Vivian Lees Finds The Big Way Out

Editorial

It’s quite extraordinary what 20 years behind the joystick of Australia’s biggest music festival can do to a man. 50 weeks of the calendar year invested into 14 days of rock ’n’ roll bedlam every January has surely got to have its long list of ails and sordid tales. After two decades turning a showgrounds shindig into one of the biggest travelling rock shows on the planet, the Big Day Out’s co-honcho Vivian Lees finally decides to call it a day.

Lees and partner Ken West have successfully cultivated what’s now the alpha staple of the Australian summer festival circuit. Winding the clock back to 1992 sees nothing of the overtly saturated festival scene we know today, and this colossal association has had everything to do with what’s followed since.

It’s this time of year that every two-sheet street poster, every windscreen flyer and full-colour page of street press is boldly adorned with summer-this and summer that, selling the next slightly varying combination of the day’s musical buzz acts, all great news if you’re a willing and able punter ready to pounce on one or more tickets, right?

Folks are more than spoilt for choice when it comes to looking for that getaway with your pals over the sunny months. Let’s face it – festivals are great, but are there just too many of the damn things?

The amount of times I’ve heard friends and folks come up with the genius idea of starting a festival then seeing it go, A/tits up, or B/no further than the original drunken conversation which the revolutionary thought spawned from is flabbergasting. It always comes from the same part of the brain telling the rest of the body that running a music festival would be a really fun and easy thing to do.

Really, who are they going to get on the line-up that everyone else hasn’t thought of already or seen before? Where and what time of the year are they going to run it so it doesn’t clash with other festivals and public events? Who’s going to be accountable for security, toilets, staging, vehicular access in and out, liquor licences, food on site, artist wristbands, artist fees, artist riders, artist accommodation, setting up, cleaning up, money to float and promote the whole thing, crap weather plan, insurance and public liability, and oh Christ, must I go on?

It’s a mammoth task and a huge risk given so many trying variables that come into play from conception to attainment. You really would have to be nuts to throw yourself and all those thousands of dollars into such an aggressively competitive market given what you’re up against at that time of the year.

I try and talk all my friends out of starting music festivals, for all the reasons mentioned above but more specifically because of the hoards of challengers all trying to do exactly the same thing. Guys like Vivian Lees and Ken West started out when terms like ‘summer festival frenzy’ didn’t even exist.

Ambition, dare, and innovation are always welcome virtues when it comes to cultivating new ideas in bringing festive folks together in mass public events, and I applaud all those who try and succeed at such a ridiculous pipe dream.

But it’s the cock-ups like 2009’s failed Blueprint Festival and more recently UK’s Rewind falling over that you don’t want to see where local artists, managers, publicists and production crew all walk away out of pocket for weeks and months of hard work because some idiot arrogantly thought they could out-cool everyone else on the scene.

It’s pretty hard to find anything cool about that at all.

Dave Larkin, Citysearch

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