Australia is one of the toughest places to stage a music festival due to its relative isolation from the rest of the world. There's plenty of fans to provide funding for a limited number of events but it's still tough to draw (and pay) huge acts for traveling so far for what's most likely to be just on appearance (versus a longer tour scenario, where headliners such as Katy Perry can make oodles of cash).
Australia had it's most famous music festival falling out on this day 40 years ago when the Sunbury Music Festival ended in a scheduling disaster. Due to financial issues, reports indicate that only Deep Purple was paid for its work. However homeland heroes AC/DC was scheduled to perform after the British act, who wanted to pack up the PA it provided and hit the road. A fight broke out between the crews of the respective bands and the Australian rockers ended up not playing at all.
It wouldn't be the first festival to go belly-up due to cash concerns. Here are five more events that died down under.
01) iHeartRadio Fest
FM Radio megalith iHeartRadio knows a thing or two about staging music festivals—it's original event in the United States has run successfully out of Las Vegas since 2011. It just couldn't get off the ground in Australia due to the headlining issues addressed earlier. It was scheduled to be at a relatively small venue, the Allphones Arena in Sydney, with a majority of the talent being provided by homeland acts such as Redfoo and The Faders. Miley Cyrus was booked as one headlining act but plans were shut down when a second headliner, whom the company never named, failed to come to terms with iHeartRadio.
02) Supafest
Supafest was the biggest name in hip-hop festivals in Australia (and way before we knew who Iggy Azalea was) for three years before it disappeared during 2013. The lineup for that year's four-city trek looked promising—T.I., Ne-Yo, 50 Cent and J. Cole were onboard—when suddenly the promoters pushed it back six months. And then cancelled the event altogether. It turned out organizer Paper Chase Touring was $17 million in debt. It wouldn't be the first hip-hop-centric event to bite the dust down under: Rap City and Movement met similar fates.
03) Pyramid Rock Festival
The Pyramid Rock Festival may have fallen victim to having eyes bigger than its stomach but it also had a nasty case of bad luck lead-up to its "closing." The event was scheduled around New Year's Eve on an island near Melbourne. A romantic notion for a Bonnaroo-style camp-out festival but eventually the reality of the situation caught to promoters: Near the very end of the event during 2009/10, a massive storm struck, causing cancellations and an electricity shortage. Thousands of fans got the full brunt of the storm and consequently opted not to come back for the next year's event. Despite suggestions of a resurrection, the 2010/11 event was the last to be held.
04) Harvest Festival
Harvest was another event that seemed to have success during its first few years but when the third installation of the three-date touring festival rolled in during 2013, AJ Maddah—the biggest name in Australian concert promotion-declared that the event had been cancelled, very near to his announcement that his company had acquired part of Big Day Out, the nation's biggest festival. The former promoter for Big Day Out issued a warning about Maddah's tactics, pointing at the fate of Harvest and suggesting that his opponent couldn't care less about helping Australian talent and would run Big Day Out into the rocks. No way!
05) Big Day Out
Okay, to be fair, Big Day Out has not been entirely cancelled. But the event took a hit less than two months after Maddah took control, as headliner Blur pulled out, citing communication issues with promoters. That led organizers to collect the ordinarily two-day event into one, reportedly coming out $10 million in debt as ticket sales were roughly half of the 2013 total. Maddah claimed the loss was expected and then promptly stepped down as director, turning over control to C3, the American company behind Lollapalooza and others. Don't expect any expansion in the next few years.
