The Big Day Out Festival Faux Pas

Whilst Australia’s festival scene flounders, with all the recent Big Day Out press confirming the worst, overseas festivals have never been doing better. 

Just yesterday The Austin Psych Fest announced a phenomenal second artist announcement that included classic rival bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warholes, as well as The War On Drugs, Loop, Bardo Pond, Mikal Cronin and Temples. They are joining a line up that is already shaping up to be spectacular, including Austin psych favourites The Black Angels, legendary sixties garage rockers The Zombies, The Horrors, of Montreal and Black Lips, all for the dirt cheap price of $157 for a weekend ticket (plus heaps of other amazing bands nobody has heard of). Meanwhile, our festivals are suffering more than ever from mediocrity and inflated prices. This year Big Day Out’s headliners included Pearl Jam, Arcade Fire, Snoop Lion, Major Lazer, The Hives, Beady Eye and Flume – hardly the makings of Big Day Out history. The price? $185 for a one-day event. And I haven’t even covered the drink costs yet, plus the personal costs of suffering in the Gold Coast heat amongst thousands of irritating people on a cocktail of VBs, steroids and methamphetamine-laced E’s (or so, Campbell Newman would have us believe).

Just last week The Groovin The Moo line-up was announced, which is usually a pretty good indication of who might play our biggest festival, Splendour In The Grass. Needless to say, it was a huge disappointment. Disclosure, Parkway Drive, Dizzee Rascal, The Jezebels, Robert Delong, Architecture In Helsinki, Illy, The Jungle Giants, Karnivool, Thundamentals, Loon Lake, Kingswood, The Kite String Tangle, The Naked and Famous, The Presets and Violent Soho. What do all of these bands have in common? They’re all pretty mediocre, but that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that they all seem to be appearing on every festival line up ever.

The Naked and Famous, Loon Lake, Kingswood, Violent Soho and The Jungle Giants all played Big Day Out just a few weeks ago.  Flume, (who played Big Day Out) The Presets, Robert Delong, The Jungle Giants, Violent Soho, Architecture In Helsinki all played Splendour In The Grass. 

Lorde, The Growl, The Jezebels, Cloud Control, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Vance Joy, Jagwar Ma, Daughter and Haim all played Laneway and all played Splendour In The Grass last year too. 

Meanwhile Chet Faker and Flight Facilities, who both played Splendour, plus Violent Soho and Thundamentals on the Groovin The Moo line-up, were all on the Falls line-up.

Seeing a pattern here?

Not only are the ticket prices going up, but we are effectively paying for the same festival experience, simply branded differently. This wouldn’t be so bad if the prices weren’t so over the top, but we are paying $185 for Big Day Out and $350 for Splendour, which doesn’t include the costs of camping and travel (add on another $300 for all that, plus a few more hundred dollars for inflated drink prices and inevitable illegal drugs to get you through the weekend).

Groovin The Moo is slightly more affordable at $99, but the line-up is miniscule and it takes place at locations that are hardly as picturesque as Byron Bay. Laneway is $123, which seems fair, but it is probably the best festival available to Queenslanders at the moment, and one of the more successful ones. 

The worst offender of the lot? Falls Festivals, which was $378, even more expensive than Splendour, a festival that featured about three-fold more acts than Falls. Falls-advocates will argue that Falls is ‘about the experience, man’. My response? That’s what the festival organisers want you to say. That $378 is for someone’s hefty wage, not your special snowflake Falls experience. 

As for the other big three-day festivals? Well, Coachella is $375 for a three day pass, but the line-up is about six times Falls size. With Beck, Bryan Ferry, Fayboy Slim, Outkast, The Replacements, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Queens of the Stone Age, Pharrell Williams, Lana Del Ray, Skrillex, Muse, Afghan Talk, Ty Segall, Mogwai, The Knife, Girl Talk and Flosstradamus, you can’t really compare it, even if most of these bands aren’t exactly my cup of tea. You’ve also got nearly all of the big headliners for the various Australian festivals playing Coachella – pretty much all of them, and for the same price. Arcade Fire, Beady Eye, Chvrches (played Laneway), Disclosure, Flume, Grouplove (played Big Day Out), Haim, Jagwar Ma, Flight Facilities, Lorde, Daughter, MGMT (played Falls), The Naked and Famous, and Warpaint (played Laneway) are all playing Coachella.

Meanwhile, the Glastonbury line-up is ridiculously good.  I can’t even be bothered to type it out because it’s so long. Just understand that is has pretty much anybody in the music business who you would probably ever want to see live, apart from unknown underground acts. Ticket prices are 210 pounds, which I guess would equate to being just a little more expensive than Falls. 

Just a little more expensive than Falls. 

So why are we paying more for something that is nowhere near as good? The answer – we’re not. Australian touring Mogul AJ Maddah, who joined the Big Day Out team last year confirmed in a recent interview with triple j that Big Day Out would be suffering between 8 – 15 million dollar losses, and that they had falsely inflated attendance figures.  On top of audience members jumping ship, so are bands. Blur's cancellation of their Big Day Out spot was obviously the most talked about case, but Soundwave is shaping up just as badly with Megadeath and Sevendust both cancelling. 

When asked about the inflated prices for Big Day Out during his tell-all interview with triple j, this is what Maddah had to say:

“The price  - $185 was ridiculous. But, as I said, you know, that was not long before I came in this year. It's just insane. Look, you know, if you go to a specialty festival where, you know, there are 20 bands that you want to see that's one thing. You know, Soundwave has something like 97 bands this year and 12 stages, and, you know, if you're into any kind of guitar music, there is a full days programming for you. Big Day Out is more about the experience, it's more about the day. You know, there are 3 or 4 bands everyone wants to see throughout the programming hopefully. And, you know, it's a day of wandering round, doing the markets, doing the bands, doing everything else. And for that - $185 is absolutely unreasonable.”

