One of the darkest jobs within a festival is that of booking. Who works behind the scenes to build festival posters? How do negotiations take place? And how much in advance do we need to reach an agreement with the artists? (spoiler: much, more than you imagine).
The XXII edition of C2C Festival will begin on Thursday, what has now become the most important indoor festival in our country. From 31 October to 3 November Turin will come alive for four days of concerts, performances, DJ sets, talks and installations in the locations of Lingotto Fiere, OGR Torino, Teatro Regio and Combo, bringing into play 43 artists from 18 nationalities and 32 different shows ( all the info here). On the bill are artists such as Arca, Bicep, Nicolas Jaar's Darkside, Shabaka, Romy, AG Cook, Sega Bodega and many others. But how is the C2C line-up built?
For the occasion we had the pleasure of speaking with Guido Savini, who among the various tasks within the Turin festival deals with the artistic direction, to tell us the behind-the-scenes story of the work that has made C2C the international reality we are talking about Today.
Hi Guido, tell us about your role within C2C Festival.
I deal with the artistic direction, but also with business development. My role has a fairly transversal involvement, from the conception of projects, to the selection of artists, through the supervision of communication aspects, to relations with stakeholders. I started covering this role in 2014, previously I was involved in organizing musical events on an incredibly smaller scale which however were fundamental in my professional experience and allowed me to gain a lot of experience.
Besides you, how many people are there working on the booking part?
The team that manages the booking is made up of me, Sergio Ricciardone and Davide Olivero.
Sergio Ricciardone (with whom we had a long chat in the past about the first twenty years of C2C) often repeats that although you are a festival that happens in the first weekend of November, for bookings you are “the last festival of the summer”. What does this mean on a factual level?
I'm looking at the weather and it looks like it should be sunny this year. [ride] Being “the last festival of the summer” means being deseasonalized. This allows us to play a very peculiar role, if on the one hand we host the closing date of some tours, on the other C2C Festival turns into an exclusive preview of projects that the artists will present only in the following year.
How does the booking process work for a festival like yours? How far in advance do you have to work to build a billboard?
The booking process for a single edition of the Festival is quite complex and lasts between 12 and 18 months. Often the conversation about the individual artist begins early and can last several years before an agreement is formalized. Sometimes it never happens, but it's all part of the game. But regardless of the confirmation and the announcement, the negotiation continues until the show is over: there are always a whole series of small details that inevitably remain pending.
How do you choose the artists to build your billboard?
Compared to ten years ago our approach has changed, at the beginning we were almost forced to exclude some artists due to the limited number of slots available. Today it is more complex because there is the feeling that there are fewer and fewer acts on the market. The public is constantly bombarded with a thousand pieces of information and it becomes more difficult to find what's new. If you think about it, around 49,000 new tracks are released on Spotify every day. We are hyper-exposed to an enormous amount of content.
Guido Savini. Photo: C2C Festival
Your history is linked to clubbing, but in recent years there has been an important switch towards live music. How do you balance the two realities? Is this a proportion you take into consideration?
In its very first phase the festival had a much more clubbing nature, from which it then progressively emancipated itself. I believe for this reason we have mixed feelings on DJ sets; you will have noticed that there are fewer and fewer of them in the program and the few you see are there only because they are particularly extraordinary and, therefore, essential for us.
Maintaining the same approach, our Stone Island stage which we could define as more “dance” was designed with a design and structure designed to hide the DJs from the view of the audience. It's a radical choice, but we are convinced that it makes little sense to stare at a DJ while he plays. At first we were worried about what the artists' reaction might be, but “being hidden” was widely appreciated by everyone: probably in this way they can concentrate completely on what they are playing, without worrying about how they appear in the eyes of the public .
Do you contact artists more or do bookers contact you to propose artists?
It depends, it varies a lot based on the case and consequently it is not easy to answer this question absolutely. As I told you before, there are dialogues and conversations about different artists that develop in parallel and that can last for years.
How important are human relationships in the world of booking a festival like yours?
By nature, I struggle to go on holiday, make friends or even just spend an evening with people who have different musical tastes from mine… or even worse, with those who seem to have none. It is natural, therefore, that over time bonds have been created with artists and professionals with whom I share a strong affinity. Many of them consider C2C the ideal festival.
Does it happen that you close projects because some promoter, friend, artist recommends them to you?
Perhaps it happened in the early years of the Festival, but today it is practically impossible. C2C has limited slots available and we pay almost obsessive attention to the choice of every single slot. The times (fortunately rare) in which we sensationally screwed up a show, we experienced them very badly, I would say bordering on psychodrama. Even just a single show that doesn't work represents a heavy defeat, which is why we really can't afford to keep things closed.
You were talking about 12-18 months in advance for some negotiations. I therefore imagine that it happens that negotiations with artists are closed “out of sight”.
There is certainly a gambling component, however there are some tricks to at least try to predict the future.
C2C has a sort of roster of its artists, understood as artists who cyclically return to the festival or to events produced or curated by you. I think of Arca, Kode9, Bill Kouligas. How are these lasting relationships created?
There is mutual respect and great affinity which, with some artists, over the years has led the initial professional collaboration to transform into lasting bonds. For many artists, C2C represents the ideal festival; furthermore, making them play cyclically creates a sort of testimony to the evolution of their career.
You often collaborate with brands (and also in this edition you have events in partnership with Adidas Originals, Bulldog Gin or the Stone Island stage you mentioned). How do you relate to a non-music brand to build a line-up?
The brands that collaborate with C2C Festival never do so for a single artist but choose to embrace the Festival project. For us, relationships with brands are fundamental but we only start them when on the other side they really understand our philosophy and our imagination. This allows us to build authentic and organic projects together, without forcing and above all without ever distorting (and devaluing) the vision of the festival.
The artist you are most proud of having brought to C2C? And someone that maybe you haven't managed to do or that you dream of doing?
One day, hopefully not far away, we will do an edition without announcing the line-up.
