BAM! Festival founder and creative director Sarita Beavis sits down with ANDREW MCMILLEN in a Brisbane cafe to set the record straight about her fledgling event.

After a week of “malicious and nasty gossip, untruths, half-truths and fear mongering”, I had every reason to suspect that BAM! Festival founder Sarita Beavis would have sharpened her knives ahead of speaking to M+N. Our insider report, which detailed a compulsory artists’ meeting, articulated many of the concerns felt within the Brisbane music scene and beyond, namely that Beavis and fellow organisers were out of their depths.

However, over a Diet Coke in a West End cafe, Beavis emerges admirably. She answers questions candidly and is willing to admit mistakes. As a first-time event promoter, she’s learning – and fast.

We'll start right at the top. How and when did BAM! Festival originate?
It's something that I've been working on since August 2008. As people mentioned on the internet, I've spent a lot of time overseas in the past 10 years, and going to festivals. I was really wondering why there was nothing like the smaller local music festivals which are really popular and common in Germany, England and countries over in Europe. We just don't really have them here. We have things like Woodford [Folk Festival] and some more community-based festivals like Bellingen [Music Festival], but not the same variety of music. I'm not one of those people who only likes reggae or only likes metal or rock or indie or whatever. I like to have a variety and choice.

Back in 2008 I was on the train home from the Reading Festival, I sat next to a guy from Austria. Because I speak German, we started chatting. Turns out he organised Nova Rock, which is a small festival in Austria. I quizzed him for half-an-hour on the train about if it was possible for just a normal person to start up a festival and make it work … Since then, the first six months were planning that I did on my own, business planning, setting up the company [Australian Music Scene] and working out … all that kind of legal stuff behind starting a festival.

In May 2009, I put out a call to people in Brisbane to see who was interested, and who might want to get involved. Now, we meet as a big group once a month, but I meet with members of the team nearly every day. As time's gone on, roles have changed. It’s our first year, so things do change quite drastically and quite often as we come across things. Like what's happened on the internet over the past few days. We've gone, "OK, maybe we need to take some of those points into consideration." We're not just going to ignore the fact, although I'm not going to retaliate online either, because there's no point in that. At the same time, we're not not going to listen.

Much of the discussion on M+N comes from a place of concern. We don’t want BAM! to be another Blueprint Festival where you’ll land yourself in loads of debt. What are you doing to stop that kind of thing happening?
My mentor is Bill Hauritz, the Woodford Folk Festival founder. It took me a long time to earn his respect. I contacted him out of the blue, told him what I wanted to do. A lot of people contact other festival organisers and directors with an idea, like I did, and as soon as they start working on it they realise how difficult it is and give up.

When I first went to him I had an idea much like the guys from Blueprint. To be completely honest, that's the point I started at. I wanted 15-30,000 people because I'd found this beautiful venue [Ivory's Rock Conference Centre] and the venue can hold that many people. That's how many people The Lost Weekend [reportedly] wanted to have, for example … It was Bill that said to me, "You've got to start with 1000 people." I thought, “That doesn't sound like as much fun.” [Laughs]

I really took his advice on and everything that he's said to me. He's shown me the Woodford budget, and I have a very clear understanding of every cost involved. I’ve put in my own money in as have other volunteers - thousands of dollars. We've also got a few random silent investors around the place who've put money in. We haven't even spent all that money to start with. We're not spending ticketholders' money to get this off the ground. We're spending our own money. Then we'll be able to pay ourselves back what we have spent, should it become successful. We don't want to get into any kind of legal or debt problems with bands or with suppliers or anything like that. So our business plan is built around a base number of 600 people attending the festival. If that many people attend, we break even … Once we pass that number of people, we need to bring a bit more infrastructure in.

