Organizers have pulled the plug on this year’s WTFest but will soon be announcing plans for a concert series to take place at local venues including The Rope Factory.

“It was an agonizing decision but at the end of the day, we’re OK with it because we know that it’s the right decision,” Jamie Stephens, an organizer and spokesperson for the annual music festival, said Thursday. “We had a tour package booked for this year’s festival that we were really excited about and were looking forward to.

“But for reasons beyond our control, that tour package fell apart and won’t be going ahead.”

Although Stephens wouldn’t go into detail about the reasons for the tour package not going ahead, he said the reasons are valid. However, when things fell apart it left him and his team of organizers very little time to book bands for this year’s WTFest.

“Booking in April for a summer show is last minute,” Stephens said. “It’s like going to Best Buy at 4 p.m. on Boxing Day instead of 8 a.m. – there’s not a lot of selection left.

“We tried everything we could including some of the other bands on the tour package but we just couldn’t get the dates and times to align.”

In the past, organizers had lined-up bands individually by speaking with various agents to build the show. For this year’s show, they decided to book a tour package, which is put together by one agent or agency who then books dates and venues across North America.

Booking a tour package helps ease a lot of the logistical details that go into putting on a show.

When it became apparent that they wouldn’t be able to get the high-quality bands the festival is used to bringing to Brantford for this year’s event, Stephens and his team, which includes Mark Calbeck, Lance Calbeck, Phil Gillies and MJ Perry, made the tough decision not to go ahead with this year’s festival.

“We’ve delivered high quality shows for the last three years and we want to maintain that standard,” Stephens said. “We didn’t want to do a show, just for the sake of doing a show.

“Our fans are the best and we want to continue to deliver the best shows possible and don’t want to be watering down our product.”

The line-up for last year’s WTFest included Our Lady Peace, Collective Soul, Tonic, Soul Asylum, Treble Charger and Sumo Cyco as well as several local bands. WTFest was held at Lion’s Park and last year’s show attracted an estimated 6,500 people.

Meanwhile, plans for WTFest 2019 are already underway and in the meantime, organizers are planning a WTFest Concert Series that will bring high quality bands to Brantford and at the same time showcase some local talent.

“We’ll be announcing very soon plans to do an intimate show at The Rope Factory and we’re in discussions to do a bigger show at Club NV and we’ve approached to the Sanderson Centre as well,” Stephens said. “We’re pretty excited about the bands we’re planning to bring to Brantford and we’re confident our fans will love these shows.”

Vball@postmedia.com

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