Photo Credit: Frontier Touring (Instagram)
Tasmania’s government is paying around $430,000 for Foo Fighters to play a single stadium show next month for a special anniversary.
On Wednesday, December 3, celebrated American rock band Foo Fighters announced it would play Tasmania’s York Park Stadium in Launceston on Saturday, January 24. Notably, it is the only Aussie show the band has announced—and Tasmania’s government is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
But the band isn’t doing it to make money, says Stadiums Tasmania boss James Avery. The show will be played during the 20th anniversary of the Beaconsfield mine collapse, which trapped two men—Brant Webb and Todd Russell—underground for two weeks.
Among their requested supplies for the ordeal, the men asked for iPods loaded with Foo Fighters songs. After their rescue, Webb and Russell also met with the band on several occasions.
Notably, the show was announced the same day that Tasmania’s upper house is voting on an order to approve the Hobart Stadium at Macquarie Point. Avery says that while the stadium and the mine disaster anniversary are relevant to the deal struck with the band, they were not actually central factors.
“The band is not undertaking this to make money,” said Avery, adding that he believes this is an excellent deal for Tasmania. “They have a history of and really have a focus on playing in regions and locations that don’t get large-scale events like this,” he explained. “They’re a different breed in that sense.”
According to Avery, the Tasmanian government and the Launceston City Council are paying AUD $650,000 (USD ~$430,000) for Foo Fighters to play next month. Of that, $500,000 is coming from the state, while $150,000 is coming from the council. It might even cost an additional “couple hundred thousand dollars” to put on the event, but Avery says they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it and will then make that info available publicly.
The deal also came about only the past two months after discussions with national concert promoters, which Avery said were becoming more frequent amid continued excitement for the Hobart Stadium proposal. The show will have a capacity of about 24,000, while about 40,000 will be able to fit in the Hobart Stadum in “concert mode.”
Avery stressed that while the Foo Fighters show is not designed to promote the Hobart Stadium proposal, “the two certainly aren’t divorced.”
Tickets to the show are expected to be priced in a “very competitive” tiered structure ranging from under $100 to around $200 for front-row seats.
