“We’re really busy,” Mannix begins. “[The festival] has generated a lot of interest on social media, and I’ve had a lot of contact from the press media, and a lot of bands have contacted us directly.”
It’s also a very personal labour of love for the guys; a couple of very sad stories are behind their strong desire to get the festival up and running, find some positive in the negative and also support two very worthy charities.
“The reason we’re [supportin] Beyond Blue is [because], a couple of years ago, my very close brother-in-law committed suicide,” Mannix reveals. “It was completely out of the blue, and that was my first hand experience with suicide in the family and the devastation it had left behind. His whole mindset of thinking that he was doing the right thing by his family, I just still cannot believe it now.”
It was this tragedy that was the initial spark for starting the festival. “It was my experience of that, and afterwards going through quite a shitty experience myself, I wanted to find something positive out of it,” he recalls. “The neighbours who were living next to us at the time [and had been for about ten years], our kids had grown up together, we’d been into music together. About a month later, in January last year, their daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia, this 13-year old. So [it was a] complete whirlwind for them as well, hence The Red Kite.”
It’s not just about ticket sales or even just about supporting those very worthy charities, but also about keeping issues such as depression, suicide and cancer in the public focus, since they touch so many of us but aren’t discussed as much as they could be. To do this in such a positive manner is one of their major goals in putting the festival together.
“That’s the general idea, you bring people together, hence the name Come Together, and what better way to try and deal with things but just to have a nice time in a nice place, nice food, nice music, and to just try to create a positive vibe that way?”
Once the decision was made to put the festival on, it was a simple matter of approaching Beyond Blue and The Red Kite and announcing their intentions to support them through a new music festival.
“The people whose daughter has leukaemia, they said The Red Kite Foundation had been amazing… They drive a lot of stuff around depression,” Greenwood says, “and their profile is just huge, they have a great reach and they’re just a great organisation.”
The festival offers an extremely diverse and eclectic range of acts for the enjoyment of the punters rocking up on the day. From tribal/Indigenous outfits to African hip hop to a Hammond organ trio, and plenty more.
“It’s turned out to be a bit more worldy,” Mannix describes. “It’s quite good timing, being just after WOMAD. I’ve had a chat to the WOMAD people, and next we’ll be able to pitch in with those guys, and piggy-back off some of the acts, which will be awesome.
“We’re going to let things evolve, the first year’s a bit of a ‘suck it and see,’ we’ve probably overcommitted on the amount of bands and DJs we have, I wasn’t very good at saying no to people,” he laughs.
BY ROD WHITFIELD
