The Hot Seat: Fuzzy's John Wall

14 June 2010

Fuzzy’s Creative Director and co-founder discusses the rocketing cost of putting on a festival, shifting musical tastes and Parklife celebrating ten years.

You’ve announced this year’s Parklife line-up with Missy Elliot, Soulwax and Groove Armada headlining. What’s your take on it?
We try to keep it evolving and mutating every year and we’ve managed to do that again. It’s not just the same old thing as last year, but there’s a lot of links to what Parklife has been before.

Parklife turns ten this year - tell us about the very first event.
It was in March 2000 in Centennial Park in Sydney with local DJs playing. It was a disaster. Our capacity was 2000 but we didn’t get half that many because it bucketed down. It was hilarious. The people that came had a good time though. The second Parklife happened in November later that year with Bob Sinclar, which went a lot better.

Last year’s Parklife saw quite an obvious shift from dance acts and DJs to include more bands and live performers like Metric, Little Boots and Bertie Blackman. Why was that?
People’s tastes are very diverse these days. It’s not like when we first started promoting in the ‘90s where you picked your side – rock or dance – and you thought everyone on the other side was an idiot. People don’t think about music that way anymore. We’ve noticed our customers don’t make that distinction between a DJ or a live band.

Is there other reasons for the shift - have licencing fees increased for a dance event too?
It kinda plays into it, yeah. The PPCA and APRA charge a whole lot more money for licencing if you’re a “dance party” although the distinction of that is quite blurry. But we were putting on bands before that regardless. To be honest, it doesn’t really disadvantage us. If I was really selfish I’d say that the [higher PPCA fees] make it a bit of a barrier for small promoters to enter the market. I still disagree with the PPCA decision.

What’s the key to success in growing a festival successfully?
We have a few principles which we stick by. Make it something we can be proud of. Never dumb it down – often when things get bigger, they just get dumber and more commercial. We try to do the opposite so as the festival grows, it allows us to put on music that maybe wouldn’t be viable by itself. We’re the biggest music fans we know. It’s mainly just caring about it, I reckon.

How does the recent explosion in festivals impact on running your own?
It’s definitely an over-saturated market at the moment, but we’re just doing everything we can to make sure Parklife is as good as you’d expect, but hopefully even better. The cost of a line-up has gotten crazy because there’s five times as many promoters trying to get artists. There aren’t magically five times more artists in the world. Prices have gone up enormously and everyone is fighting to get the best line-up. This year’s line-up will be costing us five times as much as the line-up two years ago and double that of last year’s. We’ve expanding slightly but mainly it’s all the competition. We have a joke with agents overseas that when they get a phonecall or email from an Australian promoter, it’s like ‘ka-ching!’

Do you have a favourite Parklife moment?
There’s a million bewildering moments in my head, but last year at the end of the Adelaide show, Erol Alkan was playing and there was a DJ stage invasion by Tiga, Joakim and Aeroplane. Someone managed to find a motorized Segway and started doing 360s on stage. It was hilarious. There’s something about a Segway that just cracks me up.