Felsziget Fell Apart

London agency X-Ray Touring pulled out Kaiser Chiefs, Crystal Castles, and Dragonforce two weeks before the July 18-21 event claiming deposits were long overdue.

“We’d given them every chance to pay. The festival then continued to advertise the acts until we threatened legal action,” X-Ray’s Paul Bolton explained.

Felsziget was a partnership between Romania’s Festival Production Srl and Hungary’s Sziget Cultural Management until 2010. Sziget international booker Dan Panaitescu continued to help with the billing for another two years.

That arrangement stopped when Panaitescu started to get chased by agents complaining the Romanian festival producer hadn’t paid deposits on time.

Festival Production is coming clean about late deposits but blames banks.

“During the event several employees made payments both online and offline at the bank and unfortunately some payments didn`t go through, because in some cases the online banking system had only initialized the transaction but not processed it,” Festival Production chief Laszlo Bodor explained.

Attendance at Felsziget varied. On the day before the festival, or Day Zero, when there are only a few parties and some Balkan acts, there were 2,000 people.

The four festival days had crowds of 15,000, 16,000, 18,000 and 9,000, respectively, as the final day suffered most from acts pulling out.

The third night’s crowd may well have been fewer if Spanish ska-punk band Ska-P hadn’t been persuaded to go onstage by the intervention of Sziget Cultural Management.

Nine days after the festival, Bodor released an “official statement” saying Ska-P would be paid in full by the end of August.

The acts who made it to Felsziget and hopefully got paid included Paul Kalkbrenner, Pete Tong, Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg, Utah Jazz, Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra, and The Sweet Life Society.