Hey guys, do you love a trainwreck? because I just have to tell you this one.
Sadly, since it's an italian event (or series of event, and most definitively they're unfortunate), I don't really have any links to provide, but I have to tell you how tragicomical has been the saga of the many attempts to organize an extreme metal festival over the last few years.
Do you know what the
Fyre Festival was? basically a fever dream of a "tech guru" who was basically scamming investors and a rapper, who conjured up a luxury festival on an island in the Bahamas that turned out a clusterfuck of epic proportions, with bands and caterers never being paid and people lured to the event having to sleep not in the promised luxury mansions, but in disaster relief tents.
Well, in Italy we had our own extreme metal version of that! a little history for now... once upon a time there was a venue one hour east of Milan where the metalheads could find haven and seeing many small and upcoming band play, as well as some legit mid-sized acts. I've been in that venue many times, enjoying concerts (relatively) big and small, it was such a nice place to be!
So, when the owner of the place decided to organize a metal festival, you'd think that one responsable for giving the underground scene a safe place to play would come up with something cool, right?
...well, no.
I would explain it all to you, but since someone made the point of letting everyone know and wrote an english post (public on Facebook), I might as well copy that here.
=========== PUBLIC FACEBOOK POST OF SOMEONE EXPLAINING IT ALL AND TAGGING A LOT OF BANDS TO RAISE AWARENESS:
Dear musicians, managers, booking agent friends playing and booking shows over European summer festivals.
This year (and this happened another 2 times before) there’s a festival announced in northern Italy which is about to - sadly - disgrace Italy and the hard work of many professional and reliable promoters working here, once again.
And I am pretty sick and tired of this happening.
Let me explain.
The first time (Colony Summer Fest 2018) they announced Venom, ABBATH -Official-, SÓLSTAFIR, Primordial, Dark Funeral, just to mention few, and many people bought a 2 days ticket.
The festival was fully cancelled 2-3 days before, the promoter didn’t buy any flight tickets nor sent the agreed advanced payment to most of the bands involved. Apparently, they didn’t even had any realistic location booked, they kept changing it, and they were lacking of all the bureaucracy to make a festival happen.
While bands were canceling, many days before, the promoter was still selling tickets.
Tickets they made virtually impossible to get a refund for.
Basically, a scam.
Luckily and thanks to the professionality of Saverio Mollica, who saved the day, we could experience, at least, one of the most intense Primordial show I’ve ever seen, and we had a good laugh with Alan Averill about these scammers.
In 2021 a “new” festival, with a new name (Camunia Sonora), in the same area, and clearly the same people involved, was announced.
Again, the bill was big: Coroner, Sodom Destruction Arcturus Månegarm Saor Pestilence (official) - the list here would be very long - but it also kept changing, very drastically (“only thrash” to “mixed but mostly gothic doom/black metal” bill).
Every other italian festival promoter was either waiting another year or doing their best to actually make their festival happen, despite the challenges given by this goddamn pandemic (e.g. Frantic Fest, my favourite, in the person of Davide Straccione, opted for a beautiful but smaller and all-italian-bands edition, to make sure fans wouldn’t be disappointed by too many last minute cancellation, postponing the full edition to this year).
Meanwhile, at Camunia Sonora, most bands had no advance, no flights booked, tickets were being sold to the audience with the clear promise of an easy and fast refund in case of cancellation, but we all knew this was the same scheme of Colony Summer Fest.
Few days before the festival, they finally admit the festival wasn’t going happen (supposedly for the covid situation, but no other italian event in those days had that kind of problem) and, guess what?
Tickets aren’t refundable, because the festival is tecnically POSTPONED and not cancelled (and the constant lineup changement made hard to define what that means).
And here we are in 2022, when Cernunnos Fest rises: FOUR DAYS with Candlemass, Marduk, Alcest, Saturnus, In the Woods.... and many many more on the original bill (take a look below!). It should be next week but every other day either a band announces they won’t play, agencies calls them out for this scam, the promoters make awkward statements (and then delete all of them), they publicly attack reliable webzines for “not advertising enough” (which, btw, is not even true) or other professionals such as Luca Pessina, Lorenzo and Alessandro Corno for not supporting this madness, kinda blaming everybody else for their failures.
