Sean Nottage is adding concert promotion to his vast array of talents, with an old friend!
Sean Nottage, event promoter, told Guardian Business: “The conversation for now with John Watling’s is about having future events like this with other bands, and maybe incorporating some cruise ship dynamic type of thing.
“In other words, make John Watlings Distillery into a music venue as well, which I’ve seen in other places with particularly beer brewery companies and the like across the US, that want to have summer music. So of course, here it could be all year long. I’d like the public to basically know it’s a real watershed moment in the sense that there’s never quite been a band like this that has played here. And I don’t want to scare people away. It is hard rock, but it’s very melodic. And so, I would encourage locals, and particularly local musicians, to come out and see some real masters at work in their genre.”
Pepin Argamasilla, John Watling’s managing partner, said about John Watling’s being a budding concert venue option that: “Well, it’s not part of our core business. Our core business is selling rum and vodka. What our mission is, is that we want this to become the cultural hub, so that goes along with the entire area. All the groups in this area and all the businesses in this area have kind of banded together, and we want to turn this into the cultural heart of Nassau. So part of that also equates to throwing these events to bring people downtown, which is also the mission that the Ministry of Tourism has, of how to revitalize downtown, and you revitalize it by throwing these types of events.”
Argamasilla also said that the prospects for revitalizing the downtown area is not a 12-month objective, but a multi-year project with all of the stakeholders doing their little part to bring Nassau back to the prominence of the late 1970s and even back to the 1980s at the very least.
He also said: “It really takes almost a decade to do, but you’ve got to start somewhere. These are little grains of salt that you put in, and once you put them all together, then you have something substantial.
“It’s a matter of all the different businesses and the different people in this country slowly starting to do their share. This is our share, which, as you’ve seen, the Buena Vista 14 years ago was a derelict building, falling apart. And, today, we receive well over 400,000 visitors a year.
“We’ve recently opened the Rum Academy, which, again, takes it one step further. So it’s a matter of building and continuing to build on top of each other. So then eventually you have something.”
He continued: “Bring them on, the more the merrier. There’s so much business to be had in this country. We just need to put our best foot forward. When people come to John Watling’s Distillery, we’re constantly pushing them over to GrayCliff, to Tasty Teas, to the National Art Gallery, and they do the same for us... We need to be able to take them from one place and send them to the next place.”
