In news that will hardly come a surprise to many music followers, MCD have confirmed that the Oxegen festival will not go ahead next year.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the festival – we’re all for listening to some good tunes while jumping around knee deep in mud in miserable conditions – but reports that it would take a break have been doing the rounds for some time, especially since there had been no mention of early bird tickets which had been announced for T in the Park in Scotland – a sister festival to the Punchestown extravaganza.
The announcement of the Stone Roses gig in the Phoenix Park on July 5 next year, the Thursday before Oxegen would have been due to go ahead, also added speculation that a 2012 Oxegen event was doomed.
Like almost everything in this country, Oxegen has borne the brunt of the recession and has been struggling to cope financially in recent times. Last year, less than 60,000 people showed up in Kildare for the four-day event, a far cry from the 80,000 fans that descended on Punchestown when it was at its peak.
The festival’s core support group, people aged in the 18 to 30 age group, don’t have the disposable income they had in the heady days of the Celtic Tiger, while many more have fled our shores, meaning the demand for tickets simply ain’t what it used to be.
2012 will be the first year since its inception in 2004 that Oxegen will not go ahead. The festival has regularly attracted the very best bands from around the world, until this year when they made the horrendous error of allowing Amanda Brunker on stage to belt out a few tunes.
Fans present for Brunker’s ‘performance’ deemed her vocal range similar to the noise made by a cat swallowing a set of bagpipes while simultaneously scratching its claws on the bottom of a saucepan.
That blunder aside, Oxegen has delivered the goods and has been regularly voted as one of the best festivals on the continent. Although there will be no festival next year, it will more than likely return before too long, with MCD suggesting that, like Elvis in that Kit Kat ad from a few years back, that it’s ‘just having a break’ as is the case with the Glastonbury festival across the water.
We eagerly await its return, as long as Brunker isn’t invited back of course.
Link: Five of our favourite Oxegen performances
