Picnic at Hanging Rock

The summer of 1987-1988 was like an economic “phoney war” similar to that we just experienced, 20 years on, with the 2007-2008 financial crisis. In the months following the 1987 share-market crash, we were waiting for the impact to hit. One of the casualties was surely the Neon Picnic rock festival, which went belly up hours before show time. But the global financial woes were just one of many things that caused the Picnic to be cancelled. The directors were inexperienced and completely out of their depth. The festival was targeted at late-1980s yuppies; the ticket itself was a brightly coloured credit card. And on the bill was a diverse range of quality acts but no real drawcard to drag the mythic, well-heeled, musically broadminded sophisticates into a paddock. They needed a Bon Jovi to draw the bogans and underwrite the whole thing. (Eleven years later, Sweetwaters 1999 was similarly wrong-headed and mismanaged – and by someone with much more experience.)


This article from Rip It Up, February 1988, and more about the Neon Picnic, can be read at AudioCulture.