One of our biggest problems [is] not having large amounts of money in order to do certain things. We wanted to get a bigger headliner. We haven't given in yet, but I'm quite happy with the way the line-up looks at the moment, especially because we've got a mixture of bigger DJ names, as well as a few quite well-known bands. Like the Barons Of Tang, who are coming up from Melbourne, and Dallas Frasca, who’s awesome and plays a lot at festivals like Woodford. The Winnie Coopers just headlined Red Deer Music Festival. They had 500 people out there for just one night. So, yeah, I think it's a good combination.

When did you decide that BAM! was going to be three days long and run for 24-hours a day? That comes from my Glastonbury dream. [Laughs] That's something that the venue hire is quite expensive. Just to give you an idea of our overall budget, a quarter of our budget is venue. A quarter of our budget is production, bringing in stages, sound equipment, things like that. A quarter of our budget is going towards the artists, and a quarter of our budget goes towards everything else – from security to fencing to marketing to everything else.

Those costs, particularly venue hire, but also production to an extent, are fixed. It doesn't matter how many days it goes for, or how many people … I think it's better value for money to have it open for that time. Because of where we're situated, because it's so far from everything, we don't have noise restrictions like you do in an inner-city festival, so we can run 24 hours. It's not like one stage is running 24 hours. The festival as a whole is running 24 hours. When the dance music stops at 8am we have yoga on one of the bazaar stages, which then turns into country music … The way it's broken down is that different people are looking after different areas of the festival so not one person will be awake 24 hours running the thing. [Laughs]

“I'm not going to retaliate online either, because there's no point in that. At the same time, we're not not going to listen.”

Is that quarter of the budget allocated to the bands flexible, depending on ticket sales? If you reach that 600 mark, will you keep trying to book bigger named artists?
Yeah, that's the plan, and it gets easier once you've got some more names on there. Bands are really hesitant to put themselves on the line, especially with a new festival - and especially with the kind of publicity that we've had in the last week where some of the bands are being knocked on the site as well. That's what kind of hurt me the most … A lot of them really have put themselves on the line. They are playing for free, most of them … They're not paying anything at all to be there, but they do get paid: as soon as they sell one ticket, they get paid something. It's not like they have to sell 100 tickets to get paid something.

Profit made on each ticket isn't even accounted for in the budget. That's because of the way that works with [artists’] ticket sales, it's above that because the tickets online are more expensive. The tickets online have booking fees and stuff like that. So that's where their cut comes from: the tickets the artists sell themselves. We're hoping to sell a fair percentage through Moshtix, and a fair percentage through the artists.

How did you decide what bands are playing?
A combination of different things: some bands were able to bring things to the table, like production equipment and experience in the industry. Some wanted to do something extra. Some were just really keen to get involved. Then it came down to genre. We had so many metal bands applying and because it's such a specific genre and such a specific audience, we just don't have the space to have a stage just for metal or the facilities or infrastructure…

One of our volunteers works for a local booking agency, and so he's actually seen most of the bands live. I've seen a few of them live myself, as have the people who run the three different stages. So between most of the acts on the line-up, we've seen just about all of them perform live.

But you've still got more to be announced, don’t you?
Yeah, we have about another 30 but we may be downgrading things even smaller than the current setup. After everything that's happened, there's a few big meetings ... where we'll make some final decisions about whether we cut another stage and incorporate what's there into the existing stages. The infrastructure's already there for a lot of the stages.

What's your overall goal with the festival? What are you trying to achieve?
I want it to turn into a long-term thing. The difference between a festival like this and a festival that's big and massive – with big headliners and 10,000 people – is that it has so many rules, regulations and restrictions on freedom. I feel it personally when I come to a festival in Australia. I feel like I'm herded like sheep … It's like when you go to see big names, you sacrifice a certain level of freedom for that, and here we have a lot more freedom. At the end of BAM!, I want everyone who came along to look back and go, “I had the best weekend of the year, and I will totally go again next year because I had a really good time…”

We’ve said this a million times, but we’re not making money out of this. It's not something that we started to try and make money … It was totally about starting a new festival, and it's been a bit of a crash course for me in starting a new business because unfortunately you can't start a festival without starting a business. I have a degree in business, but it's more about a passion for the actual event itself.

