‘We Worked Hard To Get Here’: Q’s With Louis Bellavance, Program Director Of Festival D’été De Quebec

It’s a wrap. The 52nd Festival d’été de Quebec closed on Sunday with a mainstage set by Blink-182. Over the course of eleven days, Alt-J, Chvrches, Twenty One Pilots, Slipknot, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening, Yungblud, Sir Sly, Mariah Carey, Diplo, Kygo, Logic, Bishop Briggs, Imagine Dragons, The Offspring, and many more performed in Quebec City, Canada over the past days.

Each year, FEQ sells more than 120,000 11-day passes, plus around 7,000 VIP tickets offering better views from various areas on site. The number of concerts grew from 250 to 300 over the past two years.

A couple of new additions awaited visitors this year, including a relocated Loto stage, the festival’s second-biggest stage, and a new Festival HQ at the city’s old armory, which also served as a venue for the newly introduced After FEQ nights.

Pollstar was on site to see some great shows and speak with program director Louis Bellavance about FEQ 2019 and business in general. A musician himself, Bellavance fell in love with the job of talent buyer while stepping in as artistic director for Rimouski Jazz Festival in the late 90s. Since then, he’s worked on many events, including the renowned International Jazz Festival and Osheaga Festival both in Montreal.

In 2011, he joined Festival d’été de Quebec. By then he had long realized that the job of a talent buyer has “at least as much to do with business as it has with music.” In his own words, “it’s about the value of the artist, negotiation and [understanding] what works in the market.”

You have to love music, of course, but it’s so not enough. I think our industry is still packed with a mix of business men and music lovers, and failed musicians, like I am. I think the reason my I’ve been booking festivals for 20 years and my phone always kept ringing is because I’m a business man, who happens to know a lot about music.

I play the guitar and the harmonica. I wanted to be a Ryan Adams or a Jeff Tweedy or a Bob Dylan, that’s my thing. 

There’s Bahamas on July 9, and Courtney Barnett another night. There’s about three [Americana artists] out of 300, because Americana is not happening here. It makes me sad, because I’m so much into Americana. I did Neil Young last year, but there’s so few [opportunities]. Quebec is not reacting well to Americana, in general.

It proves my point that you cannot just be a music lover and succeed at this. I would be booking Brandi Carlile every day. It’s happening now, she’s big in the U.S., just won a Grammy, and has everything going for her, and I just love what she’s doing. But you need to be able to put your own feelings for an artist aside and [judge] his or her impact in the market. 

Sometimes I will find a way to bring the Avett Brothers or Ryan Adams for example. It’s not too much of a stretch to put him in front of The Black Keys.

We split the stages, but we also have another split that is more important to me. Arnaud is hip hop, hard rock, left-field, underground, non-commercial stuff. Catherine is pop, indie-pop, indie-rock, indie-whatever, and pop-pop-pop. 

Arnaud and I are not [into pop], at all, so when Catherine got in, it was a very nice thing to have someone, who would say: “hey, you need to know who Kali Uchis is, or Flora Cash, or Yungblud is.”

I’m into the classic rock, Americana, anything jazzy or soul. Of the 300 bands that are playing on our stages, at one point, the three of us agreed to do it. 

I don’t book Twenty One Pilots without asking Arnaud and Catherine about how they feel about the band’s impact in Quebec City. Do you think it’s a bigger band right now than Post Malone in Quebec City? That’s the tricky part. Are we too early with A Boogie wit da Hoodie, who it just breaking through in the U.S.?

Sir Sly, who played before Alt-J, that’s a Catherine thing, Chvrches as well, while Arnaud was essential in me booking Slipknot. The team still small enough that we can have the conversation, and I’m glad. 

It’s what I love most about the job: to curate things. To match Moist and Live, or Bonham’s Led Zep with Skynyrd and Little Steven. This is a package. This is something we could put on the road, and tour across America, and it would work. I love that.

There’s a waiting list for years to come. So many people are interested in a higher experience. We need to figure out more ways to provide these potential buyers with whatever they want, because right now we’re telling tons of people, “we have nothing to sell you.” That’s a good problem to have, but we’re always thinking about: “okay, what’s next.”

At the same time we don’t want to remove any GA from the front of the stage. We need it to be real. More often than not the real fans are in the GA. 