They still claiming the festival will happen, despite already canceling one day, despite the fact we all know what’s about to happen.
Some of the bands booked there could have been booked somewhere else for the Italian fans to enjoy their shows. Fans often arrange their whole vacations around festivals, and they’ll find themselves once again left with nothing or very little. This is a damage for everybody.
At least they had guts to publicly claim they sold only 9 tickets for the canceled day (we’re talking a festival that should be AT LEAST 1000-1500 people a day to make the math work).
So, what about you all stop booking shows with this people?
There are PLENTY of GREAT, RELIABLE, HARD WORKING professionals in this country and great festivals for these bands to play (Metalitalia.com Festival, Frantic Fest 2022, Luppolo In Rock just to mention the ones I personally prefer), please help us getting the rid of these people, let’s take the chance to have a better festival season, next year, without all this circus happening.
Let’s make the metal business a better place, after all the difficulties we’ve been through, we deserve it.
Please, help me spread this message, let your band and your agent know about this.
===========
So this is how the drama unfolded. This is already the fourth time basically that a festival is being booked with the hope of raising the money to pay the band from presales, coupled with a lack of expertize on how to properly deal with the bureocratic side of things, and the delusions of grandeur of being able to organize something out of someone's reach.
To sum up how the festival went:
- Four days announced (saturday and sunday over the course of two weekends, 23/24 and 30/31 of July)
- Bands starting to pull out criticizing harshly the organization and the lack of reliabilty of the promoters
- Cancellation of the entire first day, the 23th (so we're down to three)
- Announcement of a downsizing of the festival blaming the flight strikes over Europe (a real thing actually), leaving the first saturday as a free entry event, and promising the last sunday to happen (so we're down from four days to two - the 24th being a free entry day, and the 31th confirmed for now, with Alcest headliners)
- Shistorm ensuing, and the FB page of the event - where comments were already blocked - being downright CANCELLED
- The festival gets "rebranded" into the more generic series of events that, over the course of two weeks, was happening in the same location (the metal festival was just a chapter in the entire bill where mainstream minor artists and tribute bands actually played), in a last ditch attempt to avoid bad press
- Last sunday, the 24th, comes, with two italian bands and Decapited and Suffocation meant to play..... but these two bands showed up at the festival and LEFT!!! They arrived there after all, and they LEFT! why? of course because they weren't paid and there was no money for them!
- Come this monday, Alcest announce they won't be playing next sunday (no shit, Sherlock), blaming the promoters for not honoring the agreements
- Blaming the "incoming adverse weather conditions" (which ones? it's gonna be scorching hot the entire week) the last date gets officially cancelled.
This is just the chronicle, you obviously missed all the shitstorm of funny, sarcastic and sad comments online as this major clusterfuck was unfolding.
It's really disheartening how some people can try over and over the same dirty tricks to organize a festival.... let me remind you the one behind this is not a random scammer, he's someone who actually gave THOUSANDS of concerts to the scene; how can "one of us" turn basically into a scammer? maybe it's just the desire to prove to himself and to others that even him could organize a festival, with the delusion and the desire to "make it right next time" fueling another attempt the next year, even more disastrous than the previous one?
The italian online press has savagely dived into this, covering this like no other event, and everyone joined with the online comments. Trainwrecks are addictive, what can I say? now we're all left with the pieces, a single photo of sunday being used by all the webzines for their article (literally no one else took a photo, because there were so few people to begin with, after everyone lost trust into this festival), and the hope that the damage done to the credibility of the italian metal scene won't have repercussions for many other bands...
I am so immersed into this that I had to tell you all. I hope, even if it's just an abstract thing for you, that you enjoyed this not-even-exactly-beautiful disaster
Topic: The italian, extreme metal version of the Fyre Festival (Read 544 times)