Festival X marks the needed return of a major touring festival in Australia
For quite a long time Australians enjoyed major touring festivals that billed the biggest artists in the world. These festivals were The Big Day Out, Future Music Festival, Soundwave and Stereosonic. Just look at some of the past lineups from Future Music Festival and Big Day below to see the scale of these events. Yes, that’s Kanye headlining The Big Day Out back in 2012.
Sadly and for a multitude of different reasons (some out of their control) these festivals discontinued and from 2015 onward we did not have a major touring festival in the country. During this time boutique touring festivals like FOMO, Groovin The Moo, Laneway, and Listen Out have grown in prominence and have become not to miss faves for local punters. Also, new large festivals have recently emerged into the scene to fill parts of the void left by these events. To fill the metal and hard rock gap left by Soundwave, we now have Download Festival and Good Things, and Ultra Australia is making solid progress to make up for the departure of Stereosonic. While this is amazing news, we still however don’t have our Lollapolooza, i.e. a festival that bills the huge headliners and doesn’t necessarily focus on one specific genre, like the Big Day Outs and Future Music Festivals we once had.
Enter Festival X. Put on by the legends that brought Stereosonic to us — Onelove and Hardware with the backing of international touring giants Live Nation, this festival promises to be that major touring festival we have been craving for in Australia. Forget promising us, one look at their inaugural lineup and it’s not hard to see why this festival is certainly our new major touring event.
Boasting some of the biggest DJ’s on the planet like Calvin Harris and Armin Van Buuren, and also realising the need now for headline Hip-Hop acts with Lil Pump, Blueface and Murda Beatz, the lineup is well rounded and reminsecent of any other major touring festival in the world. The team have also managed to keep the lineup locally representative with homegrown heroes Alison Wonderland, Sophiegrophy , Thandi Phoenix and more gracing the bill.
To bring home the point, we spoke exclusively to Onelove owner Frank Cotela who is one of the main driving forces behind Festival X and he had this to say:
“The last few years has been an interesting time for festivals in Australia, the boom in boutique festivals seemed to fill the void that was left by the large scale festivals that had exited the market, promoters were embracing more special festivals usually all based around niche underground and that ‘Triple J’ sound , but we knew that this wasn’t the whole market, there wasn’t a product anymore that catered for the ordinary Australian kid that loved all sorts of music like Hip Hop, EDM, Dance, Techno, and Indie. That was the foundation for Festival X, a modern music festival that caters for the rest of us… Expect to see Festival X expand into new cities and become more broader in the coming years…”
With Australian industry heavy-weights involved like Onelove and Hardware, the backing of Live Nation and an amazing debut lineup, it’s no surprise that we’re hearing tickets are flying for this one and it looks likely to be a sell-out across all cities come November. We absolutely cannot wait and will be there partying it up to tell you how it all went down. If you prefer to actually be there raging with us and not suffer FOMO while reading our re-cap you can still nab tickets here — get in quick though.
