Electric Avenue: How a little idea became Australasia’s largest music festival

Tuesday, 18 February 2025

This weekend tens of thousands of people will converge on a two-day Christchurch music festival on the cusp of international attention. Nadine Roberts takes a look inside Electric Avenue.

As the sun beats down, a golf buggy kicks up a whisper of dust.

“I’ve only had one nervous breakdown so far,” Callam Mitchell quips as he surveys the vast tent town he’s responsible for.

“I remember when I used to clock up 20,000 steps a day walking across here”.

It’s three days ‘til game time, and the cicadas are still louder than the boots and drills, but that’s set to change when Hagley Park opens its gates to the tenth Electric Avenue electronic music festival this Friday.

As Mitchell pulls up for his second (third? fourth? “I don’t remember”) media interview of the day, a sparkie crushes an energy drink can and biffs it in a recycling bin full of crumpled coffee cups.

There’s a lot of energy expended on the logistics of piecing together the steel, canvas and cable jigsaw that houses Australasia’s largest music festival.

These days the man with the initial idea gets about in style, but popularity means more pressure, more expectations and more recycling bins.

Mitchell agrees there’s easier ways to make a living - but not one that gets him out of bed, or on the phone in the middle of the night, the way this one does.

It requires an appetite for risk. “What is it they say? It’s an extremely difficult way to go broke”.

Mitchell’s an outlier in the context of the current music festival climate. Across the Tasman, festival after festival has been cancelled as operational costs rise, leading to a ministerial enquiry.

Then there’s audience drag, post pandemic, as evidenced by the likes of popular Californian festival, Coachella where tickets took months instead of hours to sell out.

All the while Mitchell’s baby has quietly but stealthily bucked the trend and is now on the cusp of being considered an internationally recognised festival.

It’s heady stuff which could bring even bigger acts than this year’s headliner The Prodigy - not that Mitchell’s getting ahead of himself.

But with a 20,000 ticket wait list in the first year the festival moved to two days, a shift to the south side of Hagley Park, looks inevitable.

Mitchell says he’s only ever wanted to bring entertainment back to what was broken after the 2011 earthquake, and it started modestly four years later, with 8000 people and a few local acts.

This year over two thirds of ticket holders will come from outside the city, enriching the city’s coffers by more than $6 million according to ChristchurchNZ’s analysis of last year’s festival.

One of those, Damien Gordon, just happens to have one of the largest circus tents in the country which he’s bought from Raglan. He might be part of the crew, but it won’t stop him being part of the 70,000 crowd.

“It’s a nice road trip on the ferry,” he says as he unloads a truck. “I enjoy it.”

Not far away, Team Event fellow director Chris Stead is all smiles, as his company Theme Productions applies the gloss - in this case site décor.

For Stead it’s not just about two weeks of long hours on site - it’s about making the festival sing aesthetically.

Stead’s proud of how a little idea has become the country’s biggest music event. “We have acts come to us now.”

He mentions Tomorrowland, a once obscure electronic music dance festival that started in Belgium in 2005. Now the festival has become a global sensation attracting 450,000 people.

“I don’t know if it’s going to get there,” he shrugs, “but for New Zealand and for seven plucky guys Electric Avenue’s already pretty amazing.”

That optimism was tempered by the cancellation of the 2022 festival due to Covid, but 37,000 people a year later proved to Mitchell and his team they were on to a good thing - if not the most financial.

“You’ve got to sell out to break even,” Mitchell tells Stuff. “but you make little bits of money along the way.”

Costs come in tens of thousands he says - there’s nothing in between - and they keep rising.

It all adds up. $12 mill to be exact.

There’s tradies like Isaac, an electrical apprentice, who’s helping to lay thousands of metres of cable, as part of a huge team making sure the generators are fired up should anything go wrong.

He’ll be among the throngs during the festival. “I won’t be nervous, but the bosses will be.”

Then there’s five kilometres of fencing worth $70,000 - a cost which hasn’t been helped by the need for a double wall, due to the European fence hopping trend we’re adopting.

It’s not a problem you would expect in a festival known to have around 40% of its audience over 35 - an unusual mix that Mitchell puts down to the balance of today’s big acts with the nineties electronic stars of his youth.

Already three months and several offers in for next year’s headliners, Mitchell keeps a keen eye on the European summer festival scene, and says he’ll be heading overseas once this weekend’s done and dusted.

In between there’s not a whole lot of sleep, although by the time everyone’s on tent town building duties, he’s pretty much done his part.

Now he’s just got to deal with the media, the dignitaries, the acts…the weather…

“I’ll probably only have one breakdown this week.”

Electric Avenue takes place at Hagley Park in Christchurch on Friday February 21-22

Electric Avenue by the numbers

18 hectare site

55 artists

70,000 people over two days

$12 million to stage including:

$400,000 on security

$400,000 on bar infrastructure and staffing

$5.5 million on artists and hotels

$3 million to set up the venue

600 portaloos

3 tonnes of organic waste