Soundwave Revolution will be marked down as one of the craziest festivals in history that never happened. The non-existent festival is a story in itself; we first found out about the festival on March 29th when Soundwave organisers starting tweeting mysterious clues, one being ’11029042 Viva La Revolution’. The number read backwards suggested that the new festival would take place on September 24 2011. After that, bands started confirming that they would be on the line-up using the tag #swRevolution.
On April 17th, Soundwave organiser Aj Maddah tweeted: Guys, announcement is April 28th (in the interest of not answering the same question for the 59489th time)
On April 25th, AJ Maddah tweeted: I may have to postpone the #swRevolution announcement scheduled for the 28th while we work out what to do about Perth
Finally, on May 11th, we were given a taste of what the festival really had in store with the first line-up announcement, and it started to sink in for fans that this festival was actually going to happen. Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Hole, Sisters Of Mercy, Danzig, Kevin Devine, Bad Religion, Machine Head, Alter Bridge; it was going to be massive and this was on top of all the bands we already knew about: Panic! at the Disco, Sum 41, The Used, and heaps more; it seemed mega. The Marketing was big: Street Press ads and Site takeovers; it seemed the Soundwave crew were really hitting it big in 2011, but did they take on too much?? From the start it seemed like it was also going to be hard to back up sales with the Soundwave 2012 Festival after all the punters had spent their money on SW Revolution. When it was announced that the Soundwave 2012 line-up would be revealed at SW Revolution in Brisbane, one thought that maybe with all the hype after all the crazy tweeting, these guys were actually going to pull it off.
On July 26th, AJ Maddah started talking about a second line-up announcement when he tweeted – Top 4 bands are considered headline acts. We have announced #1 (VH) and #4 (Alice Cooper) and left #2 & #3 for 2nd announcement.” So stay tuned for at least TWO major announcements! There will be 7 or 8 bands on the announcement.
Holy Hell, it was getting even bigger; how could this be? Fans eagerly awaited the second line-up that was scheduled for August 1st, but alas, on the day of the announcement Maddah tweeted: We’re still waiting on the paperwork for one of the 2nd announced bands. Postponing announcement to Wednesday 3 at 10pm #swRevolution
The line-up never came. On August 9th, to the shock of fans, media, bands and everyone else involved, a rumour started spreading that the festival was cancelled. A member of the band Steel Panther had tweeted: Soundwave revolution is cancelled. I am bummed.
People even speculated that this was all a joke to try and hype the announcement of the Big headliner AJ had been talking about, things had been so crazy anything was possible.
However, at 3pm 9/8/2011 Maddah made a statement via Nova, confirming the dream was over.
AJ Maddah’s Statement:
“The festival as we know it has been cancelled”
“We were scheduled to make a second announcement on the first of August – we had our festival co-headliner on that announcement… Their circumstances changed at the last minute and they had to pull out and unfortunately we don’t have enough time to replace them and we didn’t really want to go ahead with an incomplete line-up.
“We could have taken the option of linking through with the line-up as we have now – it would have obviously still been a much better financial outcome for us than to go through the road we have – but we just didn’t want to put an inferior product on the market”
Shortly afterward Soundwave released its statement:
It is with great sadness that we announce the cancellation of the Revolution Festival.
Many of the festival bands will still be coming to Australia in that time period and team up to bring you some very special shows. These will include multi band/mini festival line-ups in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. We will be announcing these events in the next 7 days.
Tickets purchased online will be refunded automatically as soon as it can be processed. If you purchased from an outlet, refunds will be available next week from point of purchase.
The question really has to be asked that after months of hype, marketing dollars, band interviews and tweets, would you really cancel a festival this big because a band you hadn’t even announced yet had cancelled? Just like that, a band none of us even knew about had cancelled, so it’s over.
Maybe we will never know the full truth of what happened, maybe the festival was doomed from the start, but it seems like it’s going to be an awfully hard task now for Maddah to convince these fans to buy Soundwave 2012 tickets. Fans have already been bombarding the SW Revolution Facebook page with complaints ranging from “what am I going to do about my plane flights” to “I’ve already booked accommodation, this is a joke.”
Will you buy tickets to Soundwave 2012 ?
RIP #swRevolution
