Luger Plans Festival Way Out West

Luger’s Ola Broquist said the major Swedish outdoors like Hultsfred and Arvika do a brilliant job catering for a younger crowd, but believes his company’s new Way Out West Festival will plug a gap in the market by appealing to a slightly older generation that feels its camping days are done.

"The big festivals are getting great bands and selling out but both are in the country miles from anywhere and not everyone wants to do that sort of traveling and camping," he explained.

The 10,000-capacity site at Slottsskogen, which is like Gothenburg’s equivalent of London’s Hyde Park, is in the city centre and no more than a 15-minute tram ride from the outskirts.

"We’re starting the festival because we think it’s needed. We have a feeling that there’s a lot of people who are happy to travel a few miles to see some live music during the day and then maybe even do the Gothenburg nightclubs afterwards.

"The festival will be the sort that we ourselves would like to visit and the bands will be the ones that we ourselves like. Booking the acts we personally like has worked well at the Accelerator Festival, which we already run as a sort of traveling show taking in venues up to 3,000 capacity in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo.

"We see Way Out West as a natural bigger step on from Accelerator and will be presenting the same style of bands. We won’t be booking heavy metal to make sure we fill the site."

Picking August 10-11 for the launch means it fetches up on the same weekend as Norway’s Oya Festival, a 12,500-capacity outdoor at Olso’s Middelalder Parken.

Broquist and the Oya organizers are already discussing the ways they might coordinate their booking policies.