EXCLUSIVE: The Birth Of Dance Festivals In Australia: Richie McNeill Part Two

By the end of the ‘90s, Richie McNeill had established himself as a major industry figure in the burgeoning Australian dance music scene.

As well as his Hardware parties and his own DJing he was one of the genre’s top A&R guys, for his own label, and he was exporting Australian dance music around the world with Mushroom.

There was another sector of the music industry that was moving from strength-to-strength at that time – festivals. Big Day Out has been launched in 1992 and by 1996/’97 it was at full speed – The Prodigy, Soundgarden, The Jesus Lizard all appearing on its bills. In 1998 the festival took a year’s hiatus, leaving the market open for someone else to try their hand.

Unfortunately for McNeill, while his first festival Apollo was ready to fill that gap, Australia wasn’t quite ready for Apollo.

Apollo was conceived by McNeill along with Jeremy Jolson and Terry Thompson, who were running Cream events and club nights around Australia. After teaming up together, they got in touch with promoter Michael Coppel, who was looking for festival opportunities again after trying to take on Big Day Out with Alternative Nation in 1995. Since then, Big Day Out had enjoyed a monopoly on the festival market.

‘You know if they did a top ten disasters, festivals that failed you’d actually be winning.’

“Jeremy’s dad was a personal friend of Michael Coppel so we somehow hooked up a meeting and Michael was very interested in getting into festivals at that point,” McNeill says. “He’d tried prior with Alternative Nation with [Michael] Gudinski and [Michael] Chugg I think it was, I think this was his second festival that he went into.

"I joked to him last year and said, ‘You know if they did a top ten disasters, festivals that failed you’d actually be winning.’ And he said, ‘I know, it’s crazy isn’t it?’ He just hasn’t had any luck the poor guy. To me he's the best promoter out there and was also a massive inspiration and influence for me. I have always had massive respect for Coppel. I've probably been to over 100 concerts of his!”

The line-up they assembled was impressive. Daft Punk, Basement Jaxx and Speedy J had broken through – or were about to – around the world. But they hadn’t quite reached Australia and the festival, held in Sydney and Melbourne in February 1998, lost money. Coppel had again been burnt for dipping his toes into the festival market, this time with the country’s first dance music event.

“Daft Punk has just put Da Funk out, which MDS had been distributing [Ed – it reached 31 in Australia], and then they blew up when the first album came out. Guy [Manuel de Homem-Christo] didn’t like flying so only Thomas [Bangalter] ended up making it, they were both booked to DJ but only one of them came in the end.”

McNeill says, “It was just ahead of its time, it was just a year too early and then Coppel didn’t want to do it again. We asked if I could use the name and do it and he wanted some money for his losses – which is fair enough.”

Apollo didn’t return in 1999, but McNeill wasn’t done with festivals yet. By that year Jason Ayoubi and Mark James of Future Entertainment had begun hosting shows at Docklands’ Shed 2 and 4. At that stage Docklands was divided into precincts and controlled by different estate agents, meaning that McNeill’s Hardware parties at Docklands – which he’d been doing for “six or seven years at that point” – were controlled by a separate agent.

“What happened is one of their venues wasn’t available in March for some reason and their real estate agent and mine had double-booked the March long weekend. But I’d done that long weekend in Shed 14 the six years prior. We had a meeting, us and the real estate agents, and I was like, ‘Well this is my date – I've done it for the past six years’. And they said, ‘Well if you both look in your contracts, because of the imminent development coming there’s a clause in there that with six weeks notice we can cancel the contract – so we’re going to cancel unless you two can work it out.”

"I sold my jet skis and trailer and motorbikes and was scrounging for money. I didn’t want to go through that again."

Forced to work together, in March of 1999 the prospects of a dance music festival in Australia were looking up. Dance music was becoming more mainstream with Daft Punk, Basement Jaxx and The Prodigy all hitting the charts.  

“If Coppel had held on one more year, who knows? I still could have been working with him and Apollo could have been in its 16th year.”

