Following the completion of another noteworthy edition of Chicago’s Lollapalooza (which unless you skipped being online last weekend, you probably heard about), the festival’s founder Perry Farrell has discussed plans of expanding the event to more international territories in future, sparking speculation that the brand could be coming to Australia.
“What I like to do these days with Lollapalooza is the big dream, and the big dream is to be international and that is happening,” Farrell tells Billboard in an interview about the popular US festival’s expansion plans.
Canada is “one place we’re looking at [expanding] for sure,” he confirms. “It’s just a matter of having faith in an idea and staying with the faith it’s gonna work. So far it’s worked fantastic in all the Americas.”
“One of the things that we can do is we can start to go global,” adds the Jane’s Addiction frontman, who started Lollapalooza back in 1991 and which now has legs in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
“It’s keeping it modern just by the fact that it’s starting to be a globetrotter. Now it has a strange, unique life and identity to it,” he says. “We do excellent work. We’re excellent craftsmen, all of us, everybody on the team C3 (Presents), William Morris, the promoters (in South America). They’re just really great. They’re excited about their position. They put in a lot of time, and the results speak for themselves.”
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Farrell doesn’t mention Australia specifically, but the elephant in the room is the fact that Texan-based C3 Presents are already well-established Down Under as the owners of the Big Day Out festival.
C3 Presents claimed full financial stake of the iconic Australian festival in June after promoter AJ Maddah sold his share, simultaneously announcing that “while we intend to bring back the festival in future years, we can confirm there will not be a Big Day Out in 2015 … We love working on BDO and are excited about the future.”
The vaguely veiled statement kick-started rumours that with Maddah no longer having any financial claim to the festival, that it would open the doors for C3 Presents to rebrand Big Day Out as Lollapalooza Australia. Speculation that was brought to Maddah’s attention during a high-profile interview on Triple J’s Hack program in June.
When asked if there had “been any conversations” about rebranding Big Day Out, Maddah replied: “Absolutely, absolutely. Look, I’ve spent quite a lot of time in Austin this year, post-even with the guys at C3 and being Lollapalooza doesn’t change the fact that there are no headliners.” Maddah had previously blamed a weak lineup lacking in top-billing artists as the primary catalyst for Big Day Out’s cancellation.
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“I believe Big Day Out with the right lineup and presented properly … making it more modern, well it would work absolutely fine,” Maddah told Triple J. “It’s not the name that you put on top of the festival, it’s what you provide.”
When pressed, Maddah said he was “indifferent about the name,” adding “[it] doesn’t change what experience is provided for the Australian public.”
Owing to some very complex financial dealings with C3 Presents, Maddah no longer has a stake in the Big Day Out, pulling his shares in order to get capital to stage his own flagship event, Soundwave Festival, moving ahead with the lineup and a new two-day format.
