Melbourne Harvest timetable;excuses for the delay

Wed 9th Nov, 2011 in Local News

The Sydney and Brisbane Harvest festival timetables were released last Friday and featured the most agonising indie kid decision since the infamous Foals/Yeasayer clash of Splendour 2010 with a three way set clash starring The National, Flaming Lips and Holy Fuck.

Early yesterday afternoon festival promoter AJ Maddah promised that the Melbourne timetable would be released in “a few hours” and even boasted that “We have managed to avoid Lips clash with National or Portishead!” Then just after 7.30pm he made the interesting claim that the “Timetable went up yesterday!”

Anyway – THE MELBOURNE HARVEST FESTIVAL SET-TIMES are finally here – and as promised there’s no clash between The National, Flaming Lips or Portishead.

---

On the weekend Maddah had blamed Portishead for the delayed release of the timetables in a none too subtle post on his blog under the headline “TIMETABLES. I don’t like doing them”, which describes the timetabling process as “a bogus journey armed with a multitude of sqaure pegs and facing a wall full of round holes.”

The blog post explains that “At the beginning of this saga, we had what Declan (my Harvest co-conspirator) and I thought was the perfect timetable. Then came word that 1 of our headliners wanted absolute silence on other stages. We had to comply with this for 2 reasons: Their amazing, melancholy and ethereal music would be ruined if there was any noise bleed from other stages; & They would cancel. And this was no bluff.”

Without actually naming the Bristol band directly Maddah claimed that the headliner “was a band I had chased for a decade. I had got down on my knees and begged them to play Harvest. It was a band whose final acquiessence had prompted me to launch the festival this year”.

Following the publication of that blog, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow responded on Twitter writing that “If you tell a promoter from the offset what you need to play theres no bullshit /they cam always say NO. This thing promoter has really fucked me off/ just spent my possible time off doing promo for his festival and he goes slagging us off /nice” Thankfully when he was asked if the band would cancel their Harvest shows Barrow reassures his followers “we wouldnt do that , dont worry.”

In response to Barrow’s comments Maddah has tweeted to say “I have no idea what he is on about” before announcing that he had “Just had the privilege of talking to Goff Barrow. Turns out he was professionally wound up by some media types hoping for controversy. It’s kind of sad that people have to go to these sorts of lengths to try and generate page impressions. It’s not as if i don’t start enough nonsense all by myself without the need to be quoted out of context! [Portishead] are really nice people. Just got baited and overreacted. Totally understandable. ”

Barrow has also noted that everything is now “sorted // Seems like these bastards tried to dug up some shit between us and harvest and it worked // As i said before the crap…I’m looking forward to it // seems like like AJ has got a big mouth much like myself….”

Storm in a tea-cup over! Phew!