I think we’re in a good spot. Our way to fight the war as an independent is often to team up with other independents. I’m doing a lot of business with Ottawa Blues Fest, Milwaukee Summer Fest, Calgary Stampede. Whoever is running an independent event in North America in early July, we’re talking, and a lot more than people would think. 

We’re travelling together, we’re going to visit agencies together, we come together in a room an [are able to] spend a lot of money. It is powerful. So, on that front, I think we can battle.

This setup here is so unique, our business model, the big crowds we’re coming up with. No matter if you’re Twenty One Pilots or the Rolling Stones, when they show up on that stage, and they look at that field, and they look at the dressing rooms, the equipment and the quality of the organization from A to Z, they are always pleased, thrilled and impressed. We worked hard to get here.

That being said, it’s a tough business, it’s a challenging world in music. Lots of festivals are struggling, some are going away. Every time one is going away without paying the bands or refunding the patrons, it’s hurting the entire ecosystem. So, we need to be better. At the end of the day, we’re in good spot, and if it’s tough for us, it’s tougher for others. We want to keep growing and take this festival to yet another lever.

We’re greedy, you know. I think we can still pump it up a bit. What we did this year with Manège Militaire, the Terrace and the After FEQ, the pop-ups every day – those are slight ways to grow. We did grow from 250 to 300 shows in the past two years.

And there’s more things cooking with that entire Manège-main-stage-second-stage connection. 

We’re trying take it to another level in terms of experience, and the Terrace and the Manège are a clear step in that direction, as well as the second stage being now closer and easier to walk to from the main stage. There’s another [piece] in that [puzzle], but we first need to sell it and finance it. There’s a lot of work to do, but it can still grow, I do think so.

No, but we could perhaps add a stage, at the same time we could start earlier. It’s something we’re going to do on the second weekend, there’s a hip hop day on the second stage, which starts at 3 p.m., that’s a first.

This is definitely a test, we want to see if there’s an appetite. It’s a bold move for us, because this is not how we’ve been doing things for the past 20 years.

If people are showing up early, and if we feel like it’s going to be a huge success, we will try to revisit that and maybe go further in that direction.

There’s a pro box right at FOH on the main stage. This is where I hang the most. I’m not backstage very often, I never watch shows from the stage. At FOH vision and sound are perfect, so this is where I want to be when I watch a show. 

But I’m often just walking. Every other day I’m going to just start on the main field and just walk all the way to the exit, through the crowd, look at the people and hear what they’re saying, and do the same thing on the second stage. Get lost in the field, all by myself, that’s something I do quite often.

Especially at festivals, you often experience sound bleed from one stage to the other. That’s the way it’s designed, it’s not that they’re bad at it, but sound is going to hit you from various stages. It ruins it for me.

So, in here we have one stage on one field, and this is one experience. And if you want to leave you scan out, you go elsewhere and enter another zone. 

Sound is super important to us, and it doesn’t just come with a big stage. You have to want it, and want it badly, because it’s very expensive, and have all those relays all the way to the back, so people in the back have the same experience. It’s not easy to do that, but we think it’s important.

I like to be home a lot. I’m often on the road, I get to travel, which is very nice, but I also miss my kids and my girlfriend, so when I’m here I’m very often at home.

But when I do go out, it’s almost always on Saint Joseph Street near Imperial Bell, and all the action around that small area in the Saint-Rock neighborhood it’s the best.

Well, Imperial Bell, that’s ours. It’s 1,000 cap, so it’s not so small, but I just love the vibe of that venue. I’m still looking for my favorite 200-cap venue, it’s still to come.

It’s very difficult during the festival. I need to get out of the site and just drive around town in my car on my own. 

Oh yeah, Bob Dylan. I mean, favorite artist of all times. Live band? Not so much Dylan lately, but Dylan in the 70s, yes. 

In recent history, I think Springsteen is the best live act out there. And his counterpart would be Florence + the Machine, she’s insane. She’s so, so good.

None of them yet. Still on the wish list.

I love this year, because I think we’re being bold, and pushing hard, and trying stuff. Tons of new stuff is happening in the same year, we’re not like, ‘it’ll be enough to move the second stage.’ No, we’re like ‘let’s move the second stage, add the Manège Militaire as a new venue, book an entirely new concert series there, and book it boldly with big bands. 

I think it’s a year where we’re being very aggressive, and I love it. I think the people that are used to Festival d’été are like: ‘oh my god, these guys will never rest.’ And that’s what I want to hear.