Devin Townsend is no newcomer to the music world, so I'd venture to say the dude knows how to efficiently make a band run as a business. Townsend recently took some time to sit down with Noisey and explain why those pricey "meet and greet" ticket packages for concerts exist, and it's essentially to keep any big-name band going financially.
Townsend said even when he and his band weren't touring recently, it still cost him $14,000 per month to keep everything afloat. Then when tours do roll around, he adds that things get even more expensive. He doesn't touch on the actual financial breakdown of what he pays from his own sales and doings and what the label pays, but it certainly sounds like expensive ticket packages are a needed evil.
"A lot of the times, fans may think bands are taking the piss by simply doing a meet-and-greet, but if we don't do them, we simply can't do what we're doing. It's not like we do them then get a bonus at the end of the tour. On the other side of it, if you're in the band and you're hypersensitive to people's energy, like I believe I am, meet-and-greets fucking beat the shit out of you. Not because you don't want to meet people, but because in order to do it correctly, you really have to invest yourself and be present and ready to talk to people and sometimes accept hyperbolic praise or criticism, and you have to be emotionally resilient enough to not let either… I mean, it's about them. They're paying for a moment and your job is to be present and that's really challenging on tour.
"If you think meet-and-greets are fundamentally stupid, then you're never not gonna think that. Some bands are, like, 'Fuck that, you can come meet me at the bar.' I never go to the bar, and if I am at the bar, please don't talk to me, because I'm there to hang out with my friends. We try to do the best with our packages, but at the same time, there's still people who are critical of it."
Regarding the bar comment, that seems fair. Touring, greeting, playing, load in, load out, soundcheck – it's all part of a job. Once that job's over for the day, and after all that stress, I'd imagine Townsend (or whoever) just wants to relax for a few minutes before doing it all over again the next day.
Townsend also revealed grand ambitions for a new musical that would (seriously) required $10 million.
Noisey: The Retinal Circus and Z² were both big, overblown rock shows. If you had the money, would you do that with every gig?
Devin Townsend: Just you wait. I’m here at Sony tonight to pitch something I need ten million bucks for! The whole show is a metaphor for sex and power, and the idea of it all being related to some sort of God who’s ultimately futile. But it’s this symphony with all these cocks and vaginas and death and it’s gotta be so over-the-top, with symphonies and choirs and it’s got to include the best of the best and it’s so fucking expensive! I’d like to not think about money, but what I want to do is just get so much money, absurd amounts of money, and just put it all into this thing that’s a fundamentally unsellable spectacle, but make it so palatable that halfway through you’ll just be like, “The fuck are we watching here?” I love that idea of absurdity and spectacle coming together. The Retinal Circus was like a high-school play; Z² and the Royal Albert thing was fun, but again, it was more like a rock show. But what I wanna do now is just blow things up, right? So I need ten million bucks…
Is that project going to be The Moth?
Yeah. It started out as just being a symphony, but then I was like, “I can’t get ten million bucks to just do a symphony.” I needed to make it like a musical, with orchestras and choirs, and if I try and be like, “We’re gonna redo Steinbeck, we’ll do The Grapes Of Wrath” then it’s gonna get lost in a sea of that shit. But if you make it just fucking absurd and a spectacle of fundamentally unsellable items and concepts but with the same production values as The Phantom Of The Opera, I think it’d get people’s attention, right? Ultimately, it sounds like a load of fun; I wanna get a load of buddies together to work on this concept that I think is pretty interesting. I do the Devin Townsend Project and all these rock records, but that’s shit I’ve been doing for twenty years—it keeps the boat floating more than anything else. I’m gonna die whenever, so I just want to make a statement. And it’s about nothing. I haven’t got a point I wanna make—I just wanna have fun.
You’re pitching this idea now, so is anything finalized?
It’s sorted, in a way. Manifest destiny, right? It’s gonna happen, buddy!
Would The Moth be a one-off show?
It can’t be! That’s the genius part of the pitch—we’ll never recoup unless we do it everywhere! It’s this brutal, grotesque depiction of sex/power/death/God but I don’t want it to be satirical, like a comedy show. But it’s going to be ridiculous. So I’ve gotta pitch it in a way that legitimizes it and I’ve gotta do it with a straight face!
How much music has been written for it?
I had this orchestrator come and stay with me for a month, and he’s done Spielberg, Slumdog Millionaire and stuff like that. He’s fucking brilliant and so far out of my league, but he’s really interested. So he came over and we started working together and dude, it’s so good. So when we propose the idea, it’s not gonna be like a pipe dream, but it’s this really well-thought-out thing with all the orchestration and the art and the logos.
Is there a tentative date for when The Moth will happen?
It’s gonna take so much and I don’t want to nickel-and-dime it. If it takes a year or two, I can do another DTP record. I’ve got tons of music, and if that’s what we do to keep everyone’s salary paid or whatever, we can do some more rock songs—so there’s my contingency plan! Good, right?
We'd pay to see this!
