Vivian Lees, the man who co-founded the Big Day Out in 1992, has some very harsh words for AJ Maddah, the promoter who has just sold his stake in the long-running Aussie music festival to US company C3 Presents.
“He’s a mega dickhead. He’s lead the race to the bottom and it’s blown up in his face,” Lees told Triple J’ Hack program this afternoon in a special broadcast attempting to unravel the rapid events of the last 24 hours that has seen Maddah pull out from his financial partnership with Big Day Out, as C3 Presents confirms it won’t be running a 2015 edition of the festival.
“Look that doesn’t surprise me after the way it ran last year. It’s pretty tragic that it won’t be coming back. It was pretty obvious that it wasn’t going to come back because of the dysfunctional relationship between the producers and AJ Maddah’s erratic management style,” Lees says of the “schism” between Maddah and C3.
“He professed to love the event but seeing as he is the owner of the competitor (Soundwave). If it worked – great, if it, didn’t then he knocked out the competition,” adding that Maddah should “stick to what he’s good at, which is Soundwave Festival, and stop trying to be a megalomaniac.”
Lees already took several nasty swipes at Maddah in a previous Hack interivew, labelling him an “odious character” and “a gambler” after he bought a 50% stake into the Big Day Out last September from Lees’ former business partner, Ken West.
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In response Maddah, who was also interviewed on Triple J’s current affairs program (which you can stream in full at bottom), refuted Lees’ harsh assessments that his involvement hurt the festival as “absolutely rubbish,” reiterating previous claims that Big Day Out was close to “dead and buried” before he bought into the event.
“If I didn’t get involved they were going to cancel the festival and it was dead,” he said, blaming the Big Day Out’s downturn in recent years of poor lineups and bad bookings on Lees, who walked from the festival in 2011.
“Viv Lees booked a terrible lineup and then ran to the hills the minute he was going to lose any money. I find Vivian and his claims a bit hypocritical at this point,” says Maddah.
As for the claims he’d bought in to the rival festival to undo it, he explained: “Soundwave and Big Day Out, really the crossover is very very minimal. Big Day Out has always been about mass appeal. It’s not really a situation that’s catered to the Soundwave crowd. Soundwave has always been about specialist rock crowd.”
Maddah’s on-air interview also saw him citing a lack of quality headliners as the reasons behind the Big Day Out 2015 cancellation, while refuting reports that he was exiting the festival partnership after selling his 50% share to C3 Presents as “not quite correct.”
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Maddah explains: “Once we were at a point that the [2015] lineup was at the point that was less than appealing we decided not to go ahead.” He described the Big Day Out as going “into hibernation” to recuperate for the future in order to “reconnect the festival to the point where it’s a bit more relevant to kids now.”
“The Big Day Out obviously fell apart last year and we, as always, had to regroup, build a new team for it,” he says, stating he “ended up losing about $5.5 million on this years festival … C3 probably lost a little bit more.”
The Soundwave boss also explained why he sold his majority share to C3. To paraphrase, when Maddah bought into the Big Day Out last September, he paid $400,000 for 50% of the shares, but he also invested “a large amount of capital” into the company.
When it was decided that there were no headliners big enough to justify Big Day Out 2015 going ahead, it was also decided they didn’t need the money to stage it, but Maddah did – in order to run Soundwave Festival.
C3 was very gracious and when it was decided that we weren’t going to go ahead with the festival and we didn’t need the capital I was able to take it out,” he explains. Rather than turn towards outside investors to stage his flagship event, he sold his Big Day Out shares back to C3 Presents “for $1,” he claims, and in turn put the capital he’d put into the Big Day Out in the first place back towards staging Soundwave.
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So while on paper, Maddah is no longer a financial partner in the festival, he claims he has the option to buy back into the Big Day Out “for $1” after Soundwave takes place next year. Or as he put it to Hack: “As it stands, I do not have a financial ownership of the Big Day Out, but I have the option to repurchase my 50% back from the Big Day Out when we decide to go ahead with the festival.”
In summary, he confirms, “yes, I’m still involved. Yes, Big Day Out will come back 2016… The festival is alive.”
Which ironically, corresponds with Lees’ comments about Big Day Out’s future. When asked about the festival’s tarnished reputation, Lees told Hack’s Tom Tilley; “All I can see, The Big Day Out has been and will always be the festival in Australia, and if people are expecting something else to come round that’s better they better not hold their breath.”
Listen To Triple J’s Hack interview with AJ Maddah below:
