AJ Maddah: 'Soundwave Is Not Australia's Got Talent'

Soundwave and Harvest promoter AJ Maddah has opened up on his opposition to booking inexperienced local bands on his festival during a Q&A session at this year's Face The Music conference.

A subdued Maddah, who said he was under the weather (“I think it was the Dandy Warhols coughing on me”), went through his entry to Australian music through The Angels to the realisation of the Harvest Festival last year, which he had been planning for seven years.

One of the main questions posed to Maddah was the perceived lack of local artist on his festivals, particularly punk and metal-focused Soundwave, a fact that he denied.

“Soundwave is not Australia's Got Talent. Soundwave is not the place – and I do get emails, bless 'em, from kids looking to play... Soundwave used to be 50/50 Australians and internationals. Being with a niche festival you don't have a great pool of talent to draw from. If you're serious about your band and it is your life, those are the bands we want. If you have a day job or doing for a laugh, or I don't think you have the right experience, we can't put you on Soundwave.”

Maddah, who admitted it was a “control thing”, said that party-prone locals in the early years of Soundwave had turned him off. “If you were there in 2007… the cockhead that's sneaking people backstage – that's inevitably the Australian band… We want serious bands who aren't using it as a last chance to party. There was so much dick-baggery, that we decided we were only going to book serious bands.

“And my only responsibility is the people who by tickets to the show. Sorry, I have no responsibility to the local scene – which I worked for ten years and got nothing from.” He claimed that when you remove bands already touring heavily and aren't on a lot of other festivals from the equation, “you've pretty much got the bands I've put on the festivals.”

With Harvest currently touring the nation, Maddah touched on the disappointment of last year's Melbourne event – when a bar bungle left the festival with large queues and without beer.

The festival was the product of seven years planning and was only launched when he was ready to take the financial hit that a first-year festival will inevitably incur. He said that while he and the team did everything to fix the bar situation as it emerged, he described it as a “catastro-fuck” and dubbed it as the “the most heartbreaking day of my life”.