Falls Festival scrapped for 2023

After a difficult few years, the long-running New Year’s festival will take a year off to ‘re-imagine how Falls will look in the future’.

Falls Festival, the annual long-running New Year’s music event, will take a year off to “rest, recover, and recalibrate.” Picture: Getty

Falls Festival, one of Australia’s foremost and longest-running music events, will not ring in the New Year this year, as organisers announced that the festival will take a year off to “rest, recover, and recalibrate”.

Secret Sounds, the team behind Falls Festival, announced on Instagram on Wednesday that the annual event, first hosted in 1993, would not go ahead in any of its three locations – Melbourne, Byron Bay, and Fremantle – this December.

The hiatus comes after a tricky few years for music festivals nationwide. Falls Festival endured postponements because of Covid-19 lockdowns and, in recent years, has struggled to find a permanent base in Victoria.

In 2022, the festival reverted to a one-day event at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl after it shifted away from its longtime Victorian home in Lorne, and organisers had to withdraw its pitch for a new venue in Birregurra.

At the time, Secret Sounds co-CEO and Falls producer Jessica Ducrou, said that it had taken two years of consulting and planning to secure the location, but the process was stalled after objections from local residents.

Lil Nas X performs on stage during Falls Festival Melbourne at Sidney Myer Music Bowl on December 29, 2022. Picture: Getty

That show saw Lil Nas X make his live Australian debut, alongside reliable festival favourites like Arctic Monkeys, Chvrches, and Jamie XX.

In 2019, 9,000 festival-goers were instructed to pack up their Lorne campsites and find transportation to leave the festival due to extreme heat and mounting bushfire threats.

“The past few years have seen unprecedented change in the live music space, both front of house and behind the scenes,” Ducrou said in a statement issued on Wednesday.

Ducrou stated that organisers will take a break to ”re-imagine how Falls will look in the future.”

Some of the most enduring names in music have performed at Falls over its 28 years, including Blondie, Iggy Pop, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Moby, Public Enemy, Bloc Party, and Childish Gambino.

The cancellation of Falls Festival this year comes after a handful of smaller festivals were wiped out — nine, quite literally — after flooding saturated venues and disrupted transport routes. Wollongong festival Yours and Owls was cancelled in April, followed by Wine Machine in the Hunter Valley.

The 20th anniversary event of Splendour in the Grass in July last year was almost shut down from extreme weather conditions.