UPDATE: Official announcement from Soundwave via their forums.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the cancellation of the Revolution Festival.
Many of the festival bands will still be coming to Australia in that time period and team up to bring you some very special shows. These will include multi band/mini festival line-ups in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. We will be announcing these events in the next 7 days.
Tickets purchased online will be refunded automatically as soon as it can be processed. If you purchased from an outlet, refunds will be available next week from point of purchase.
After appearing out of nowhere earlier this year, and following much speculation and rumours over the past fortnight, promoter AJ Maddah has officially pulled the pin on the follow up to the sold out summer metal extravaganza.
Social media networks have been ravenous all day with rumours following a tweet from Stix Zadinia, the drummer with LA hair metal band Steel Panther, stating “Soundwave Revolution is cancelled. I am bummed.” This following the delayed headliner announcements which were rumoured to be replacing the drop out of Van Halen.
In his interview with Nova, AJ stated:
“The situation as we know it has been cancelled. The situation is that we were scheduled to make a second announcement on the 1st August which had our festival co-headliner on that announcement. Their circumstances changed at the last minute and they had to pull out. And unfortunately we don’t have enough time to replace them. And we didn’t really want to go ahead with an incomplete line-up.
“We were supposed to make the public announcement this evening anyway. But what we wanted to do—because a lot of those bands are still coming and we are creating packages and what have you, for them to do in clubs and other venues—we wanted to be able to make the full announcement at 1pm [today]. So that we could say the festival in its format is no longer happening. That these shows are taking its place. Unfortunately one of those artists jumped the gun.
“Well the people that have already bought their tickets, I think it’s nice enough that people have already purchased their tickets by with credit card, in which case those tickets are automatically refunded. And the small percentage that might have bought it from outlets they’ll be able to get a refund I expect.
“Had we had been able to have our second headliner and make our second announcement I think we wouldn’t have had any issues with that. And it wasn’t the fact of not being able to attract the artists, I guess we were victims of certain artists circumstances or what have you. I still think the festival market is very strong.
“Obviously we love our fanbase and we try to do what’s best for them. And we could have taken the option of limping through with the line-up as we have [it] now. It still would have obviously still been a much better financial outcome for us than to go through the road we have – but we just didn’t want to put an inferior product on the market.
“Revolution was a one-off but yes, Soundwave 2012 will be back in February and the line-up is massive.”
More details on the reasons behind the cancellation, refunds and the effect on the upcoming Harvest Festival to come.
