Putting The Green Talk Into A Green Walk: Q’s With Tour Manager Jamal Chalabi

Chalabi has consulting a couple of bands on how they can tour sustainably, from planning to routing to lighting to the design. As tour manager for Bring Me The Horizon, he’s aiming to produce a green arena tour.  Chalabi is a founding member of the UK’s Tour Production Group, which was launched in 2020 as a reaction to the instant decimation of global touring due to coronavirus. 

 

Jamal Chalabi: We’re not looking at one specific body, we’re looking at absolutely everything, a 360-degree point of view. We started off by encouraging conversations amongst everybody in the industry, from agents and promoters to production and tour managers, from venues to vendors and suppliers. 

We are drilling down to the core of each aspect of sustainability, whether it be catering, tour buses, power, lights, audio and video – everything – we’re bringing everybody into the conversation to see what we can do. 

What we found is that there’s some really easy wins, things that we could go out and implement tomorrow, that will start reducing our carbon footprint, which is the thing that we need to mitigate straightaway as much as we possibly can. I’m not going to use the word ‘offset’, but we need to sink our carbon.

There is saving to be done in literally every department. What we’re trying to do in conversations is to encourage the change of mindset and doing things differently. Our community is known for being very creative, for not taking no for an answer, and always making sure that the show goes on. Adaption is in our DNA. Adapting to a new business model and different methods is something that we can actually do.

But if you really want something that jumps out at me, straight off the bat, it is power management. The use of generators across large venues and festivals is something that needs to be managed and can be managed much better. We’re wasting and burning enormous amounts of fuel and money just to keep generators running at peak power, which isn’t needed.

Everybody gets it, everybody realizes how urgent it is, some of them just don’t know how to go about it. That’s where we come in. We’ve also found that a lot of people, from power companies to lighting companies, from agents to promoters, have their sustainable initiatives in place already, which has been a real surprise and hugely encouraging. Part of our conversation is educating ourselves on what everybody else is doing.

The economics of it all are the part we really need to get our heads around. It’s all well and good looking at sustainability, but who’s going to pay for it? But if we look at the way we’re running our business models and where the money flows, and the huge amount of money that we can actually save by reducing the amount of fuel we burn by being more streamlined in our productions, making things far more efficient, reducing the size of stuff we use, recycling and upcycling – all this is a saving. I’d really like to dive deeper into changing the way money flows within the industry. I think that’s something where we could get huge wins.

The one thing that is an issue is obviously flying. It’s part of the question, how we sink our carbon footprint, and I really want to make a distinction between offsetting and sinking. Offsetting isn’t enough, it is just avoidance, and it’s not getting rid of the problem. When it comes to airlines, they’re looking into different types of fuel, different ways they can mitigate. The airlines, unfortunately, are under very, very different rules and regulations than the rest of the industry.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to get rid of flying at present. Battery operated planes are way off in the future. The only advancement on that is going to be different fuel, which is possible. There are various airlines out there that use biofuels. Flights aren’t going to go away anytime soon, but as far as the routing is concerned, once we get a couple of years beyond the pandemic, I think people will be looking at ways to do a world tour without doing lots of back-homes. 

Better waste management to enable recycling from the ground up, power management, it’s also looking at the different fixtures, it’s also making sure that we spec our power correctly. There’s loads of other things we can do, like working with the venues to make sure single use plastic is a thing of the past. Water stations. 

The other obvious thing is managing the riders and making sure they are realistic, and we’re not wasting loads and loads of food, because one of the things that has a massive carbon footprint is food production. If we reduce the amount of food we’re using, we can make sure it’s all consumed. There’s also lots of talk about becoming vegetarian and vegan, meat production is a huge CO2 producer, as well. 

When it comes to trucks and buses, running your generator 24 hours a day is a given in America. Nowadays, we should be looking at plugging all our buses and trucks into power when they arrive and not running their generators. 

The other thing that we can be doing is making sure all our venues are plugged into the grid, a lot of the grids are now converting to green sources. Moving away from generators and plugging into a green grid is definitely a really easy win. The Sustainability in Production Alliance [SIPA] has developed 10 easy wins for every single department [of live production]: 10 things you can go out and do tomorrow that can be part of your touring as well as your everyday life.

Not really. The mindset is the hardest thing. Strangely enough, everybody wants it to happen. The will is there, we don’t have the luxury to wait for the technology to catch up with us, we can’t be sitting around relying on it.

Another thing that’s coming down the pipe is legislation. Governments are all coming out in agreement with the UN and the Paris Agreement. They’re all focused on COP26, which is the big conference in Glasgow in November. They’re all coming out and making declarations of what they’re going to be doing as a nation and internationally. Being taxed on our carbon footprint isn’t something that I see as a distant thing. 

That legislation will also bring in some good news, because it means that we can lobby for governments to work on making sure the grid is green, making sure that venues are green and efficient buildings. They can work on urban infrastructure, which will help audiences get to and from our gigs, on electric transport etc.

There is a discussion of a supplement charge on the ticket, which I don’t imagine will be much. It would be really good to do, because we can reinvest that into making our industry greener. I also think that the audiences will welcome that. The thing is that the audience will be demanding this from artists going forward. 

Artists will need to make sure their backstage is green if they’re going to be talking about sustainability. I mean, everybody has their favourite musician, but no one has their favourite politician. The music industry has a huge voice, we can reach people globally with this message, therefore, we have a responsibility to make sure that our act is clean.

Europe has always been interesting. Their live industry has always been supplemented by some of their governments, which has been great. I also think that their urban planning is a bit more ahead than in the UK, and especially in America. We’ve got a mountain to climb, America’s got a mountain range to climb when it comes to sustainability. 

Holland is also ahead of it, the way they have been managing their festivals and reducing their carbon footprint year in year out over the last five years has been really impressive. There’s a lot to be learned, and we really need to share our technology and the lessons that we’ve learned.

The most important thing right now is that the live community talks to each other. There’s some amazing things being done out there. Shambala Festival, for instance, has done some great work in reducing their carbon footprint and the amount of research they’re putting into it. There’s a lot of people working hard on this across the board.

It’s all about how it’s managed. It doesn’t really matter if they return with a vengeance, as long as the venues are changing their sustainability policies.

The greatest factor is time, the more time we have, the better it is. It’s really a mutual responsibility for everybody to be talking. We still have that time to talk, we’re slightly ahead of the curve. As long as we use the time to look into the planning, and we invest correctly, we can reduce our bottom line. I don’t think coming back with a vengeance means that we’re all going to be burning more and more fuel, I’d like to be burning less!

I’m consulting with a couple of bands on how they can focus on sustainability from the get-go, from planning to routing to lighting to the design. 

As Tour Manager for Bring Me The Horizon, I’m aiming to produce a green arena tour. It is ambitious but great to have band, management and crew on board. I’m looking forward to putting all this green talk into a green walk.