One of the contradictions that you've just mentioned - and it was touched upon in the M+N report – is that you wanted to start small. But it's a three-day festival that runs 24-hours a day, held an hour outside of Brisbane for $200? That’s not the smallest place to start, is it?
Part of the reason for that is the venue … [It’s] the best festival venue in the world. It’s stunning and the facilities and everything are there. We wouldn't be able to just use it for one night and still have a reasonable ticket price … [Plus] I never wanted to do a one-day festival. That doesn't interest me at all because I find that there are so many one-day festivals around Brisbane and it's not something that I want to do. Camping is more of a community-based thing. You get to know all the people camping around you, you hang out in your site, you chill out in the campground for half the time and it is literally like a camping weekend away with your mates.

The Lost Weekend was a three-day camping festival. Its ticket prices were about the same as BAM!’s. It had international acts. But they couldn't sell enough tickets to make it happen. Why do you think BAM! will succeed where The Lost Weekend failed?
I don't want to speculate the way people have been speculating about BAM!. The only information I have is from the venue and the police, [who] were expecting to deal with a festival of 15,000 people … We're really aiming for 2000. We’ll probably cap it at 3500 - if it gets to that. After the initial reality checks with Bill, I was never aiming for anything like that number. All of our budgeting - even with us making profit - is based around 3500 people. We don’t want to have more people than we can comfortably look after. It’s about making sure that everyone is happy and comfortable being there. It’s not necessarily about massive crowds.

A lot of the bands - beyond those couple of headliners you mentioned - gig regularly in Brisbane. They all have tiny fanbases. Do you think that the incentive to see dozens of those smaller bands will be enough to encourage people to attend?
We’ll have to wait and see what happens with the ticket sales. They’re moving at the moment; it’s not like we’ve stopped and realised it’s not going to work at all. Like you say, each band has its own small fanbase, and ideally, all we want is for each band to bring along their small fanbase. In a lot of cases, their fanbase are their friends. We’re trying to make it a camping trip away with their friends to see not only them, but a whole range of other bands that are there. That’s our Brisbane market: most people that come from Brisbane will be there with that kind of thing in mind.

With Ipswich, Toowoomba and Boonah, those areas don’t have access to as many festivals as we do in Brisbane. There’s a festival in Ipswich this Saturday [July 10], Switchfest, which has sold 2500 ticket so far. Their headliner is Hook ‘N’ Sling. They’ve only got DJ acts, and their DJ line-up is maybe not as strong as ours. We’ve got a strong line-up on the DJ side. So that, in combination with the bands, I think will at least sell 600. But hopefully more like 1500. That’d be a really nice, comfortable number to have out there. Plus we’ll have about 1000 band members and volunteers, by the time we add it all together.

Can you tell me about the logistics associated with running the festival?
We’ll have five stages, which are being run separately. Each stage has its own venue manager, production team and stage manager. There are two artist liaison locations on site.

Are those members already part of the BAM! team?
Yeah, they’re volunteers. They come from a variety of backgrounds – they’ve been involved with 2high Festival, some are band members, some have done local gigs, some are band and stage managers, and there’s a local booking agent. They all work with local musicians already.

Can you tell me a bit more about the BAM! team?
Company-wise, when we’re talking about directors, we’ve got a guy called Steve Brodie, who’s in [Brisbane band] Le Fricken Hecks, and the third person is an accountant. There’s also a company secretary. That’s the business team. They’re in place because, when you run a company, an Australian corporation, you have a pretty big responsibility to do it properly. You can get in a lot more trouble for stuffing up a company, than you can for stuffing up a festival.

Our volunteer base is broken into four areas: a service team, which includes the gatekeeper (who looks after parking and traffic management); the “green crusaders” (who look after waste management and recycling initiatives); the “lemmings” (our volunteer team); a market stalls coordinator; and a resident and bar liaison. His job is to make sure that - although the bars are being run by the site - they’re doing everything within our legal agreements, so that the residents and the surrounds are happy. And then there’s the programming team. Most of them work full-time. I’m the only one who’s given up my life for this. They can only afford to spend 10 hours a week on top of full-time work, although most of them have got holidays for the two weeks surrounding the festival so that they’ll be on-site, setting up.

