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NXNE ditches the Port Lands for 2018 festival

NXNE has announced it will be back for 2018, from June 8-17. What won’t be back is the outdoor Port Lands festival at 51 Commissioners, which has been NXNE’s flagship event for the past two years. 

“There will be no Port Lands this year,” NXNE founder Michael Hollett wrote in an email to NOW. “It was a great experiment but we’re going back to what our audience loves best.” 

For its 24th year, the festival will return to its roots by focusing on outdoor events on Yonge Street and in clubs and venues throughout the city. 

In addition to music at Yonge-Dundas Square (the home of the festival’s most famous concerts, most infamously Iggy Pop & The Stooges in 2010), NXNE will also turn Yonge Street into a “festival village” with free concerts, comedy shows and talks and panels from June 15-17.

Hollett says he’s still working out how much of Yonge Street the festival will use, but “there will absolutely be live music at Yonge-Dundas square.” The Game Land eSports event, which has taken place there for the last two years, will now be held at a yet-to-be-announced “unique Toronto venue” from June 8-10. 

The Club Land Curator Series will also return for its second year and “at least double, maybe even triple to between 20 and 30 shows,” says Hollett.

In 2017, the booking reins were handed over to artists like Billy Talent’s Ian D’Sa, July Talk’s Leah Fay, rapper Tasha the Amazon and Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning. No word yet on who will participate in 2018. Pricing is still being decided, but a “low-price wristband” will be available for access to all the Club Land Curator shows, in addition to single admission options. 

So a focus on free shows at Yonge-Dundas Square and a wristband that lets attendees hop between club shows: it sounds a lot like what NXNE used to be. 

For fans that missed the citywide experience of the festival, that should come as good news. It’s also not very surprising. Despite an attempt to reboot the event into more of a traditional outdoor music festival, it never felt quite right. Some missed the sprawling, multi-venue city-as-canvas feel that NXNE built its name on, and the shade-less, concrete Port Lands grounds looked empty and sparse in 2017. The fact that last year’s NXNE took place at the same time as Pride and Luminato likely didn’t help. (This year, the festival is happening a week earlier than Pride.)

Moreover, NXNE’s mega-festival shift in 2016/17 was poorly timed, as many similar large-scale music events struggled or threw in the towel this past summer. 

Perhaps a return to what made the festival special will help restore NXNE to its former glory. 

richardt@nowtoronto.com | @trapunski

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