Ever been to the Rainbow Serpent Festival in country Victoria?

Yes? No? Is there a few hands raised out there in internet land? I really can’t be sure. I, personally, have never been to the festival but it’s one that has always fascinated me. It’s kind of tucked away in the middle of nowhere and always features hundreds of artists that I’ve never heard of. I’ve seen photos of the festival and everyone looks like they’re having a wicked time in their brightly coloured clothes, face paint and dreadlocks. Yet, it’s still a bit of a mystery.

To shed some light on Rainbow, I recently caught up with one of the festival’s organisers, Tim Harvey. He was more than happy to talk at length about the festival that he spends a good chunk of the year organising. Whether you’re going for the fifth time or just want to find out a little about the festival, please take a few minutes to have a read of our chat :)

Jack Pilven: So what’s been on the cards today?

Tim Harvey: Today, I’m getting media passes out to people, dealing with last minute precious DJs… and six months worth of GST got thrown into the mix. So yeah, it’s all fun and games.

JP: Is this a full-time job for you?

TH: For seven months of the year it is, and at the moment it’s 14 hour days pretty much. I go to sleep at about 1 – 2 am and it’s the last thing I think about, and I wake up at about 7:30 – 8 and it’s right back into it. It’s chaotic.

JP: Can you step us through a regular day organising the festival? What kind of things are you doing?

TH: Well, I’m the marketing director but I also do a lot of the music stuff as well and bleed over into other areas. So wherever something’s not happening or someone needs to be connected to someone else, then I’m generally the person people come to.

JP: How did Rainbow Serpent start?

TH: It started 15 years ago when a couple of guys that had been doing indoor events in Melbourne decided they would try their hand at an outdoor party. The first Rainbow Serpent Festival happened up near Trentham, just out of Melbourne. From memory it had about 800 to 900 people, which is still pretty impressive considering it was the first event held over a single night. I think back then it was called something else… it was called like the Rainbow Serpent Gathering or something like that. So that was the very first one and then it moved down into the Pyrenees Shire for the second one and became the Rainbow Serpent Festival. It’s been through a few sites and it’s grown since then, and each time we outgrow a site we need to find a new one. The one that we have now we’re hoping to remain at for at least 10 years. It has plenty of room for growth and it’s beautiful, so it’s definitely our best site yet.

JP: Apart from it moving from site to site, what else has changed about the festival over the past 15 years?

TH: Well, obviously at the start it was predominantly about music, and at the very, very start it was about trance music. So in terms of the diversification of its music styles, the changes have been massive. Especially in the past five years we’ve taken on a lot of gypsy and swing bands, which are fantastic. It’s interesting… it’s almost like as we’ve grown older and our musical tastes have broadened, we’ve brought a little bit of that into the festival as well. It’s almost as though we’ve been growing with our patrons together. While we still have a lot of music that young kids get into, there’s also a lot of music that the older ones can sit back and enjoy now as well.

JP: Rainbow Serpent has a reputation for being a trance and techno orientated festival. So is it fair to say you’re trying to expand the line-up outside of these genres?

TH: I think it is now. It’s interesting because we have a lot of people say to us that there’s not enough trance anymore, you know? And then we have other people say to us that there’s too much trance and then others that say there’s too much techno, or not enough techno… so you’re never going to fully satisfy everyone. I think it’s a case of striking a good balance between emerging new styles like glitch-hop, which has become pretty big in Australia and over in the States over the last three or four years. Now we’ve got a good contingent of glitch-hop artists on the Monday on the Sunset stage at Rainbow this year. Previously we’ve had guys like Tipper, and again he’s coming back this year alongside Opiuo and Spoonbill who are performing on the Market stage. I think the styles have definitely broadened and anyone who can objectively sit there and look at our line-up will say that we’ve probably got one of the most diverse musical line-ups out of any festival in Australia.

Click here to read the full interview over at Everguide