PLAYGROUND WEEKENDER AT WISEMAN'S FERRY IS RUN BY A SHONK.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE. THE NUMBER OF SHONKS IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY IS AMAZING, AND THIS SORT OF THING HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR EVER. THE FIRST RECORDING I MADE WITH A BAND 39 YEARS AGO WAS A HIT AND ALSO RE-RELEASED AT LEAST 12 TIMES OVER THE YEARS. HOW MUCH WAS I PAID? YEP, YOU GUESSED IT.
THE THING THAT IS DISTURBING ABOUT ABOUT THE STORY BELOW, IS THE BASTARD RUNNING THIS FESTIVAL CLAIMS EVERYONE WILL EVENTUALLY BE PAID. IF THIS IS TRUE, GUESS WHERE THAT MONEY WILL COME FROM? YES THE PRESALE TICKET MONEY FOR NEXT YEAR'S FESTIVAL. SO, OBVIOUSLY NEXT YEARS ARTISTS WILL BE THE NEXT BUNCH OF SUCKERS. IF ANYONE READING THIS KNOWS ANY MUSICIANS ENGAGED TO PLAY THERE, TELL THEM DON'T.

This article is lifted in full from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Tim Elliott
October 29, 2009

IT WAS billed as a long weekend of "riverside revelry for clued-up campers", a music festival on the banks of the Hawkesbury River.

Over four scorching days in February, the third annual Playground Weekender at Del Rio Riverside Resort, Wisemans Ferry, boasted six stages of live music, an outdoor cinema, a cocktail bar and a yoga stall, as well as the Scottish band Primal Scream and "the cream" of local talent.

"From the moment you arrive, you will feel a million miles away from the stresses of home," the event's website promised.

But for many of the support acts, contractors and ancillary staff, Playground Weekender has proven anything but relaxing. Eight months later, some of them have not been paid - even though its British-born organiser, Andy Rigby, has advertised and sold tickets for next year's festival.

"We did 300 hours of cleaning at that event and he still owes us $4200," says Nickie Haylen, owner of Arctic Cleaning. "Whenever I speak to him he says he couldn't find my invoice or his email is down or that his money was being held in trust by someone else.''

Ben Chamie, whose band Peabody played on February 7, says he is still owed $600. "It's not a lot of money - it's more about the fact that he's advertising next year's festival when he hasn't paid people from previous years."

A band manager whose musicians were owed $6000 spent six months "screaming down the phone" at Rigby, and was paid after threatening to email "every contact I had in the industry and telling how he operated". The money had to be picked up, in cash, from a Chinese restaurant in Cabramatta, the manager says.

"Andy is an amateur, and it's up to us to stop him from doing it again, otherwise other acts are going to get hurt."

Rigby, 37, arrived in Australia from England in 1996 and has been involved with several music festivals, including Justin Hemmes's Good Vibrations. His first Playground Weekender, in 2007, was a hit, despite what the Faster Louder music website called a "kinda-cool-kinda-dangerous lack of security".

Rigby operates several companies, one of which, Playground Music, went into liquidation in December 2007 owing $172,000. Another, Playground Entertainment, was briefly deregistered a week before this year's festival.

"The festival has had a couple of harder years when we first started,'' Rigby says. ''But we have been battling through to make sure that every single person has been paid. Everyone associated with last year's festival will be paid before next year's festival."