It’s been an interesting day for the Big Day Out, one of the oldest and biggest music festivals in the country.
Earlier today came the shock revelation that less than a year on from buying a 50% stake into the festival, Big Day Out promoter AJ Maddah pulled out of the partnership with American co-promoters C3 Presents, making the Texan festival company the sole owners of the long-running Australian festival.
It’s news that’s as sudden and surprising as when Maddah first purchased a stake into the Big Day Out last September (shortly after the cancellation of his own Harvest music festival) from previous promoter and former rival Ken West.
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Now comes reports that Australia may not see an event at all in 2015, marking the first time since 1998 that the iconic summer festival hasn’t been held around the country for hundreds of thousands of music lovers.
According to Fairfax, the venues that have hosted Big Day Out in previous years had their bookings cancelled last week with no indication the festival has any plans to proceed with a 2015 iteration.
“All I know is they cancelled the booking last week and we were told to release the date,” Peter Thorpe, general manager of the Sydney Showground revealed.
“It’s very disappointing for the fans and for us because it’s an iconic event. It was the first rock and roll event I went to and the first we held. I was there for 20 years at Paddington and we’ve been with it here ever since.”
Maddah had previously admitted that this year’s Big Day Out had suffered “ugly” financial losses and low ticket sales but had indicated that plans to revive the brand would enable it to once become “a brand people will come back to.”
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Reports have been circulating for months about Big Day Out’s future, with speculation that it was in serious doubt after facing losses of between $8 to $15 million from lax attendance figures.
There’s also been industry whispers that a lawsuit may erupt between Maddah and C3 Presents over losses accrued from the national one-day event.
Maddah has refuted the allegations, dismissing there was any souring in the relationship with C3, calling Fairfax “enablers of gossip… they will take any old rubbish from any idiot [and] run with it completely irresponsibly;” just one volley in a vicious war of words that broke out between the Big Day Out and Fairfax earlier this year.
In a later interview in which Maddah discussed the moment ‘Big Day Out fucked their brand’, he admitted that “the event was seriously wobbly” before he bought into the company, revealing that the festival was “on the verge” of cancelling before he entered the picture.
“[I] got involved for very selfish reasons,” Maddah told Triple J’s Hack program in February. “All my happy memories from my childhood are from the Big Day Out, from Livid Festival. It was the one or two days of the year where I could get away from my shitty home life or whatever else.”
Blake Kendrick, the same person listed as the festival’s Assistant Accountant, is listed as the newly appointed director of BDO Presents, while the festival company’s new registered address belongs to a law firm based in Australia.
