EXCLUSIVE: Legion Organiser Speaks Out Against Today's 'Ridiculous' Media Leak

With news breaking today that the newly-created Legion festival will not be going ahead as planned this March, organisers for the event have stressed that it will go ahead on the Australia Day weekend in 2017 after news of this year’s postponement leaked online prematurely today.

Due to confirm the festival postponement tomorrow, organisers were forced to bring the news forward by a day after an email explaining tomorrow’s announcement, which was sent confidentially to those who had pledged in the current crowdfunding campaign, was quickly leaked to media outlet Music Feeds.

Speaking exclusively to theMusic, Mark Spillane called the leak "ridiculous".

"We did that [email] as a transparent thing for our fans because we need to," he said.

"We need to have that one-on-one conversation with the people that are in our inner circle. That is a fair thing and that’s all we were trying to do."

Spillane insisted however that "nothing has changed" as to how the festival will run in 2017.

"All we’re doing is moving the dates because it works best for everybody on the planet," Spillane said.

"It's a really positive thing, we're really happy with where things are at, we've got some incredible headliners that we’re dealing with and it just takes time to go through the fine details to make an event of this size happen in the right way."

"We’re about being transparent with our fan base. There’s no way we want to change one thing unless we speak to our people."

In a prepared statement released earlier today, Legion founder John Sankey said that the Legion team faced a number of hurdles in getting the event together which included international headline acts being "worried about attaching themselves to a festival" in Australia given the current festival landscape, securing venues and the timing of the event. 

"Considering we haven’t announced any headliners yet and have already seen such huge support from the community, we've decided that we really need to spend the right amount of time to amp this up and give the artists and the fans the best festival that Australia has ever seen," Sankey said.

The Pozible campaign will be re-launched with an extra 60 days added, which will allow time to announce the full line-up. 

The 2017 festival will include 3 major east coast open air shows plus two mini-festival club shows in Perth and Adelaide. 

See below for the new dates with venues to still be announced. 

21 January — Perth 

22 January — Adelaide

26 January — Melbourne

28 January  — Sydney

29 January — Brisbane