RIFFLANDIA
Where: Various venues, including Royal Athletic Park and Phillips Brewery
When: Thursday through Sunday
Tickets: rifflandia.frontgatetickets.com
When the gates to Royal Athletic Park open today, the 1,460-day break between editions of the Rifflandia music festival will finally come to a close.
Things have certainly changed for the festival in the years since Rifflandia went dark. The festival’s previous edition, held in 2018, was headlined by Canadians Jessie Reyez and Daniel Caesar — notable acts, to be sure, yet far from the A-listers at the 2022 edition. That bodes well for Rifflandia’s long-awaited return.
“We’ve definitely heard from people — they are excited the festival is back,” said festival founder Nick Blasko. “[The break] gave us a chance to take an objective look at it, see what was working and what was not. And we took the time and focus to do that.”
Blasko said he expects a combined 15,000 people between his two major venues. Royal Athletic Park will be activated for afternoon and early evening performances, while Electric Avenue, which includes Phillips Brewing, is home to late evening events. Tickets for both locations are selling at a greater clip than previous years, Blasko said. He credits that to the increased quality of the festival, in particular its two buzz-friendly acts: Lorde and Charli XCX.
Lorde, 25, is a two-time Grammy Award winner, and Charli XCX, 30, saw her latest album, Crash, top the sales charts in four countries. “We’re closing in on being sold out for some of the days. It felt like if there was a year we could do that, it would be this year.”
The booking of pro basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal has also drawn an inordinate amount of publicity, which is pushing ticket sales for his Friday appearance far beyond expectations. “People love Shaq,” Blasko said of the TV personality, who performs as DJ Diesel. “But it’s rare that people at his level come to the Island, let alone come to play music in Victoria at a festival.”
O’Neal — who has 28 million followers on Instagram and 16 million followers on Twitter — is among a new breed of celebrity whose social media popularity can result in a considerable economic impact. What’s good for Rifflandia is also good for Victoria, to a degree, Blasko said. “When an artist says to their millions of followers across the world, ‘Hey I’m playing a festival in Victoria,’ that has value. Huge value.”
The mainstream hitmakers aren’t the only notable acts, however. There’s also Cypress Hill, the pioneering Latin hip-hop act behind Insane in the Brain; soul-blues performer Ben Harper, a three-time Grammy Award winner; and Russian anti-Putin punk group Pussy Riot. Harper is the only one of the aforementioned acts who has played Victoria previously, and that was a quarter-century ago.
“We didn’t want to repeat a lot of past performers,” Blasko said of his lineup. “As wonderful as those artists were, it was time to break new ground in such a big way that it would be unmistakable.”
Rifflandia was expected to return in 2020, after a planned absence in 2019, but the pandemic stretched the one-year break into three. Work on the upcoming instalment began in earnest one year ago, a stretch that gave Blasko and his team ample time to rethink and reset. Stand-up comedy on the Lafflandia stage, for example, has been added to each of the three days Electric Avenue is in operation.
Blasko said he resisted the urge to overhaul the festival, choosing instead to refine the spaces that are already in use; in turn, he elevated everything from customer experience to production values. The vendor village inside Royal Athletic Park will feature purpose-built shipping containers, rather than traditional festival tents, and Electric Avenue has an expanded footprint.
Of course, a bigger reward requires bigger risks. Expenses to produce the festival have increased, Blasko said, but the calibre of some of the acts meant costs could be re-couped through tickets. Even though he has been fine-tuning Rifflandia since 2008, he admits the festival remains a work in progress.
“There’s no foolproof magic formula for it. At the end of the day, it’s combination of revenue streams pitted against an ever-changing set of expenses. It’s not a short-play business to be in, generally. You don’t do one and get out of the business.”
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
