After several days of rumours, Alt-Fest organisers have confirmed that the festival has been cancelled prior to its first staging.
Addressing the concerns of ticket-holders in a lengthy statement, Dominic and Missy Void explained that a lack of funding, exacerbated by a "costing error" and "poor advice in the early stages", had forced them to scrap their plans.
After some £61,762 was raised through Kickstarter in 2013, Marilyn Manson, Fields of the Nephilim, Gary Numan, Cradle of Filth, Killing Joke, the Cult and many more had been lined up to play Kettering’s Boughton Estate between August 15 and 17.
Some 7,500 tickets were sold for the festival, but that still left them some way short of the £1.7 million required to stage the event. They wrote:
“We were expecting to sell more tickets based on our line-up, and if we had sold just 3000 tickets more then we would have been over the breakeven line, or if we could have deferred a percentage of our contractor's payment, which they sadly were not prepared to do.
“We thought our logic was sound and this was also backed by other promoters and people we respect in the music industry in general – Marilyn Manson can easily sell out a 5000 capacity venue, as can The Cult, Arch Enemy or Cradle of Filth. Then there's the rest of the line-up plus the circus, steampunk, traders and art installations. Perhaps the people who would go to see them at a gig wouldn't go to a 3 day festival, but they could still have bought day tickets and seen some of the 60-odd bands on that day as well as the headliners, and bring their kids along for free too – we are still trying to understand why we haven't sold more tickets despite the offering & energy that has gone into it.”
Read the full statement, including details of how to obtain a refund, here.
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