The Big Pineapple Music Festival is back for a second year, and will be a revamped and reworked version of its debut event, says promoter and founder Mark Pico.
“We learnt a hell of a lot last year, with it being the first year of the festival at the site,” he says. “We've been able to just nail everything this year and improve on things that we stuffed up on last year. We've been able to put right things that we underestimated last year, which is great. “My partner Brendan and I also run another festival called Golden Days; that's been going for four years on the Sunshine Coast.
The Big Pineapple festival is probably about three times bigger than Golden Days, and we didn't know how big it was going to be last year, and it sold out with over 13,000 tickets. We weren't used to that, and it was very exciting. Basically, we think there were too many people at the event, so we've taken it back a bit this year to make it more comfortable for everybody, and we've got a lot more bars and things like that to handle the amount of people coming. Hopefully the smaller capacity will make it an even happier day.”
Last year's festival featured Regurgitator and Grinspoon, and the pressure was on to better the line-up this time around. “The headliners are Bliss N Eso, The Living End, Spiderbait, Art Vs Science and Dead Letter Circus,” Pico says. “And we've got a pretty solid electronic stage this year with Alison Wonderland, Opiuo and the likes. We've also got a bit of a hotted-up car exhibition, there'll be a big skate ramp going on and we've got the Red Bull wakeboarding crew. On top of that, we've expanded the two smaller stages; we've taken the electronic stage outside this year. It will be under the trees which surround the whole site; it'll be pretty special. We're going to do some great stuff with lighting there.
“We've also expanded the camping, as last year the site sold out in the first month, and we've been able to find space for another thousand campers, so people who might've missed out last year will be able to get onboard with the camping.”
Preparation for the festival hasn't been without hitches, however, with Violent Soho and Thundamentals pulling out of the line-up; something the team moved quickly to remedy. “They are two of my favourite bands, and I was excited to see them,” Pico says.
“Our original plan was to have Dead Letter Circus, but Violent Soho came in when Dead Letter Circus wasn't able to do it. It just so happened that when Violent Soho pulled out, Dead Letter Circus were then available, so we were able to make the swap pretty easily. It was a bit of a stressful thing at first, but we were able to sort it out pretty quickly.
“As far as Thundamentals go, nobody is going to miss out on anything on the day. There'll be a good surprise for people; something in the pipeline that people will be excited about. We've got probably about 65 percent of tickets sold at the moment. We sold out last year, and it wasn't until the last week that it went crazy. Sunshine Coast people don't buy tickets until the last minute; it's crazy but that's just what they do every year. Anybody who has ever done an event up here says they've never seen anything like it. In 2011, when we did Golden Days festival, 3,500 rocked up on the day and bought tickets.”
With the likes of Soundwave, Future Music and other festivals getting bigger every year, Pico says it's important for smaller festivals to play to their strengths. “We're not even in the same ballgame as them,” he says. “We just want to do our own thing here. We've been fortunate in that we've put the hard work in over the last four years to get to where we are, so we don't look at those guys to see what they're doing; they're in a league of their own. One of those headliners would be worth more than our whole line-up. Our tickets are well priced; it's around $77 for 33 acts, and it suits the economic factor of the Sunshine Coast. We just do our own thing and hope people leave us alone, although we definitely became a target this year, for ridiculous reasons; hence a couple of those bands were taken off our festival. So, we just hope people go about their own business and let us do our own regional festival; we're happy with that.”
