Edited transcript of interview with Peter Jones 

ASE:  Welcome to Event Talk.  With me today is Peter Jones of Peter Jones Special Events.  Peter has just completed a huge job for Amway China on the Gold Coast and we’re going to go through the process of what happened with that event.  Welcome Peter.

Peter Jones:  Trevor always a pleasure to be with you.

ASE:  First of all can you tell us how this event came about.

PJ:  The event was won a number of years ago by the Gold Coast and it’s an event that travels around the world. Amway are always looking for destinations where they can take their top achievers.  The Gold Coast won it and then Amway China were looking for an event company that they could work with to stage the final event, the gala dinner.

The pitch for it was done by the Gold Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau as a joint effort with the Convention Centre as this was the venue that could handle an event of that size up there. 

The Gold Coast is very well recognised in China.  It’s an aspirational destination, they understand what it is.  It was also the biggest event the Gold Coast has ever had as far as an incentive goes, so they had their work cut out for them to be able to put this event together from a logistical point of view.

ASE:  And the timeline then.  From the time the Gold Coast won the pitch.

PJ:  Gold Coast won the pitch about July last year and then Amway went through a whole process of finding an event company that they could work with but that did not start until November of last year when they started talking to Australian event companies.

ASE:  And the event was on when?

PJ:  The event was in March.  So let’s just say it was an awfully tight turnaround.  We were very fortunate to be recommended as a company they should talk to. I remember being asked to fly up on Melbourne Cup day last year and I said, it’s a little bit busy down here in Melbourne, we can’t quite do that.  So I went up on the Wednesday, did a presentation of credentials to them and they said terrific and they went away and then about a week later we got an email saying, we would like you to put a presentation together and we need it in two and a half weeks.

ASE:  And what was that presentation, what was your concept for it?

PJ:  Basically they wanted a ‘wow event’.  At the end of the day they wanted people to walk out saying that was the most fantastic dinner they’ve ever been to.  So we had to sit down and work out what would work for a group that basically did not speak English.  The whole event had to be visual and it had to be able to communicate with an audience that had been around the world and seen so many shows, it was a very tough brief in a way, and it had to be repeated six times.

The concept came from basically a few Chardonnay’s, mixed together with a few other bits of pieces and it became a cross for those that are old enough to remember, and you are one of these people Trevor, there was an Andrew Lloyd Webber show many years ago called Starlight Express, which was all based on people rollerskating around a theatre.  We took that, and the other inspiration was a 1970’s act, showing my age here with all of this stuff, called ELO, Electric Light Orchestra; and ELO had a concert that they produced that started with a spaceship that was down on the stage and it lifted off and ELO were inside it.

So combining those two together we came up with a concept, it was called Amway Express; and basically it was a concept that involved taking a futuristic theme and putting performers in different areas on rollerblades and skateboards and extreme skaters to produce something that was visually spectacular because it’s what it had to be.  You had to wow them totally to the point where they would go I’ve never seen that before and as I mentioned it’s very hard to do that with a group like this.

ASE:  Now talking about the visual spectacular, the set itself was incredibly spectacular.  Could you step us through how the set design arose and how you developed it.

PJ:  It’s an interesting one.  In the original concept there was no set, it was all supposed to be one big one white cyc that ran behind the stage and around the room. That would then change with lighting and the client said, I don’t like that, we want a set.  They don’t give you an actual brief of what they want.

The set had to be designed so that we could get the performers on and off and it had to have height because you’re dealing with a large audience and you had to try and get this thing as big as possible.  It also was designed so you could project onto it because we were using the catalyst system.  So you needed a surface that could run projectors over it.

Tim Newman designed the set with these boomerang type shapes and lots of LED lighting which became such a visual centrepiece of the whole event.

The set was 35 metres wide and it was quite huge and the amount of rigging that went in, the Gold Coast Convention Centre had never had an event that had as much rigging, in fact we had to move points in there because they were not convinced that some of the stuff could be hung, so we had to modify the show slightly to make sure we could actually do it legally and safely within the Convention Centre.

