Roadfest Morphs Into Pure Fest

The story of Serbia’s proposed Roadfest took more strange turns when local organizer Dragan Vujin suddenly rechristened it Pure Fest.

The festival slogan has also changed, although only a little: "Roadfest – To Peace Through Music" has morphed into "Pure 007 – To Peace Through Music."

Just as the Roadfest marketing listed bands that hadn’t been booked, and some without their agents being contacted, a new Pure Fest site set up March 18th (myspace.com/roadfestival) also had a string of unconfirmed acts including The Prodigy, Moby, New Order, and Gorillaz.

Within 24 hours of Pollstar raising the question with Vujin, the site disappeared.

At the beginning of March, when he started marketing the original Roadfest, Vujin reacted to similar questions by pulling down a Web site that had billed Iggy & The Stooges, Foo Fighters, Metallica, Daft Punk, The Prodigy, Jamiroquai, Deep Purple, Underworld, Motörhead, Tricky, Joe Cocker, The Cult, and former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock.

He’d announced the same bill at a February 12th press conference at Belgrade Sava Centre.

The apparently official Pure 007 Web site, pure-rock.org, now lists The Cult and Glen Matlock as the international live acts.

Another strange turn came when Vujin denied any involvement in the new festival. He said he’d decided to "to recede from the music industry" at the beginning of March, but it’s since turned out that he meant that he was taking a step back and leaving the running of the festival to staffers from his SFL Europe sports marketing and branding firm.

The official Pure 007 Web site wasn’t mentioning dates or a venue at press time, although the original Roadfest was scheduled to take place on a river island site at Zrenjanin June 28-30, one day after Live Nation and Exit Festival organisers stage a Red Hot Chili Peppers show an hour’s drive away.

Pure 007 event still appears to have the support of Woodstock co-founder Artie Kornfeld, although his Florida-based lawyer Shelly Kerner said her client isn’t there "to put up the dollars" and certainly isn’t contractually obligated to do so.