It was the festival disaster that gripped the world. A modern-day Lord of the Flies with Instagram influencers instead of schoolchildren.
But the return of the infamous Fyre festival is still on, its organiser has announced, but it remains uncertain when or where it is – or who may be performing is still not known a year on.
Plans to reboot the ill-fated getaway were announced last summer but it was feared history might have been repeating itself when no updates were issued.
But the event’s co-founder, Billy McFarland, has insisted it is still happening. And tickets have already been sold, with prices starting at $499 (£379) and rising to $7,999 (£6,077). “Fyre II has to work,” McFarland told the Wall Street Journal.
While Blink-182 and Migos were billed as headline acts for the original festival, acts and events for Fyre II are still being considered. “Karate combat on the beach, I think that would be amazing,” McFarland said. “Having some extreme sports, having some comedy and some fashion.”
He added that his associates were considering potential locations in Honduras, Belize, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica and Panama.
McFarland said people would be “hard-pressed” to trust him if his second go at Fyre festival failed. “It’s going to be very hard to get other opportunities, whether that’s a marketing job, a podcast appearance, a TV show or a relationship,” he added.
The original event, which in a lawsuit was likened to The Hunger Games or Lord of the Flies, was co-founded by McFarland and the rapper Ja Rule and scheduled to take place in the Bahamas in 2017.
It caused more than $26m in losses when it was cancelled over inadequate accommodation, food and water. Ja Rule was cleared of wrongdoing over the Fyre festival disaster in 2019, a year after McFarland was jailed.
As shown in the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, organisers had used influencers such as Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid to promote the luxury event.
It was billed to take place on a remote private island that supposedly once belonged to the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. There is no suggestion Jenner or Hadid knew about the state of the festival.
Guests were promised Instagram-worthy experiences, opulent accommodation and deluxe food, with tickets costing up to $12,780. But when they arrived, they found a rain-sodden campsite and emergency tents used for disaster relief.
Their luggage was thrown into a dark car park and what was supposed to be gourmet food turned out to be cheese sandwiches in takeaway containers. There was also no running water or electricity, and artists including Blink-182 pulled out of performing.
McFarland, the former founder of the card-based membership club Magnises, was jailed in 2018 after pleading guilty to numerous fraud charges relating to the festival and his company NYC VIP Access, which sold fake tickets to events such as the Met Gala. Vanity Fair described him as “the poster boy for millennial scamming”.
A group of 277 attenders of Fyre festival were in 2021 awarded settlement payouts of $7,220 each.
After being released last year, McFarland began planning a second incarnation of Fyre festival, which he said he devised during a stint in solitary confinement. He told his followers on social media: “This is everything I’ve been working towards. Let’s fucking go.”
