Features
Coke Fest Lifts Season
Turkey’s Rock & Coke Festival justified its major sponsor’s decision to go ahead despite the riots that caused so many cancellations earlier in the summer, pulling an average of 20,000 per day Sept. 7-8 to its university campus site near Istanbul’s city center.
That’s down on the record 25,000 per day it did way back in 2005, but this year – when the civil unrest all but wiped the country’s outdoor season – it probably did well to get out of the blocks. Local promoter Pozitif Productions, which ran Rock & Coke until this year, when the drinks firm switched to Hungary’s Sziget Cultural Management, was forced to cancel almost all its outdoor events as civil unrest became close to something more like civil war.
The acts at Rock & Coke included The Prodigy, Arctic Monkeys, Primal Scream, Moby, Paolo Nutini, Editors, Hurts, and Skunk Anansie.