On September 16 and 17, La Fica venue in Murcia is home to a new edition of Visor Fest, a rock music festival specializing in British bands from the 80s and 90s, organized by a Valencian organizer and held in Benidorm until now. will host. To be more precise, only once in 2018 as the following editions were canceled due to various circumstances. A few days before the start of the 2019 edition, a DANA devastated the coast of Alicante, forcing concerts to be suspended. As for the 2020 and 2021 versions, they were the coronavirus pandemic and the measures applied to the cultural sector.
The Visor Fest 2022 poster is almost identical to the poster that will hit the scene in 2019 and is rescheduled for 2020. The festival will start with Lizard Nick’s performance, followed by Mudhoney, The Waterboys and New Model Army. . Historic Valencian mixer Fran Lenaers will play in the closing session. Saturday’s session will kick off with Australian Blonde and continue with British Lightning Seeds, Teenage Fanclub and James and DJ David Kano to wrap up the event.
Visor Fest is not a current summer festival. When a group of concert promoters started working on this event in Valencia in 2017, they did so with 90s festivals in mind, like the FIB of the first editions. Performances that showcased the special musical offer or the profession of attracting foreign performers were more important to the organizers and the public than to attend a major event regardless of who was performing it.
As Jorge Llabrés, one of the organizers of Visor Fest, underlined, 90% of the bands at the festival are British, have long careers but are still active and attractive and will perform as usual during an individual concert. time constraints specific to festivals. “We make the festival we want to go to,” sums up Llabrés.
But to “go to the festival we want to go to” they will have to travel to Murcia. According to Llabrés, there are several reasons for this displacement, this ‘exile’ of a festival from the self-proclaimed ‘land of festivals’, the Community. It has nothing to do with the lack of support from public administrations, which none of them is in a hurry to explain.
According to the organizer, although the Visor Fest started in Benidorm, the first option they considered was Murcia. But in the end, they chose the city of Alicante because of the large presence of British tourists who might be attracted to a citizen-dominated poster.
Soon the organizers realized that to attract such public it was necessary to promote the Visor Fest in the country of origin and not in Benidorm itself, to immerse themselves fully in the British market, something at an economic cost they could not afford. . . . They also assumed that although Benidorm is a major population center during the summer months, it lacks the demographics of a big city to bring enough locals to this type of festival. “There are many saraos in Benidorm that work very well, but with a different kind of music and a different audience,” says Llabrés.