Splendour camping tickets soldout

Tue 24th May, 2011 in Local News

With the Splendour in the Grass Event-Camping tickets have now officially sold out, FasterLouder spoke to Jessica Ducrou, who runs the huge festival with her partner Paul Piticco, about the festival’s lineup and suggestions that Kanye West and Coldplay don’t belong on a Splendour bill.

While some conspiracy theories (and conspiracy theory parodies ) have suggested that the presence of Kanye West and Coldplay at the top of the bill hurt the speed of the ticket sales as they aren’t ‘suitable’ Splendour headliners Ducrou obviously disagrees and says that opposition to the more commercially successful headliners is “just people being narrow minded.”

“I don’t see them as being massive departures [for the festival],” she says, “but they’re big bands, probably some of the biggest in the world and that’s what people push back on. That’s balanced with the acts that by the time the festival comes around people will be much more familiar with. There has to be a broad variety of talent that appeals to a lot of people – especially when you’re trying to sell 32 thousand tickets… It’s about challenging people and not everyone’s going to like what you do.”

Like the rest of us, Ducrou tuned into watch Kanye’s performance as it streamed live form Coachella and wondered if Kanye’s Splendour set would be something similar. “After I saw the stream I sent an email to Kanye’s agent to find out if he was bringing the same show to Australia,” she told us, “but we don’t know. Apparently he changes things up quite a lot. So there’ll probably be elements of [Coachella] with some new stuff as well. He’s coming all the way for one show so I imagine he’s going to put a fair bit of effort into it.”

As for the chance of a Chris Martin joining Kanye on stage for a dream performance of Homecoming live on stage Ducrou says “Zero. Absolutely zero. The only way it could happen is if Kanye decided to come and join Coldplay on stage, it couldn’t be the other way around because Coldplay are playing at Fuji Rock on the Friday night.”

While the full details of the always contentious schedule won’t be released until two weeks before the festival, Ducrou also confirmed that the main stage headliners will be Coldplay, Jane’s Addiction and obviously Kanye, while in a one two punch of British goodness the reformed Pulp will play on the amphitheatre stage immediately before Coldplay. Regina Spektor and her piano will headline one of the three nights in the GW McLennan tent.

The full interview with Jessica Ducrou about planning and booking the festival, her must see acts and the Splendour returning to Byron Bay will be published on FasterLouder later this week.