ASE:  Now usually a set design is done and then the lighting designer comes in and does an overlay onto that, but in fact with this one the AV, the lighting and the set all evolved as one entity.  Is that correct?

PJ:  Yeah it was because the guy that actually designed the set was the lighting director and I think that helped because he knew what the brief was and what we were trying to achieve from a set perspective and he did a fantastic job with it and in the end, as you saw it, it was visually spectacular and added to the whole prestige of the event because the whole thing was focused on the stage and the Chinese needed a set that showed that this was the best that they could offer all the qualifiers for the event.

ASE:  And the set construction was done by?

PJ:  Set construction was done here in Melbourne by Solution Red.  It was built and trucked up there, it was obviously made to fit, it was purpose designed.  So were the ramps that came off the side because they were for the skateboarders and the set had to be designed to fit the orchestra as well and for the UFO to actually lift off and become the focal point for the stage design.

So it was a major production, pyrotechnics were built into it.  It was designed to be able to take all the creative elements so that there wasn’t anything that had to be adjusted up there.  Whilst we had to make a few changes, most of it was pretty well thought out and planned with just some minor modifications that had to be made.

ASE:  Moving on to the show itself.  Let’s start with the concept of having an orchestra there and the music that was actually produced for the event.

PJ:  We originally didn’t have a band in mind at all, it was all going to be pre-recorded, but the client said having a live band is seen to be very prestigious.  So we went down that track.  We went with a musical director Greg Mills who is based in Melbourne. With all the entertainment that was programmed, each piece had a preferred music piece for their performance.  What Greg then had to do is take that music and rerecord it and mix it for the live performance.

There were also four pieces of original music that were written for it that had to be dramatic, had to have the impact… for the opening it was all original. It had to be learnt, musicians had to be put together and then it had to be presented via CD over in Hong Kong.

They would listen to it and they would go, yes don’t like it, yes, no and make adjustments from there, so that was an amazing process and remember this all happened in the space of three months and you had a thing called Christmas in between.  Full credit to Greg and the work that he put in to be able to make it work.

ASE:  We had Christmas but the Chinese didn’t.

PJ:  Yeah unfortunately everything did shut down here for three weeks, so you had to stop.  But again having the live band, certainly added a new dimension to the event.

ASE:  Now to the rehearsal period and the set itself, was the set pre-built anywhere or did it go straight into the venue and how did the rehearsal process run?

PJ:  It went straight into the venue; we did not pre-build it anywhere else.  All the acts were rehearsed independently as far as their own requirements went.  then on the weekend before in Melbourne we hired the Showgrounds, the Stadium out there, and ran each of the acts to see how it would all come together.  The client was at that.  We made some modifications from that.  We knew our issues were going to be and when we got up to the Gold Coast we then started doing the bump in and starting the rehearsals up there.

We made a lot of changes.  After the first rehearsal even I’ve gone, “Oh God, this isn’t quite going to work” and we changed a number of the acts, we changed the order of their performance and we also shortened a number of acts.  One act was chopped in half because it was just simply too long and lost the impact.

So as well as you can plan these things until you actually get it on site, get it on the stage and look at it, then you need to be looking at making modifications but we were able to do that in the three or four days that we had up there.

ASE:  Essentially you did a four act show if you think of it in theatre terms, how did the catering fit in with the show and how many were catered for?

PJ:  The smallest event was about 850; the largest was about 1200 people. In a normal event you would actually stop an event for time to eat.  With this event once it started it didn’t stop.  It’s quite a unique event.  So what we had to do with the caterers is say, “okay, this is how the show is going to run, this is what’s going to happen, you can’t start until after the official proceedings were done with”.  After that what happened is they just kept serving and clearing while we kept doing the show and we were able to keep out of each others way; so we understood what they were doing, they understood what we were doing to the point where they served four courses in about an hour and a half, the whole function started at six o’clock and was finished by quarter past nine.