Instead, Two Tribes was born as a collaboration between Hardware Corp and Future Entertainment (the name suggested by Simon Digby when he was listening to Frankie Goes To Hollywood) and it was a success. All of a sudden McNeill was on a roll.

“December 1999, the Millennium New Year’s Eve – the big one, I had that shed booked again. I tendered for it, there were different organisations that wanted it, but I won that contract. Future had been doing a couple of New Year’s Eves with [Michael] Gudinski and Scott Murphy at the old exhibition buildings called Halcyon Nights and it was pretty strong, they had Carl Cox the first year. 

“But I invited [Future] to come and get involved with New Year’s Eve and we did Welcome 2000, which again was really successful. So we’d had two successful events within an eight month period. Made a lot of money, I went and travelled Europe – and that was about [my only] break time, actually. 

“Well, it wasn’t really a break because I was working and booking talent as I was travelling around and I did a big trip around Europe seeing all the agents and managers and clubs I’ve always wanted to see. I did a lot of DJing as well.”

There doesn’t seem to have been too much tension between Future and Gudinski’s Mushroom Group when they jumped ship to join McNeill’s New Year’s Eve party, but it probably hurt Scott Murphy and Melanie Di Mattina’s Gudinksi-backed Agent Mad.

“All those big rock promoters [like Gudinski] were looking to dip their toes in the water. Michael Coppel had with Apollo and Gudinski had backed Scott Murphy with his agency called Agent Mad, which was doing raves and this and that,” McNeill says.

“I know that was the beginning of the end for Agent Mad, when Future left them off the New Year’s Eve thing. They lost a lot of money that Welcome 2000 year, we killed it at Docklands. We actually ended up doing the biggest dance event that Melbourne had seen by that stage – just over 20,000 I think, I can’t remember numbers anymore there’s been so many. And then [Agent Mad] did another year after that and that’s pretty much when they shut up shop.”

At the turn of the millennium the UK market took a nosedive, the market becoming overcrowded. There was no ‘dip’ in Australia though, and 2000 proved to be the catalyst for Australia’s festival boom.

“It wasn’t really a dip [in Australia],” McNeill says. “I mean, it was [a dip] in the UK because the UK festival scene with Tribal Gathering and Creamfields and Homelands and Glastonbury and all these things – it was a very established, long-standing scene in the UK. So for Australia, until Apollo started there was just the Big Day Out. We didn’t have six or seven festivals like the UK had… there was Big Day Out, Apollo – which didn’t work – and then there was Two Tribes.”

"And the first year he got like six or seven thousand people and we were like, ‘Fuck, what a great idea'."

With the festivals running in January and March respectively, the landscape was unrecognisable compared to the post-2010 world. In the dance world there were no festivals before Christmas, no recurring New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day events – just sporadic New Year’s Eve parties. 

“That’s when Mark James had this crazy idea of doing this New Year’s Day recovery event at the Myer Music Bowl and we all thought ‘You’re fucking crazy!’ [laughs] But he’s like, ‘Nah, 30 bucks – keep it cheap!’ And the first year he got like six or seven thousand people and we were like, ‘Fuck, what a great idea.’ And then the next year it was 15,000 and Summadayze turned into this monster that ran for 12 or 13 years.”

Not everything in Australia was immune from the post-millennium blues, however, and McNeill’s strong run came to halt even quicker than it had begun.

“In the UK there was a bit of a dip because after the millennium it was a very established festival scene… and they sort of burnt it. In Australia we had a good year in 2001 [but] the New Year’s Eve 2001 was a flop. We lost a shitload of money on 2001, I got into a lot of financial trouble because everything I’d made on the New Year’s before I'd spent on travelling around Europe. Whatever I had left I lost – and then some. 

“The New Year’s coming from 2000 into 2001 was such a let down because 2000 was such a hype and the Y2K bug and all that where the world was going to collapse and traffic lights weren’t going to work and planes were going to fall out of the sky. It was the biggest let down and there was so much media about it that next year people were like, ‘Fuck it, we’re just gonna stay home’.

