Female-fronted Australian music festival Wildflower to prove the doubters wrong
Never before has a touring festival line-up like this been staged in Australia. As far as Kasey Chambers is concerned, βItβs about f..king time!β
Never before has a touring festival line-up composed entirely of female-fronted acts been staged in Australia, and as far as country singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers is concerned, “It’s about f..king time!”
Named Wildflower, the tour starts on Saturday at Yarra Valley’s Rochford winery, where Chambers will share the stage with Missy Higgins, Kate Miller-Heidke, Sarah Blasko, Deborah Conway and Vikki Thorn.
“Wildflower is making history in a male-dominated industry and I’m so proud to be a part of that,” Chambers told The Australian.
“I think we are about to see a lot more of the strength of female-heavy line-ups in festivals – this is just the beginning.”
After the Yarra Valley debut on Saturday, the festival will travel to Brisbane (March 19), Hunter Valley (April 2) and Mudgee (October 29).
In the US and Canada, a touring music festival named Lilith Fair burned brightly for several years in the late 1990s with line-ups composed of female artists including Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow and Tracy Chapman. Yet nothing of this scale has been staged on our shores until now.
“I played Lilith Fair back in the day,” Higgins told The Australian.
“It was just such a wonderful experience, and I don’t really know why it hasn’t happened here before now. It just seems like such a great idea; we’ve just got so many incredible female musicians in this country.
“So many of these women – like Kasey Chambers and Vikki Thorn from The Waifs – were huge influences on me when I was just starting out.”
Conceived and booked by Isobel Lanesman, general manager of national concert promoter Empire Touring – a Sydney-based family rock ’n’ roll business started by her father Marc Christowski – Wildflower is a fresh and timely concept.
For Lanesman, this first run of shows will be a proof of concept for something she felt in her bones: Australian music is bursting with female talent, and building a festival around this very fact has resonated strongly with fellow music fans, with about 15,000 tickets sold so far.
“When I started talking to a lot of agents and teams, people didn’t really think a female-fronted festival would succeed; they felt you needed a combination of male and female artists,” said Lanesman, who met with fellow horse rider Chambers on the NSW Central Coast for The Australian’s photo shoot. “But we’ve proved them wrong … and it’s going to be a great success,” she said.
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