Rock en Seine is preparing to close the page of summer 2022 festivals in style and expects some 150,000 people from August 25 to 28 on the lawn of the Parc de Saint-Cloud (Paris). For this edition of recovery after two years of virtual forced shutdown, the organizers have gone into overdrive and are no longer offering three but four days of music in total (five days were even planned before the cancellation of the coming of Rage Against The Machine for medical reasons on Tuesday, August 30). If festival-goers have never wanted to commune with their favorite groups so much, the artists also had ants in their legs: the festival found itself faced with a plethoric offer of concerts, as Arnaud Meersseman, programmer tells us of Rock en Seine and Managing Director of AEG France.
Restarting the pump of a festival like Rock en Seine after almost three years of break, it is necessarily difficult. What was the most complicated in this exercise?
Arnaud Meersseman : It was complicated especially in terms of personnel, to train the teams, in particular technicians, because there is a large volume of festivals this summer and an overall lack of personnel. With the inflation of costs linked to the general economic context, there is also a real challenge in keeping costs more or less within budget. It was quite difficult.
On the programming side, have you noticed a crowd of groups asking to play?
Yes, it was difficult to cope with the volume of groups that we were offered. Today, the majority of artists’ income comes from touring and during the two years of Covid many of them found themselves deprived of income. Consequence: everyone decided to shoot at the same time and we had to refuse a lot of things. But we had such a wide range of proposals that we thought it would be silly to miss all that. So each time we added groups, to the point that we even wondered at one point if we weren’t going to do a full week! (laughs)
The cancellation for health reasons of Rage Against The Machine less than three weeks before the festival, is it a big blow? What are the consequences for the artistic and financial balance of the festival?
Yes, it was a blow because it was a real event to receive the group which had not occurred in France for ten years, with already a first cancellation! This has little impact on the artistic balance because we were on a special day, Tuesday, which stood alone. As far as the financial part is concerned, we are insured and this therefore has no impact.
How did you build the program this year, what guided your choices?
Except Rage Against The Machine, which was the only postponement of 2020, everything else is new: we started from zero on the lineup because we thought that bands that had been booked in 2019 for 2020 it wouldn’t be very exciting in 2022. Moreover, we have understood that we have a loyal audience, attached to the rock DNA of the festival. That’s why we went to artists like Nick Cave or Arctic Monkeys. But the idea was also to open up the musical field a little. Firstly because the pool of rock bands is quite limited, but also because there are other things happening in the music that the festival should reflect, we are convinced of that. For us, it’s a difficult exercise because we has a very grumbling audience that needs to be spared, so we’re going gradually, in small steps. We had gone much too far in 2018 with the headlining PNL concert, which was linked to the circumstances since we had been caught by Kendrick Lamar (by Live Nation, AEG’s majority competitor at Rock en Seine Editor’s note ). We therefore remain on a rock base but that does not prevent us from opening up to pop like Stromae or to electronic pop with artists like The Blaze, FKJ or Tame Impala.
The 2022 poster is rich and includes a shower of stars. Did your budget explode or did the artists lower their fees a bit because they needed to play?
The day the artists lower their fees, we will let it be known! (he’s laughing). Above all, we took more risks but we wanted to take advantage of all this volume of artists available. And it pays off because we were already sold out at the end of May for Thursday with Arctic Monkeys. We also benefited from a strategic reorganization of AEG (the majority American company in Rock en Seine) which postponed its London festival All Points East from the beginning of June to the last weekend of August. As AEG also has a festival which takes place the same weekend in Bristol, we were able to make the artists a triple offer Bristol, London and Paris. This way it’s much simpler for us and it’s also easier to hook up the groups.
What are the big exclusives of this edition?
Arctic Monkeys and Tame Impala, who weren’t playing anywhere else in France this summer, The Blaze is also an outcast, as is London Grammar. It’s good because this summer at the festivals there were a lot of similar headliners like Angèle and PNL. But today, for a festival to be interesting, there aren’t a thousand ways to stand out: putting two stages in a field doesn’t really work anymore. So either you have a place to die for like Coachella, or you have an out-of-this-world lineup that can’t be found anywhere else. I think it’s very important to have exclusives on headliners, we pay attention to it when we work on the program and we are already watching for it for 2023.
Which bands or artists are you most looking forward to seeing?
There are quite a few, some have been waiting to play for two years. I’m a big fan of Arctic Monkeys so very happy to have landed an exclusive date. I can’t wait to see November Ultra, all the feedback about it is amazing. I’m also waiting to see what Yung Blud, quite crazy at the Olympia, does on a big stage. Same for the Parcels, which I find phenomenal with a little Fleetwood Mac side, and then Tame Impala which is always an experience. