Touch Bass organisers reschedule music festival due to border closures

The music festival industry has taken another hit with a second giant event forced to reschedule. But the new dates might have left the door open for more overseas artists.

The music festival industry has been dealt a second big blow in as many weeks after organisers of another major event, which attracts more than 30,000 people, were forced to reschedule.

Touch Bass, an electronic music festival featuring well-known artists such as Excision, Borgore and Drezo, was meant to hit venues in Auckland, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney in April.

But organisers this week announced the event had been moved to late November with border closures around the country making it impossible for the event to go ahead.

LA-based producer Drezo is one of the artists to feature at Touch Bass.

The postponement of Touch Bass, a festival which burst onto the scene in 2019 and is held at the Eatons Hill Hotel in Brisbane, comes a week after Wildlands Weekender festival was postponed just nine days out from the event.

“We know people are disappointed but no one is more frustrated than us,” Simon Coyle, the director and CEO of Pitch Control who run Touch Bass, said.

“We could have easily just cancelled the event and given everyone refunds, it’s incredibly hard for us financially, along with marketing and everything to reschedule the festival but we don’t want to do that.

“We want to give everyone a great event and a music festival they can really enjoy after such a tough past year also. We’re finding that only five to 10 per cent of people are asking for refunds because they want to go to a music festival once again.”

An outdoor concert at the Eatons Hill Hotel, where Touch Bass was scheduled for April but has been postponed to November.

After last weeks news that Wildlands Weekender has been postponed, a Queensland Health spokesman said they worked closely with organisations to ensure event organisers could run their events in a COVID safe way.

“We follow the same process with all organisations who submit plans, and will continue to do so in future,” the spokesman said.

The new dates for Touch Bass have also left the door open for more big name international artists to be added to the line-up with overseas travel possibly returning later in the year.

“I’d be open to the idea,” Coyle said.

“You’re playing a bit of Russian roulette bringing someone in because of everything that could happen, like snap lockdowns, but I’d be up for it, I don’t think many others would be though.

Brisbane DJ Jordan Burns will also perform at Touch Bass.

“We moved to these dates so hopefully the vaccine will be rolled out by then, it’s meant to be September but we’ve allowed for some delays, then hopefully if the high risk people are taken care of, the lower risk population can do what they want.”

Coyle, who owned one of the country’s biggest ever music festivals in Stereosonic which ran from 2008 to 2015, said he worried about the future of the industry after impacts from the COVID pandemic.

“The biggest thing I worry about is that it could be two years since any major music festivals happened, so young people who attend these types of events could find other things that become their interests,” he said.

“I’m confident the industry will be back, it might just not be what it was.”

Touch Bass will start in Auckland on November 25, followed by Adelaide on November 26, Brisbane and Sydney on November 27 and Perth on November 28.

Wildlands Weekender, to be held at Brisbane’s RNA Showgrounds, will now be held on December 26 and 27.