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Old Posted Dec 17, 2011, 1:45 PM
Waye Mason's Avatar
Waye Mason Waye Mason is offline
opinionated so and so
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Halifax, NS
Posts: 721
Alderney Landing is my favourite big venue.

It can hold a lot, 8000 capacity, which is great, and has the perfect balance between facilities (stage, power, some bathrooms, greenroom) and outdoors (they cut you in on concessions).

The best show I ever did was Wilco there, perfect day, sun setting, band happy, crowd happy. Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, NoFX are all bands I have enjoyed there, and it is also a great site for Summer Rush, where Rihanna and all that kind of urban music have played.

Here is the thing about concert routing - for a lot of bands smaller than the huge outdoor festival type bands, they need dates to be 8 hours apart. When you have a bunch of buses and trucks driving from date to date, and you are "small" enough to not have more than one stage setup, your drivers drive the legal limit (it is their job, they cannot risk losing their license, insurance).

So you have to have to route the tour so that you can finish striking the stage somewhere between midnight and 1 and have it all in the trucks and rolling to the next venue for an 8-10am load in. There are always variations, but eight hours is normal, 10 is stretching it, 12 is difficult.

So, the problem with concerts coming here on routed dates, well, it isn't us. It is New Brunswick. Between here and Quebec city there are not a lot of places to play, for a certain sized band, and you have to remember, they drive here and then often drive back out past Moncton.

Sure a band can route to have the off day on the in or the out leg of the tour, but it is really hard. When we did Wilco they played the Playhouse in Fredericton. They really really wanted to play Halifax, so they played a slightly less than 700 seat theatre, the smallest venue they had played (by half or more) in a decade to make the routing work.

Most bands won't do that, because they get paid correspondingly less, obviously, and why go somewhere where you can't make bank?

And the price for a promoter to book a band that is not routed, to play a "one off," is usually significantly higher.
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