Two years of postponements and cancellations pushed them to the brink. Now promoters are looking ahead to a summer like no other.

This time last year, Gareth Popham was making three separate plans. In the first, Auckland’s borders would be open by Christmas and the promoter’s New Year’s music festival Northern Bass would go ahead as planned. In the second, the city’s borders stayed closed and Popham’s festival would move from Mangawhai, an hour north of Auckland, to a new home at Mt Smart Stadium. In the third, based on Covid restrictions continuing to curb the spread of Omicron, Northern Bass would be postponed and moved to the last weekend of January. 

In the end, none of those options panned out. “I’m a forever optimist,” says Popham, who spent weeks struggling with his decision to call Northern Bass off for the first time in its 10-year history. By mid-January he was forced to make the call, and he felt the weight of an industry sitting on his shoulders. “People say to me, ‘Oh, come on man, it’s just a party, you can go a year without it.’ It’s a $5 million party. It’s a business. It employs heaps of people. Lots of people rely on it, lots of suppliers … What about the mental health of the 5,000 people in that industry that are all going bankrupt?”

Hamish Pinkham, founder and promoter of the long-running Rhythm & Vines, was also a ball of stress. By November last year, as Covid restrictions continued, he wasn’t sure his Gisborne-based festival could go ahead either. Like Popham, he attempted to push it out to Easter weekend. But by March he realised Covid concerns hadn’t abated enough to make a music festival work. “These are big projects and we need a good lead-in time. We’re not seeing enough visibility to give us confidence,” he told media at the time.

For the first time in the festival’s 19-year history, Pinkham was forced to cancel Rhythm & Vines. That it was supposed to be the 20th anniversary celebration only made his decision harder. Then, on April 15, the day his rescheduled festival would have kicked off, Cyclone Fili passed through Gisborne, causing flooding and power cuts. The cyclone probably would have washed his festival out anyway. “It’s so lucky that we didn’t deliver it,” he says.

Talk to any music festival promoters, from the Australian organisers of Auckland’s Laneway festival, to the promoters of Splore and Taranaki’s Womad festival, and they all have stories like Popham and Pinkham. The past three years have been rough. Covid has pushed all of them to the brink. Out of everyone spoken to for this story, most had been forced to reschedule or cancel events, suffering through sleepless nights while wondering if they were going to survive. “It’s been a tense winter,” agreed Popham.

They’ve lost money trying to hold on, see out Covid and fight for their futures. With the live music industry returning en masse, with more concerts and festival events planned this summer than ever before, promoters are praying they can go ahead uninterrupted, without Covid hiccups, new variants or gathering restrictions in place, so they can get back to where they used to be, rebuild their confidence and hopefully recoup some of their losses. As one admitted to me: “It’s been very traumatic … I’ve lost nearly $1 million.”

The main stage is on a surf beach, kids get in for free and most people bring their pillows, sleeping bags and a tent with them for the full three days. John Minty took over the reins at Splore, held at Tāpapakanga Regional Park, south of Auckland, in 2006. Back then, it was run across the last weekend of February every two years. The festival often lost money, but Minty put his business nous to work and created a bigger vision. So, by 2014, Splore had become an annual event that attracted international headliners, artists like Talib Kweli, Leftfield and the Cuban Brothers.

Minty’s 2022 festival was shaping up as his most popular yet, with all 7,500 tickets selling out in just four hours the previous June. “We hadn’t even booked an act, let alone announced one,” he says. “It’s a good position to be in.” As February neared, with Aotearoa still not clear of omicron restrictions, it became clear Splore might have to be cancelled for the first time in the event’s history. “They put us into restrictions … about five weeks out from our festival,” he says. “We could see the writing on the wall. We pretty well announced straight away a cancellation.”

Along with crowd safety, Minty says it was also a financial decision. The closer he got to the festival, the more he’d be spending. It was money he’d be unlikely to get back. “We were really stressing in the weeks leading up to it,” he says. As it turned out, stricter restrictions were announced on the weekend Splore would have run. “We would have had to close everything at midnight on the Saturday,” he says, shaking his head. “We would have had to get 10,000 people off site in a lockdown situation.”

Minty has scraped by, he says, by being conservative. He’d been saving up over the years so he was ready in case anything like this happened. “When we make a profit, I very rarely spend it,” he says. “I just leave it alone. I’ve got a fund for a rainy day. With that postponement, and the cancellation, we’ve probably lost about three quarters of a million dollars in revenue, which we can handle.”