ASE:  In terms of the catering, were there any particular issues with the food itself and with the ratio of staff?

PJ:  It was quite a most amazing sight where I’ve never seen such a high ratio of staff.  Because of the short turnaround time to be able to serve the staff ratio was actually doubled.  In fact at the start of the night, there were more staff in the room than there were guests obviously.  There were dedicated teams to serve, and separate teams to clear.

So they were able to do that because to get that done in that period of time takes so much extra staff and the Gold Coast Convention Centre did the most fantastic job in coordinating that because it ran like clockwork and in the end we were actually joking with ourselves, timing them saying “come on, you’ve got to get this out in ten minutes”, and they were saying, “well your show’s running five minutes late you know”.  So we had a bit of fun like that.

But it was a major undertaking that I’d never seen for an event before and the Gold Coast Convention Centre had never done it quite like this before because our client’s demands were so specific.

ASE:  And in terms of cultural issues with the food that you served?

PJ:  Yeah it was interesting.  The seafood is very big and obviously that’s from an Australian perspective.  So it was soup and seafood, they didn’t go steaks or anything along those lines.  It was Western food done with an Asian influence; rice was obviously part of it from there.  They’re not big drinkers the Chinese.  Wine was there and beer more so for the men but they certainly didn’t hit the grog in a way that perhaps some Australian audiences might.  Mind you when it’s all finished by 9:15 it’s all pretty hard.

ASE:  What about language issues with the staff communicating with the guests.

PJ:  What happened with the staff is that obviously very little English is spoken by this group.  We had our key contacts who spoke very good English as well as speaking Mandarin from there.  The menus were printed in Mandarin so they knew what food was coming, the Centre had a number of staff that could actually speak Mandarin and they were put in key positions so that if anything was needed they could do it.  But basically it’s all just visual and there were no major issues whatsoever with anything.

ASE:  On the production side of it, who was actually calling the show itself and how were the communication issues dealt with there?

PJ:  Basically what happened was, there was show-caller, Martin Featherstone and he was responsible for calling and then we had two stage managers appointed.  There was a lighting director, catalyst director and then there was the head flyer, the rigging man who flew and did the moving sequences.

A lot of it is pre-programmed because we knew the exact timing of all these acts because obviously it had been rehearsed and they knew that, and Martin was able to call it in a way where the whole show seamlessly ran from one stage to another.  As you know we had to stop some of the performances to get bands on and off, particularly the ABBA cover band that was involved, that took a bit of time.  So we had to have fill-in music that would be able to achieve that.  But from a guest experience, the night started and just didn’t stop.

ASE:  But the presentations that were done on stage were in Mandarin, did you have somebody who was Chinese who was actually dealing with that?

PJ:  The sound operator had a Chinese person next to him and we pre-recorded a lot of announcements and he would say hit button number one, they’re saying this, hit button number two.  We obviously had the major client who sat next to Martin anyway and was able to explain what was going on so that we knew what they were saying and when to do certain cues from there.  So that’s the only way it could happen, because their Emcee’s who were brought out from China obviously spoke in Mandarin and we had no idea what they were saying, even by the end of it, we still couldn’t quite learn what was done.  But we knew enough and having done it enough times they knew what to do and to be honest with you we did not have one technical issue with any of that throughout all the six shows.

ASE:  Let’s step through the show itself.  Starting with the arrival and the time it took for the guests to arrive and then stepping through what happened from there.

PJ:  A thousand people and they’re all coming by bus, so you just can’t all lob at once.  So the arrival took an hour, from six o’clock till seven o’clock.

We had wandering performers that were in the room to entertain them during that time.  We joked about it because we’ve never seen so many balloon hats in all my life.  I can’t believe all these people actually put the balloon hats on but they did.  High tech funky music playing; a vibey atmosphere when they walked in.

They were very big on the opening, so once everybody was seated there was a countdown and the UFO took off on the main stage with the use of special effects and pyrotechnics and then we had Laseroid, a character that actually flew through the air, landed on the stage and then did an amazing laser performance culminating in the reveal of the Amway logo.  So three and a half minutes of over the top production.

