The Grammy award-winning singer, rapper and flautist Lizzo will headline the 2023 Splendour in the Grass festival, a year after the New South Wales event was hit by a series of disasters.
Festival organisers announced Lizzo’s performance ahead of the full line-up, which they said would be “coming very soon”, as well as revealing a new “flexible pricing model” for tickets, under which prices will increase as the event approaches.
The announcement comes weeks after the festival organisers Paul Piticco and Jess Ducrou issued a fresh apology for conditions at last year’s festival, where adverse weather, up to 15-hour waits to get into a campsite, according to some reports, and lengthy waits for replacement transport led to the first day being cancelled and thousands of festivalgoers becoming bogged and stranded.
Splendour is to return to its main campsite in Ngarindjin/North Byron Parklands, where it has been held since 2013. The campsite was closed on the first day of the festival last year due to flooding, with travellers redirected to another site 13km away, which lead to long waits for buses to the festival grounds and traffic chaos for locals.
Spokespeople from Byron and Tweed shire councils told Guardian Australia last year that the problems were “quite foreseeable” and “just plain dangerous”, as the site has flooded for years and is difficult to evacuate.
In a statement on the festival’s website, Piticco and Ducrou described last year’s festival “without a doubt the most challenging and difficult year ever and it was not what any of us wanted”.
“While we can’t control the weather, we can manage how we respond and for that, we are deeply sorry,” they wrote, acknowledging that traffic management and transportation had failed.
Piticco and Ducrou laid out changes that had been made to the festival’s response plan to adverse weather, promising weatherproofing upgrades to areas of high vehicle and foot traffic, more and wider walkways to improve accessibility and enhanced drainage throughout the site.
They also said they had invested in “significant onsite materials and equipment to immediately address unexpected weather conditions” and promised “improved communications”.
In regards to traffic and transport, Piticco and Ducrou said they had reviewed last year’s traffic management plan “in consultation with experts” and promised to enforce “compliance from the bus companies to deliver on their agreed service levels”, as well as improving staff numbers on the grounds.
“We have invested enormous amounts of time and money over the last six months to upgrade the venue and our processes,” Piticco and Ducrou said. “[We] will continue to do so right up until Splendour 2023.”
Lizzo will perform in the North Byron Parklands one month after co-headlining at Glastonbury, where she will be opening for Guns N’ Roses. Lizzo has joint headline billing with the US rockers on the Saturday night.
Splendour in the Grass will run from 21 to 23 July.