"We knew that was going to happen and we brought the break-even right down from ten to six thousand or something but we only got five thousand or four thousand people. We lost lots of money. But then at that point Two Tribes was going really well, Summadayze was going really well. Mark and Jason from Summadayze asked the Fuzzy guys about doing Summadayze in Sydney, and they told them ‘no’ and started their own and called it Field Day. So things were healthy then. Then the Falls Festival started started [Falls began in 1996 and held its first Tasmanian date in 2003] and things started to build up. Good Vibrations came, that lasted about five years. 2000 – that new millennium – that started the festival boom really.”

From a rock perspective, Homebake had started in 1996, consolidating to Sydney in 2000, and before that Livid had been running in Brisbane since 1989 and attempted to go national in 2002.

"It was really stressful for us because I could not be sitting here today if they’d been successful in putting us out of business."

Two Tribes had set up both Hardware Corp and Future Entertainment as forces in the festival scene and in 2006 it attracted some of the world’s biggest names with Armin Van Buuren, Erick Morillo, Markus Schulz and David Guetta. But its success was part of the reason for its downfall. Disagreements over the direction of the event ensured that 2006 was also the last year of Two Tribes.

By this point McNeill had set up Totem Industries with Brad Drummond from KillRockStar, Daniel Teuma from Novel and Simon Coyle. All the while Hardware was continuing to host raves and tour acts like Carl Cox, Paul Van Dyke and Sven Vath.

“It just got to the point in Two Tribes that there was just a difference of opinion, musically it was getting really commercial and I was into underground music,” McNeill says. “It got to a point where musically it wasn’t going in the direction that I wanted, there were a lot of disputes over certain things – who was going to get the bigger room and the bigger sound system and stuff? I just felt that the techno stuff I was doing wasn’t being represented in the right way. So I stopped, and those [Two Tribes] dates turned into Future Music.”

Having taken place in Sydney in 2006, in 2007 Future Music Festival expanded. After taking a year off, McNeill returned in 2007 with his new venture – Stereosonic. It almost didn’t happen.

“They kept the dates, I took a year off and wanted to look at doing a different time period. We had an arrangement to stay away from each other’s events – still compete for acts when we’re pitching for tours and stuff, that’s just business – but stay away from each other’s dates.”

Along with Simon Coyle, McNeill got in contact with Peter Raff and Frank Cotela from OneLove and Dror Erez, who McNeill knew from shows at The Prince (“I always thought he was a bit crazy, a crazy Israeli. I love him to death but at that point I just thought he was a bit of a lunatic [laughs]. I loved him, but we’d always argue because I wouldn’t want to pay a dollar per head to rent the venue and we’d have these massive arguments. But he always fights for what he believes in.”). For months they met repeatedly in attempt to nut out a new festival format.

“For three or four months it was on, [then] it was off. Raff was into it and then he wasn’t and then Frank and Dror were into it and Raff wasn’t. And then Dror and Raff were into it and Frank wasn’t. And then Frank and Raff were into it and Dror wasn’t. Simon and I would look at each other and go, ‘You know what? We’re just gonna fuckin’ do it ourselves.’ I toured Booka Shade and they were a really strong one for us so we had Booka Shade booked in and Fedde Le Grand and Armin Van Helden – some really good stuff. 

“We decided we were going ahead ourselves, basically, as Totem. And then Dror and Raff called up and said, ‘we’re in’. Which was great because it was a lot of money to put it on, it was just Melbourne but it was ten thousand people target and seven thousand break even.”

The first Stereosonic was to cost between $600,000 and $700,000. Though McNeill had double-mortgaged his house and had the money to lose if they needed to lose it, it wasn’t something he wanted to do - again. 

“I’d been through that before after the New Year’s Eve [2001] where I sold my jet skis and trailer and motorbikes and was scrounging for money. I didn’t want to go through that again so I was really happy they wanted to come on board as partners – and that was it. 

“We ran it out of the Totem office for a couple of years and it just grew. The first year [2007] was really successful in Melbourne with 15,000 people. Then the next year it was so popular that bloody Future decided to do Global Gathering at the same frickin’ time. It was really stressful for us because I could not be sitting here today if they’d been successful in putting us out of business. If Global Gathering was successful it’s the difference between me sitting here and not.”