Then came the official proceedings – speeches and toasts..  Then after that we went into the ABBA Tribute band which came on, which you might think is a bit weird and wonderful…

ASE:  Now that was quite interesting, you had an ABBA Tribute band as the dinner music.

PJ:  Correct and no-one, well very few would have known who ABBA was but to the Chinese it was pop music, there were a lot of tunes in there that they may simply well have known.  Visually the girls and guys changed costumes for the different sets from there, but it was designed as a link so there was continuous music going throughout.

ASE:  And then the next act?

PJ:  The next act was fire and there were eight fire-breathing performers who came out with an amazing routine twirling and breathing fire and it set an amazing opening because it was so visual to be able to go and do that.  So that was the act I was talking about before that was shortened, it was too long at the start.  Everything had to be short and sharp, high in impact because their concentration span is not that long.

ASE:  With that particular act you had key performers from Melbourne that you took up there and then you picked up some local performers.

PJ:  We did.  It’s amazing how many people around this country that can breathe fire.  The key guy was in Melbourne, there was some from Sydney and there was some from the Gold Coast there so it was specially choreographed over about two months and they rehearsed the whole thing and made special props for it, made special costumes, so it was specially created for this particular performance.

ASE:  And speaking of the costuming.  In the opening segment, you had the rollerskaters and rollerbladers and so forth all with special costumes.

PJ:  That’s right.  The costumes were all made for it. 

Very hard to find people who can rollerblade.  It’s not something that you can go ring up an agency and say give me ten rollerbladers.  What we did was take a dance troupe, and a choreographer who worked on Starlight Express in Germany for two years and she basically trained them.  They just got out there and she taught them how to rollerblade.  Now what we were doing was not death defying leaps but on roller blades to be able to do it, we supplemented that with a bunch of extreme skaters, these are the boys that you see in parks jumping up and down on tubes, they were Brisbane based and they were fantastic and they added the spectacular element to it cause they were the ones who were doing those flying flips in the air.

ASE:  In the next segment you actually combined the number of acts.

PJ:  Yeah what we did was each act had to be extremely visual, we were concerned about height, the fact that you could see them.  So after that we went into a performance by Strange Fruit who were on the sway poles who did this amazing routine, you know bending and on the poles with bubble machines going on behind them and they were in these sort of futuristic costumes.  So again from a visual point of view, the Chinese had never seen anything like this before.

We then used an act from Cirque du Soleil called the Gemini Brothers who are Polish twins who currently are in Saltimbanco touring the world.  They have an amazing strength act and they were put together with a group called Strutton Fret out of Brisbane who had aerial performers, and combined it was a great visual performance.

The Gemini Brothers is quite an amazing performance but we had to modify their act because at the end of them one puts his hand on the other’s head and he lifts himself up, some amazing strength in the neck.  The head person from Amway thought that was cruel and it would be misconstrued as being, basically being cruel.  So we had to go to them and ask them to modify their act and not put that lift in at the end; which was an interesting request considering they’ve performed that act all around the world and particularly in China.

But understanding the cultural differences and the way they perceived it, we didn’t want to offend anybody so the act was modified.

And the accompanying aerial act was using umbrellas.  It was done as a visual thing to look a little bit different from there

And then the finale was Glen Birchall and the sphere. This was designed as a visual spectacular at the end where the sphere rose in the air and it was a great aerial performance by Glen.  I can’t believe he can do it and not drop Alex, the young girl that was with him.  But visually it was quite spectacular to make that in the end.  So that finished off the show.

ASE:  But that finale started with five backpack lasers.

PJ:  So there’s rollerbladers flying around with lasers coming off their backs, again specially made for this show.

ASE:  That was the end of it from the Australian performers.  Then there was something of a treat for them in terms of the Chinese culture.

