With Coachella 2024 officially in the history books, music festival season is well underway across the US. But abroad, things are still heating up. Over in Malaysia, that means the return of Good Vibes Festival. Between July 20 and 21, musicians J Balvin, Peggy Gou, Joji, BIBI, and more are set to serves as headliners at the Resorts World Awana in Genting Highlands.
However, following last year’s emergency cancellation (now referred to as kill switch) due to The 1975’s frontman Matty Healy and bassist Ross MacDonald’s kiss (to protest the government’s anti-LGBTQ laws), ticket holders are uncertain about the event. On May 8, organizer, Future Sound Asia’s Director of Entertainment Wan Alman set out to assure the public things are “back to normal” during a conversation with NME.
Read his remarks below.
We’re not going to let this one bad incident ruin everything that we’ve worked for. We’ve worked too hard for this. That’s when we decided that we’re going to go ahead with Good Vibes 2024 but at that point, we didn’t know in what form. We were still going through various iterations of what we could make work. So in the end, we decided on this two-day festival in Genting Highlands.
Alman later claimed to have the backing of local law enforcement, despite last year’s onstage protest.
Despite what happened last year, the government has actually been quite supportive. 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. We have been working with government authorities in workshops with PUSPAL (Central Committee for Application for Filming and Performance by Foreign Artistes) to come up with SOPs [standing operating procedures] to deal with incidents such as what happened last year, and also to refine and improve PUSPAL guidelines. The good thing is that Good Vibes Festival is not banned, so we’re doing it again this year.
According to the interview, Future Sound Asia in still in “legal proceedings” with The 1975 due to the kiss (which temporarily landed the band behind bars).