in a professional and worthwhile way. Make sure they’re ready but make sure when you do put them up there they’re not on the third bloody stage at the back where they can’t be seen.
They’ve got to be presented. And if I was back doing that sort of work, I would make sure that any band I was using on a concert like that, I would somehow get it working in all the pubs that I could for a month or two months before.
Bob Lott has lived through the American folk, swing and jazz era right through the garage bands and the punk bands. He says the music may change, but they all follow the same patterns. Photo: Helen Karakulak/InDaily
Booking bands to play pubs and be festival-ready seems like the responsibility of the band manager. What do you think makes a quality band manager?
It’s very hard to answer that and be correct. There’s no absolute correct answer to it.
Are there particular traits or skills that a quality band manager has?
You’ve got to be able to recognise it [talent], which means you’ve got to have some sort of music intellect yourself. You have to be committed to the downtimes because it isn’t automatic riches. You have to be competitive.
I, and people who made a living out of the entertainment industry, who are still committed to the entertainment industry shake their heads when we see money being paid to people who will never draw a head through the front door. Then people say “yeah, but that doesn’t mean to say that they’re not good artists or they’re not committed” but if there’s no one coming through the door here, that’s a commercial side of things.
I can’t separate entertainment and musicianship and all those sort of things from being capable to draw a crowd.
What responsibility do you think governments have in terms of investing in grassroots musicians?
I think what they’re doing in New South Wales is interesting, where they take a big group of promising bands and the government is very much involved in that, it’s different to putting your hand out and getting money. They get all these bands and take them to Wagga Wagga and they take them to Orange, places like that and bring that joy to those towns.
Now that’s fine. I can understand that and I can accept that. It doesn’t matter what I think anyhow, at my age now, but it’s an intelligent way of using government funds to go to the far-flung regions and give them a taste of what they would get if they were capable of being able to get to the city for the big shows down there.
Do you think there’s an issue in the quality of talent coming through SA rather than a lack of investment?
We had a show called One12 my son put on at Thebbie Theatre, and they’re all the major pub bands, there were a couple of bands in there that were fantastic. There’s a band that comes out of Melbourne that has played at Thebbie as a side band and I’m not being rude, but it is called Tropical Fuck Storm. It’s got to be one of the best bands I’ve seen since the old days. It’s just so, so good. But they’ve never quite made it. And the reason they haven’t quite made it is that they don’t have good management, and the name is off-putting to a lot of people, but it’s also very attractive to other people. So it’s not that, that is holding them down.
I don’t know that I’ve heard music played as tightly as that group has played for many, many years. Fantastic little band. They played as a warm-up for… what’s that funny name about King Gizzard, the lizard?
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard?
Good band. I think it’s a Western Australian band. They use this young band [Tropical Fuck Storm] as a backup but I don’t think they have good personal management. If I went back into management, I’d look to manage them because they’re very good.