Falls Festival is thrice as nice this year with the New Year’s arts and music festival expanding to Bryon Bay this year, complementing its annual appearances in Lorne and Marion Bay.
Falls Festival’s Byron debut will use the Yelgun site at the North Byron Parklands that got its debut at the recent Splendour In The Grass, with Falls founder calling it “a destination for our patrons to travel for.”
Now organisers have revealed that the the whole reason that patrons travel – the all-important Falls Festival lineup – will be unveiled this Monday 12th August. A post on the event’s Facebook page confirms “the 2013 lineup will be announced on Monday morning” on Triple J.
As for who to expect on the Falls Festival 2013 lineup announcement, there have already been a number of major clues.
Chief among them, New York indie royalty Vampire Weekend, which would mark them bookending their 2013 in Australia after appearing as part of the Big Day Out lineup in January. Speculation first stirred that they could be headlining Falls after the band’s song ‘Unbelievers’, taken from their latest album Modern Vampires Of The City, was used to soundtrack teaser trailers for Falls arrival in Lorne, Marion Bay, and Byron Bay.
As frontman Ezra Koenig sings on the tune, “I’m not excited/but should I be?”, the answer is most definitely ‘yes’ if the festival soundtrack trick happens to have the same end results as Splendour In The Grass, which featured Jake Bugg’s ‘Lightning Bolt’ on their trailer for the 2013 edition, before – lo and behold – his name appeared in the confirmed lineup announcement.
Fellow New Yorkers, Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear, are also in the rumour mix for Falls. Singer/guitarist Ed Droste let slip that the band were due for a visit to Australia over the 2013/14 transition; “We’ll be Down Under come New Years,” wrote Droste in a casual comment on a photo on hisInstagram account while on tour in Porto, Portugal in support of fourth album Shields, a tour that also took in Australia in 2012 for Harvest Festival and a run of sideshows.
Meanwhile, also on the rumour mill is the legendary hip hop crew, The Roots; the Elvis Costello-collaborating band’s ringleader Ahmir ‘?uestlove’ Thompson tweeting that the band would “be in Aussie day after Xmas for a week in 2013.
All will be revealed come Monday with the first of the Falls Festival 2013 lineup of bands that will hit Lorne and Marion Bay – which have been running for 20 and years respectively – as well as its first expansion to New South Wales at the 660-acre Yelgun site at North Byron Parklands.
The move to Byron comes as a result of last year’s deal that saw Splendour In The Grass co-founders Jessica Ducrou and Paul Piticco buying into a partnership with Falls after the departure of the New Year’s festival’s General Manager Naomi Daly and Event Manager Carmella Morgan.
The new partnership helped ease approval by the local Shire Council for Splendour In The Grass’s new permanent home, securing a five-year trail to host three events at the Yelgun site, with a shift to new grounds promising more room for staging, less sound-bleed between stages, and extra space for camping and manoeuvring traffic at the picturesque parklands.
At least, it should have, with post-festival reports of Splendour At The Grass revealing several teething problems with the new site, organisers admitting issues with toilet queues, four/five-hour delays in transport, issues at VIP camping grounds, and other grumbles from punters.
Falls Festival are keen to avoid the pitfalls experienced by Splendour, essentially treating its debut at the new permanent site as a test run for its own Byron debut this December.
Falls Festival 2013 Dates
Marion Bay, TAS: December 29, 2013 – January 01, 2014 (All Ages)
Byron Bay, NSW: December 31, 2013 – January 03, 2014 (18+)
Lorne, VIC: December 28, 2013 – January 01, 2014 (18+)
Falls Festival 2013 Lineup Rumours
Vampire Weekend
Grizzly Bear
The Roots