If the festival succeeds this year, are you planning to look into paid roles and paying bands next year?
I don’t know what position we’ll be in for next year. My first thing would be to make things a little easier from the organisational aspect. I’ve had to flog my guts out just to get the most basic things done, because we don’t have enough money to do massive print runs, and things like that. We’ve had to find ways around printing and marketing that are a lot more face-to-face and hands-on. In our second year, the extra money that we’ll hopefully have will be put into marketing and the line-up, so that we’ll be able to have a few bigger headliners. We’ll always be a local music festival. We’ll always have predominately local bands there. However, for them to have a better experience, if we have three big headliners on the bill, we get that many more people there that they’ll have more exposure…

We don’t want to rip off bands … Running a band is like running a business, and for some bands it’s not a good business decision [to be involved with BAM!], and for other bands it is. A few of the bands are quite confident they’ll sell 100 tickets.

Which lands them a $5000 bonus, right?
Exactly. Like I said, we only need to sell 600 tickets. If one band pulls in a sixth of what we require, I have no problem with giving them 1/4 of the total money that they brought in for the festival. $5000 is more than any of those bands would usually be paid. It’s more than most people get paid for five weeks’ work.

I work at Flight Centre. I’ve worked there for 10 years. “What gets incentivised, gets done” has been drilled into me for way too long. But at the same time, it’s something that I believe in. I see that company make so much money, all because of the way that they incentivise people to do things. Even local bands, a lot of them say, “Oh, but you’re the promoter.” It sounds bad, but I never consider myself a promoter. It’s not my goal. I’m trying to create the festival - that’s what I want to do.

A lot of the bands are really excited about it. A few have said they don’t want to do it, and that’s fine. A few are coming along for the whole weekend, and bringing massive amounts of their friends. Others are just coming for their set, then leaving. Everyone’s different – they can do what they want to do.

What was your reaction to seeing the “insider report” on M+N, and the comments that followed?
I was disappointed. Mostly I was disappointed because whoever it was - and I don’t know who it was - didn’t come up and speak to me at all. On one hand, I should have held a Q&A at the end, which is one thing he or she commented on. But while he was outside “in the shadows”, I was inside talking to all the bands. I’m a very easily-contactable and open person, and the fact that they felt it was necessary to sneak in, take notes, and write everything in such a negative way ... I mean, a lot of what he said was true. There were only a few points that were incorrect. It was mostly just the way that it was written, which was to make people think that [BAM!] is terrible. I was disappointed that somebody felt the need to write it like that.

The comments that followed ... I’m not a mean person. I can’t be mean. And to read a lot of stuff like that, it makes you wonder how nasty some people can be. Especially about something they really don’t know much about. It’s really hard to create something new that people don’t understand. Apparently, in a 15-minute meeting, you can learn enough to discount 14 months’ research and work. That’s what I found disappointing and upsetting.

Given your experiences in the last week, then, is it true that all publicity is good publicity?
[Laughs] I haven’t actually written anything on our Facebook or the website since [the M+N report was posted]. I wanted to give it a chance to settle down a little bit and see what happens. Maybe it hasn’t made a difference, publicity-wise to us in Brisbane. I’ve already earned the respect and trust of those people who are of key importance to the running of the festival. They’ve all been through business plans, and the budget, and they know and trust what we’re doing. That’s the important part.

As far as wider publicity from people who hadn’t heard about it before, I think it has reached a few people around Brisbane, but we’ve reached people in Sydney and Melbourne who we had no intention of marketing to in the first year. In that way, the publicity - negative as it may be - has reached people further afield than we would have tried to target this year.

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BAM! Festival will take place from October 8-10 at Ivory’s Rock Conference Centre in Queensland. For more information click here.