Malaysia’s Good Vibes returns after The 1975 furore

Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival (GVF) is set to return in July after the controversy surrounding The 1975’s set during last year’s edition.

The British band were headlining the first day of the festival’s 10th-anniversary edition when frontman Matty Healy hit out at the country’s strict anti-LGBT laws and kissed a male bandmate on stage.

The set was cut short, and promoters Future Sound Asia (FSA) were ordered by the government to call off the rest of the three-day festival at Sepang International Circuit.

FSA described Good Vibes Festival’s cancellation as a “catastrophic financial blow” and demanded £2 million in compensation from The 1975. Legal proceedings are ongoing.

Today (8 May), Good Vibes has announced its comeback, albeit in a different location than last year and with one less day.

“Immediately after what happened last year, we thought the world was ending”

Set to take place on 20 and 21 July at the Resorts World Awana in Genting Highlands, the 2024 edition features J Balvin, Peggy Gou, Joji, BIBI and more, as well as returning Malaysian acts who had their performances cut from the 2023 event.

“Immediately after what happened last year, we thought the world was ending,” Future Sound Asia’s Wan Alman told NME in a new interview. “We were left thinking about what was going to happen, were we still going to be working in this industry and things like that. But as time went on and we dealt with the situation, our heads became clearer.

“Towards the end of last year, we realised that the government was not going to ban us and we’ve got a good thing going here – we’ve been doing this for 10 years.”

According to Alman, the government has supported the return of Good Vibes: “They want to work with us hand-in-hand to make sure that that sort of thing doesn’t happen again and that the live music industry and the festival industry isn’t adversely affected by what happened.”

FSA and the government have also been working with PUSPAL (Central Committee for Application for Filming and Performance by Foreign Artistes) to refine and improve its guidelines and standardise responses to incidents.

“The kill switch is always a nuclear option, it’s the very last resort”

Alman says that the incident has not put booking agents off the festival, but that domestic promoters are “more careful in which acts they want to book and probably more diligent in clearly informing the artists that these are the things you can and cannot do when performing in Malaysia”.

In the months following the controversy, promoters were ordered to install a “kill switch” to end performances by international artists that breach government regulations. Alman says the kill switch has not been standardised and says each promoter and organiser has their own version of it.

“For us, the kill switch is a system where we can immediately cut off audio, video and lights on the stage,” says Alman. “Of course, this is always a nuclear option, it’s the very last resort. We have other protocols in place about who can call for stage closure and when we can call for it.

“We’re not going to call for it if an artist starts smoking a cigarette onstage; we’re just going to stop them and tell them they can’t do that. There will be various scenarios and degrees of severity, and what happened last year would be the most severe, where we cut everything off.”

Ticketholders for last year’s event could either defer their tickets or donate the money to the festival. As the festival is shorter this year, those who opted to defer 2023 tickets will be entitled to two full festival passes for 2024 plus a RM100 F&B voucher. See the full lineup here.

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