Tivoli creative director on protecting Brisbane’s iconic (and haunted) venues

Welcome to CityChats, where Brisbane Times meets our city’s most interesting characters on our most iconic form of transport. This week, creative director Dave Sleswick of The Tivoli Group tells us about his favourite Brisbane act to see live, what it takes to keep a festival running, and why he’s convinced there are ghosts in two of the city’s favourite venues.

We meet Sleswick at Howard Smith Wharves ferry terminal – the closest stop to The Tivoli. He’s in the thick of Open Season, The Tivoli Group’s annual program of music, art and cultural events that runs until the end of July.

What is your favourite Brisbane act you’ve seen?

Ball Park Music. They’re going to go down as one of the great Australian bands of all time. They’ve got a long history. They keep making incredible songs. Their live show is amazing. Whenever I see them at The Tivoli, I’m always like, “Ah, this feels right.” They never get old.

What do you think makes Brisbane’s music scene unique?

Brisbane’s music scene has a super-long history. It’s gone through all of these phases and I think it used to be super unique, in this real kind of underground rogue, rock and roll [way]. It was very political.

Where we’re at now, I think the proximity of all the music venues and the live music scene is really exciting. I feel like we’ve got a lot of work to do still. I want to give it a big shiny review, but I also go, “Hey, like, we really need to be cultivating young and emerging artists better in Brisbane. We need to be working on how we cultivate new labels and artist managers.”

I also think how we speak to our audiences could be stronger. We put on some really amazing shows all the time and we’re often thinking about how we can reach an audience – without necessarily all just being paid social ads – so we’re really thinking about audience development, artist development, sustainability.

Do you think we should make it mandatory that people have a local opening act in Australia, given that it’s such a hard space for local artists to get ahead in?

One hundred per cent.

Do you think it should be legislated?

I think it should just be the right thing to do. I feel like it was an unspoken thing for a long time. All the shows that we do, whenever we’re self-producing and self-promoting, we’re making calls, finding local bands, and they have to be the right fit, obviously.

We’re always wanting to sell as many tickets as we can, but it’s that balance between making sure that we’re keeping line-ups diverse as well. Bringing interstate artists into Queensland is also really important because we want to be promoting exchange and those artists, building community.

We’ve seen a lot of festivals fall lately. You’ve kept Open Season around for six years now. What does it take to keep one alive?

A bit of gumption. Lots of rolling up our sleeves. Lots of running around the city and asking people to be part of our thing. Lots of partnerships. For me, what’s kept our Open Season dream alive has been having a vision for it. Allowing things to grow slowly. Listening to people and what they want, and having an amazing team that are as equally passionate about the thing as we are.

But it’s tough out there. We do it because we’re super passionate about it and we love providing something to the city that we don’t see as much. But it’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. You’ve got to have a thick skin and be really willing to work really hard.

Would you say the same about keeping a small venue or an independent venue alive as well?

Yeah, 100 per cent. There’s no wonder we’re seeing so many small venues close down, or venues pop up and have a short lifespan and then shut down.

I don’t think that people really understand the mechanics around it all – the expenses and the costs and the permits and the red tape and the constant attempt to try and secure acts and sell tickets.

If we’re going to want to have all these really amazing underground, cultural, rich, dynamic spaces where artists are cutting their teeth, where music businesses are cutting their teeth, where promoters are getting a chance to play and build audiences – if we don’t have a support mechanism around that level of the ecosystem, we’re going to lose a lot of the grassroots culture.

I think people underestimate the power of the little guys and what that means to a city and its cultural life.

So whilst [The Tivoli Group] have two venues — one of them’s 950 capacity, another one’s 560, so they’re bigger venues – we spend a lot of time trying to support the lower front tier of the music industry.

The Princess Theatre and Tivoli are two of the most iconic venues in Brisbane. Do you think there is a lot of goodwill for these spaces?

We have a lot of amazing goodwill. The Tivoli is Brisbane’s longest-running music venue. We’ve been running it for the last 10 years, and we inherited a very beautiful legacy at a time where The Tivoli was really the only major music venue in Brisbane at our size. So we’ve had the gift of cultural significance for a longer period of time.

The Princess is Queensland’s oldest-standing theatre, so we’re custodians of these two beautiful legacy pieces in the city. We don’t take that job lightly or for granted.

We’re really proud of the venues, and we understand that ownership is quite fickle. We own and run them, but actually the city owns them by turning up to them. They’re heritage spaces as well. There are a lot of stories that have happened in those venues long before our time.

Are there any quirks of either building that people might not know about?

They’re both super old, like really really really old, which gives them a certain something to them that the new builds don’t have. It’s like stories in the walls. It’s an energy I think that’s hard to manufacture.

There are lots of spooky, fun, stories that have unfolded in those venues over the years.

There were a number of experiences whilst we were doing the renovation that made me aware that the venues are being looked after not just by us.

See, I was going to say I feel like it’d be full of ghosts.

So many. The venues are being looked after, and not just by us. Let’s just say that.

Did you find any cool music paraphernalia or anything during your renovations?

For both the Tivoli and the Princess, we did a really long historical study on them. We had a historian come through and they uncovered a whole bunch of stories. Lots of stories about the past of both venues and previous owners and previous uses.

I think sometimes we come into a space for our experience of that moment and we forget that that building has been there for over 100 years. Especially in Brisbane, that’s so rare.

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