Following the wash-up from the national Heatwave festival – which included artist no-shows, low attendance, a cancelled stop in Perth, no liquor license on-site in Melbourne and a chorus of disgruntled punters – promoter Patrick Whyntie has looked back on it all in an email exchange with Mess & Noise. In the interview, Whyntie talks about the risks of coordinating a hip hop tour in 2012 and the “brutal” lessons he’s learned about festival management.

“Costs blew out substantially and we were having battles with council and police to keep the event going,” Whyntie says of the tour’s first stop, a camping weekender in South Australia. “This cost quite a bit of money and time, fighting something they should have supported. The camping festival was a huge undertaking, and in hindsight, we would preferred to have concentrated solely on this, and had other national promoters taken the other states.”

Whyntie also talks openly of his issues with artists (“D12 was an ongoing struggle to coordinate them here to Australia”), with the most fraught being Kid Cudi. As described by our reviewer, Cudi’s set in Melbourne was cut short by 40 minutes because of noise restrictions, and the headliner responded by “jumping offstage, kicking over a light and a speaker as bouncers tried to grab him.”

“The whole tour, he was acting like a spoiled brat; you can ask anyone and everyone who encountered him,” explains Whyntie. “He had everything from his substantial fee upfront to the five-star suites he required. His crew were great people to deal with, and so was everybody else.”

The festival had hoped to attract 5,000 punters to the South Australian event and had booked a 13,000 capacity venue for the Brisbane show, but Whyntie admits the attendances were well below expectations: “We sold around 4500 tickets – including 700 complimentary – in Melbourne. Brisbane was just under 1000. SA was varied; Thursday had 500, Friday 1500, Saturday 2000. Sydney was a strong crowd both nights and Canberra was smaller.”

Read the full interview over at Mess & Noise.