PJ:  Yeah this was an interesting bit.  This is an act they selected.  Obviously we didn’t know what would happen here.  They went for a young lady, a little pop princess called Landy who was from Taiwan and she came out with a troupe of dancers and she performed her music which was up, poppy, up-tempo, but she performed a lot of songs that are well known in China and it was like a bit of a mosh pit down the front there.  They all got up and started cheering and dancing along to her.  She was very, very good.

We had no idea what she was singing because it was all in Mandarin but she finished off the night on a real high because they all walked out clapping and singing along to all the songs that she’d performed.

ASE:  The Chinese supplied a lot of security for the show and that particular act.

PJ:  Yeah they did.  It was interesting that they had their own security down there because the Chinese, groups like this, they take every opportunity to have their picture taken anywhere in the room and particular if it’s on the stage; and obviously with the amount of pyrotechnics that were put along the front we had to protect that.  So they had their own security guys that would say, “you can’t go beyond here” which worked very well in there because it could be quite dangerous.  We were concerned with the fact that we, you know we were going to kill someone with a bloody rollerblader flying off the stage.  So that had to be taken into consideration.

Any opportunity for them to get up as close as possible to the acts is something they do from there.  But no, she went and actually walked into the crowd and they mobbed her, which was great.  I mean she wasn’t a huge name in China but because she was Chinese, because she sang in Mandarin and because she sang the right stuff, they could all relate to it and I think that was a really important ingredient to this show that there was that Chinese component to it.

ASE:  When the show was finished, the room cleared fairly quickly.

PJ:    Within 20 minutes, they’re all gone and you sit down there and this is at 9:15 so you sit there twiddling your thumbs at 9:30 going well, where did it all go?

Anyway, they go off.  They go back to the hotels and go out and do other things from there.  So we would then reset because each dinner was two or three days apart.  So you actually have to leave the venue sitting empty for a couple of days, come back and do it all again to be able to go and do it from there.  So we had to go and dry-clean linen and clean up the place and make sure it was all presentable for the next dinner.

ASE:  Just reflecting on it.  What were the highlights, what was the biggest challenge for you in dealing with this event?

PJ:  The biggest challenge was understanding the culture and the way they do things.  In hindsight now, we could have done a lot of things differently.  We finally got there, but it just took a while because it was understanding what their needs are.  That was the biggest challenge, being able to put something on that would visually wow them, because as I said this group has been going around the world and they are wined and dined in all sorts of places, they’ve seen so much stuff and then being able to adapt.  Because they changed a lot of things, things went good, bad, we need to make some alterations there, so you need to be flexible.  So they were probably the two biggest challenges we faced with an event of this nature.

ASE:  Now you’ve done quite a few large events, quite exciting events.  Where does this fit in the spectre of Peter Jones’ experience?

PJ:  It was a totally new chapter that has been opened in dealing with an international group that has such specific needs that is quite unique.  What you would design for this group, you would not design for anyone else, simply because of their needs from there.  So from that it was a wonderful experience to learn and to be able to do something that’s a little bit outside the norm of what you would normally do.  The great thing about it, they also had a sufficient budget to be able to put an event of this scale on which again is quite refreshing because you don’t get that every day.

So I have great memories of it.  It was hard work but at the end when they walked out and those people were singing and dancing going out the door, you know you’ve given them a great event.

ASE:  Can we mention the budget?

PJ:  The budget was six figures.  It was enough to do it properly without being ridiculous.  But they understand the size of the event and what’s got to go in and just having lighting in there for three weeks and hiring that sort of stuff.  So there was enough there to do it properly.

ASE:  But in relation to the rest of the incentive when you take into account the airfares and the accommodation and so forth, it’s…

PJ:  It’s all relative.  You’re talking about flying 6000 people to Australia, putting them in buses, putting them in hotels, feeding them; they were there for four days.  So you just add all that up there and you’re talking in many millions of dollars.

ASE:  Well Pete, thanks very much for that.  Been a pleasure to talk to you again.

PJ:  Trev always a pleasure to talk to you and I’m glad that you’ve taken the time to find out more about it, but it was a fantastic event and we’re very proud of it.