MICHAEL CHUGG of CHUGG ENTERTAINMENT: A World Of Beginnings And Endings
An interview by Sarah Kidd with photography by Doug Peters.
It will undoubtedly be the show to end all others, Sir Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour bringing a conclusion to touring for one of the most iconic figures of the music industry today and of the last five decades.
The tour, which will consist of more than three hundred shows and span across five continents will also be touching down in New Zealand, John scheduled to play three shows across the country, his last and final farewell being performed at Auckland’s Mount Smart Stadium in 2020 signaling thirty-six years since he first played the very same venue in 1984.
Standing in the middle of Mt Smart Stadium the day before tickets for the Auckland show go on sale, Michael Chugg of the famed Chugg Entertainment looks around and chuckles, commenting on how the stadium has certainly changed from when he ran his first show within its grounds in 1980. With footage from Sir Elton John’s farewell performances in America last year playing on the big screen behind us, Chugg walks us through a brief description of what John’s show will look like; three massive LED screens making up the sides of the stage itself while across it lies a train track upon which Elton’s piano will traverse back and forth. “We’re building a stadium within a stadium” Chugg states promising – having seen the show himself in Philadelphia where the tour kicked off – that the overall production is “absolutely stunning”.
And while Sir Elton John maybe signing off, Michael Chugg certainly isn’t. As both the founder of Frontier Touring in 1979 where he worked for twenty years before forming Chugg Entertainment in the year 2000, Chugg has seen it all and worked with some of the very best; artists at all stages of their career from Elton John who is bringing his to a close through to Billie Eilish whose star is just beginning to peak.
Perched in a row of seats overlooking the stadium as ‘Bennie and The Jets’ serenaded us from the big screen, I took a moment to speak with Michael Chugg about the upcoming shows, ticketing woes and just what continues to drive him after fifty-five years in the business…
Sir Elton John’s farewell tour, an end of an era in many ways
“Yeah it will be, that’s for sure”
Do you sometimes feel that you yourself have evolved along with Sir Elton’s career considering the number of years that you have worked with him?
“Yeah, I think everybody has, I mean one of the things that we’ve worked out over the years is that we can pretty much take him anywhere and he will sell out. A couple of years ago I went to places like Cairns and Mackay and Wollongong and sold in excess of twenty thousand tickets everywhere in little regional areas, you know places like Darwin.
The fact that he can go and sell out The Mission [Napier] in an hour, things like that. So that’s the one thing we have learnt about Elton, is that his audiences are just so deep… there is so much depth and it’s actually growing.
I’m sure you have been watching some of the footage from the American shows and the audiences are twenty to seventy (years old)”
Indeed, he is an artist that is inter-generational.
“Yeah, and his music is timeless, ageless. Still some of the most played music on radio worldwide. The great thing about Sir Elton is that he cares about the audiences probably more than he cares about himself sometimes.”
Which is very admirable!
“Yeah it is.”
And with this being his final tour, if you have never seen Sir Elton John, well now would be the time to do it…
“I’m sure there have been a lot of people buying tickets that have never seen him before…”
Indeed, but this performance, this farewell tour would be the show to see, both the stage design and overall production of it all absolutely mind blowing.
“Well it’s the biggest show he’s ever done in his life, it’s a monster. You know when I first saw it I thought fuck how we going to fit this in to some of these venues!”
[laughs] Logistical nightmares!
“And it’s taken a good six months to get it sorted and to get it, so it does work.”
A topic that has been popping up in the news recently, not just around Sir Elton John’s shows but around any worldwide artists are ticketing issues that people have suffered with sites such as Viagogo; how do promoters such as yourselves work around that?
“We do our best to let everybody know that Viagogo are a bad thing for the industry and for the public because they charge three or fours times as much for the tickets. Sometimes they are selling tickets they haven’t even got, some of the tickets are forged, some of the tickets are duplicated, some of the tickets are in other people’s names. They use illegal cancelled credit cards, all sorts of scams to get their hands on tickets. They pay people to go and buy the limit, so that’s six or four tickets and they sell them straight to Viagogo; they make money out of selling them to Viagogo who then sell them on. With the way computerized ticketing is these days and the scanners and all that it’s fairly easy to bust them and unfortunately, we then have to tell them [the ticket holders] that they can’t come in to the show.
And I think there is a bit of confusion too, these tickets are selling out so fast that people are complaining that there was something wrong with the websites or the computer systems and they didn’t get to buy any tickets. But it’s not because anything is wrong, it’s because the demand is unbelievable. All I can say is like any big stadium show, as we get into it there’ll be tickets in that stand [pointing across the field] and tickets behind us that haven’t been released that once it’s all worked out can be released. So, over the next twelve months there will be tickets put back for sale and through the socials and through the ticketing agencies, websites and you know their news blasts people will be able to find out and buy those tickets, rather than in desperation going and paying a thousand bucks for a three-hundred-dollar seat that might not exist.”
Obviously you have been in the industry a long time and it is interesting to note that not only do you have artists such as Sir Elton John selling out venues, but on the opposite end of the age scale, artists such as Billie Eilish…
“Yeah, we’re very excited about that!”
How do you view the differences between two such artists, a stalwart like Sir Elton compared to a seventeen-year-old whose career is just beginning to see her sell out bigger and better venues?
“It’s incredible; of course, the audience demographic [with Eilish] is different, it’s fourteen to twenty-year-old women basically. So, it’s different. And the thing her management have to think about and what we have to think about is, is she ready to play ten thousand capacity rooms? The demand is there you know, but does she need that pressure at this stage of her career? So, it’s interesting. It’s exciting.”
So, what keeps you in it? After all these years and all the trials and tribulations you must have endured, what keeps you amongst the thick of it?
“The excitement. I love watching people enjoy themselves, it’s certainly not the money. It’s just the excitement and to be able to be involved with someone like Billie [Eilish] at the beginning of her career and watch it grow like we have with Florence and the Machine; she started off in the same circumstances, an early spot on Laneway and a couple of small clubs and to see her sell out Spark Arena in a minute and sell out twenty-seven thousand tickets at the domain in Sydney, to forty-odd-thousand tickets over a couple of shows in Melbourne is pretty exciting. And that vibe keeps everybody really happy.”
Looking after festival shows such as Laneway compared to headline shows; do you have a preference?
“Well there’s a lot of work that goes into festivals; we have CMC Rocks the big country music one in Queensland every year, we sell sixty-six thousand tickets in half an hour, campers start arriving on the Wednesday night for the first day of the Friday. So, the organization that goes into festivals is pretty intense, and then you’ve got to keep it together for three days or one day.
With a show like this [gestures at the stadium around him] you’re in and out… not as quickly as it used to be [mutual laughter] but, we employ the best people in the world and usually with acts like Elton… you know, his tour director was the stage manager on ABBA in 1975”
Wow…
“So there’s all that experience, and relationships are a big part of why I stay in the business, and it’s not easy these days you know. You’ve got promoters overpaying for artists and charging too much for tickets and then not promoting it very well and then cutting ticket prices in half which upsets the people who paid the premium and it also damages the artists longevity. But you know it’s really sad to see a lot of these acts take huge money and then three weeks before the tour…four weeks before the tour, two hundred-dollar tickets are being sold for sixty-four dollars.
It’s something I have never done and won’t start doing and Michael Gudinski’s the same; we started off together at Frontier Touring in 1979, so we were together until I left in 2000 so a lot of our policies and ideas are the same and we’ve stuck with it. But it’s pretty frustrating when these clowns are just paying so much money for the acts and it doesn’t work, they cut the ticket prices and it’s screwing up the business…
But, we live on.”
Tickets for Elton John’s Dunedin and Auckland “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” shows go on sale tomorrow morning (14th February 2019) at 9am from Ticketmaster. It is advised to get in quick as these shows are expected to sell extremely quickly!
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