As for the drink prices? Well, that’s something out of the festival organizer’s hands. You have the government to blame for that, who on their never-ending quest to destroy live music in Australia, have made ridiculous alcohol and venue regulations that mean you pay $10 for a mid-strength beer that tastes like bacteria-infested water. You also have the Australian government to thank for the entire pound of sniffer dogs greeting you at festival gates. 

“We have a situation in Australia where everyone is presumed, as far as music events go, everybody is presumed guilty until innocent and the fact that certain states they put 30,000 people in drinking cages just on the off chance someone might pass a beer to a 17 year-old it’s ridiculous, it’s insane and the other situation is of course that most of the bars and most of the food and beverage operators are operated by venues and there’s certainly a certain amount of gouging that goes on and sadly we’re limited by the venues we can use in a city like this and we have to put up or not have the events.”

On top of all this, Maddah also recently announced the cancellation of the Perth leg of Big Day Out, with Adelaide next in line for the guillotine. 

“I love the city, some of my favourite cake shops are there,” says Maddah on Perth. “But look, at the end of the day when you look through the financial history of most of the national festivals, especially a rock festival, the east coast has to subsidise Perth, that’s another reason for BDO’s higher ticket prices this year is generally you lose money in Perth. You’ve got two days to get there, three days to get back, all the trucking all the production, things in Perth because of the mining boom have been really difficult in recent years. A hotel room that you would pay $180 in Sydney is $320 a night in Perth in the same hotel chain. Everything, the price of hiring everything is ridiculous over there, security is two and a half times the rate of the east coast so it becomes a situation where people struggle to go to Perth. Combine that will dropping public support for festivals over there and attendance figures and then for all your trouble you get a kicking from the local government and state government. It just got to a point where it’s become unbearable.”

So it’s clear that with bands cancelling festival slots, attendance figures dropping and huge losses occurring, something’s got to give. Maddah covers this in his interview with triple j, explaining that prices are expected to go down, but this doesn’t cover the issue of mediocre line-ups. Maddah explains that they are targeting an older crowd with their line-ups, as older people have more money, I guess. This approach might work if Big Day Out had actually acquired Blur on their line-up, but they didn’t  - instead we got Beady Eye and The Hives, hardly adequate replacements. It might also be more effective if the festival organisers knew who they were targeting. Blur fans are hardly going to get excited about Pearl Jam, even if they are from the same era.

I guess what it all boils down to is money. Australia is a small country and it is very far away from all the other major Western countries. This means that it requires a lot of money to get big artists here. And if nobody is here to watch them, then how do we pay them? The answer – we don’t. The result? 

Big Day Off. 

I imagine it’s a lot cheaper to ship big acts between America and Europe for festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury, possibly reducing the costs of hiring these acts. So a big international-filled line up festival is probably not going to happen any time soon and not for a cheap price. But nothing great will happen at all if people don’t go to festivals.

I do not believe it’s as simple as the prices being too high. I personally don’t think all that many people are interested in festivals, possibly after years of disappointing line-ups and experiences at Big Day Out and Splendor. It was rumored last year that The Black Angels were considering bringing The Austin Psych Fest to Brisbane, as a smaller and less popular city. However, this never happened and will probably never happen. When The Black Angels performed in Brisbane last year at The Tivoli it must have a wake up call for the band, as the show was nowhere near a sell-out, a good indication of what would happen if there actually was an awesome festival like the Psych Fest in Brisbane – nobody would go. Indeed, Japanese band Kikagaku Moyo attempted a mini psych fest in Brisbane last year at The Beetle Bar with Brisbane’s best psych outfit Dreamtime. Nobody went. Not even people who like psych music went (I know this, because they’re my friends). Why? It certainly wasn’t the price, as it was $25. The line-up? Possibly, but if you were into that type of music the line-up featured a pretty good spread of Australian psych bands and of course, Kikagaku Moyo, who are exceptional (and playing Austin). 

There seems to be a wider problem here – a kind of indifference toward live music that is immediately obvious if you spend a few weeks attending live shows in Brisbane, as most of the time the room is half full. So promoters and festival organizers are pretty much guaranteed to operate at a rate of loss in the current live music climate. Even Laneway, which featured a pretty stellar line-up, didn’t sell out this year, not even with festival goldmine Lorde.

There are a few different ways the festival crisis could be resolved. Neither may be effective, but it’s something we haven’t tried. If the costs of hiring and negotiating with international artists cannot be recouped in the current festival market, then perhaps it would be better to focus on a solid Australian line-up that would be cheaper to hire. Therefore prices could be cheaper and festival organizers could focus on making the experience more fun; better vibes, a two-day festival permit and cheaper drinks. Big Aussie acts like Courtney Barnett, Jagwar Ma, The Preatures, Lorde (uh…kind of) are all playing Coachella, whilst Tame Impala are playing Glastonbury. Get some big Australian talent on the bill and then supplement the costs of hiring them with cheaper local bands. Better yet, put the event on Australia Day (okay, don’t do that…that’s a terrible idea. Just ask AJ Maddah). 

Or go all out. Get a line up together that is bloody amazing if you’re charging $400 for a mere ticket. Who cares about ‘the festival experience’ – the festival experience is seeing amazing music live. Sacrifice all the party and art crap Falls and Splendour put on for some awesome international artists. Forget after-festival DJs and 'clubs', nobody even hangs around for that shit. Hire less bands and spread them out more, most people end up missing bands because they’re in line for the bathroom or at the alcohol tents, so it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice if festival organizers cut about ten bands off the line-ups of major festivals. Less days, less money, less crap and better bands. 

That’s a festival I’d go to.


Published by AAA Backstage.