It seems that the 20th Big Day Out marks the end of the international relations between the festival and New Zealand. Big Day Out organiser Ken West has said that it is no longer financially viable to hold the festival in New Zealand as the costs involved with shipping stages, artists and everything in-between is putting a huge strain on the festival.
This is not the first of the issues for the Big Day Out promoter this year, after his partner left him late last year, and also with slow ticket sales, however not as bad as first anticipated, selling more tickets than the 2009 line-up which included Neil Young, The Prodigy and Arctic Monkeys.
New Zealand promoter of the festival Campbell Smith has spoken out about the cancellation of the 2013 festival saying “We found ourselves looking back at the Big Day Out and over the last few years it’s grown a bit and it’s become a bit out of control and it’s become a bit, honestly a bit too expensive, so we have looked at I guess going back to the beginning and rebuilding it,”
Ken West has also said that it seems fitting that the first and last Big Days Out in New Zealand were headlined by grunge outfit Soundgarden.
This is one of the first changes to the Big Day Out that we have seen since the C3 Partnership, and we have been promised both an internal and external overhaul of the festival when it returns to Australian shores only in 2013.