Things would have been worse if it wasn’t for the government’s Event Transition Support Payment scheme, introduced to give promoters confidence that if their events were cancelled because of Covid restrictions they’d be able to recoup 90% of their costs. “That insurance scheme was a lifeline for a lot of operators,” says Minty. “If we hadn’t had an insurance scheme, we probably would have lost $3 million. I’d be relying very much on the goodwill of punters to support us maybe for the next few years.”

Popham, from Northern Bass, agrees, saying that insurance is the only way he’s been able to go ahead with confidence to plan this year’s event. Even then, things are tight. “Northern Bass took five years to break even,” he says. “I can’t go and buy a new car. I put it away for the year that maybe something else like this happens.”

Down in New Plymouth, where Womad has been held at Pukekura Park annually since 2003, times have also been tough. Held every March and run by the Taranaki Arts Festival Trust (TAFT), Womad’s lasts two festivals have been cancelled because of Covid. They’ve survived by relying on their other annual events, like the Taranaki Garden Festival, to keep things ticking over. “You couldn’t just do the festival. That would be a hard slog,” says spokesperson Suzanne Porter, who describes calling Womad off twice as “depressing”.

They’ve survived the past two years by counting their pennies. “The frugalness of being a small charitable trust has meant we’ve been able to survive and keep the core team,” she says. “We have always put money away for a rainy day … I never thought we would [need it] for a pandemic.”

It is shaping up like a summer like no other. More international artists are coming here than ever before. Ed Sheeran is visiting, Elton John is coming back and shows by Backstreet Boys, Counting Crows, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lorde, Harry Styles and Kendrick Lamar are all planned. Taylor Swift and Beyonce are rumoured to be announced soon. This coming weekend, Teeks and Conan Grey perform at Spark Arena, The Lumineers and Nice ‘n Urlich are at the Powerstation, the Auckland Blues Festival is held in Parakai and Friday Jams – a one-day nostalgia festival headlined by Macklemore, Akon and Ashanti – will go off at Western Springs.

Despite Covid forcing most festivals to cancel their previous events, they’re all returning with gusto, with line-ups bolstered by the inclusion of international headliners thanks to New Zealand’s open borders. So what’s hot? “The elderly raver market, as we commonly refer to it, is very buoyant,” says Rhythm & Vines’ Pinkham, who is bringing Groove Armada and Fatboy Slim here for a string of nationwide shows including two new Auckland festivals. “People have got money. They want to see these acts. They’re very fond of them from previous tours … It’s going to be a big time for babysitters.”

Demand across the board appears huge. When tickets to Laneway, the Australasian festival that has taken the past three years off, went on sale recently for $200 each, 13,000 were sold in two hours, forcing organisers to upgrade the venue to the much larger Western Springs. “We took our time and didn’t rush back,” says the festival’s Melbourne founder, Danny Rogers. “We wanted everything to be as normal as it could possibly be.”

His fingers are crossed that next year’s January event, headlined by Haim, Phoebe Bridgers and Turnstile, can go ahead uninterrupted. He knew he had a lineup, which also includes The Beths, Slowthai and Joji, that was going to sell well in Aotearoa. “People are going to lose their shit,” he says. “But some things are out of your hands. I can’t control the weather. I’m only a human being.”

Perhaps the luckiest promoter of them all is Alex Turnbull. Nestled into the foothills of the Cardrona Valley for the past 12 years, New Year’s festival Rhythm & Alps may be the only worldwide event that hasn’t been cancelled by Covid. “We’ve been one of the luckiest on the planet,” admits Turnbull. But even he hasn’t been spared the stresses of running a festival during a pandemic. He had people stopping him in the street, telling him to call it off. “People would point their finger into your chest,” he says. “Everyone had an opinion.”

Like many, last year’s event could have gone either way thanks to the country’s Covid restrictions, which were gentler in the South Island than in the North. “It takes us six weeks to build the show, we’re a week into that going, ‘Are we going ahead or aren’t we?’ It felt like we were flying a plane with no runway to land on. Where was it going?” In the end, it ran successfully with vaccination checks keeping punters safe and an all-Kiwi line-up soundtracking the celebrations. “We went for it,” says Turnbull. “It was like, ‘Let’s go.'”

If everything goes ahead successfully this summer, Turnbull believes the last few years of stresses and strains will add an extra layer of magic to festivals, a feeling that will reach from those artists performing on stage who haven’t been able to work properly for several years, to those in the crowd who watched from home as their favourite festivals were cancelled. “Humans are funny. They want to migrate to things that make you feel good,” he says. “We’re a New Year’s Eve party in a holiday hotspot. It’s a ‘kiwifruit on top of the pavlova’ kind of thing.”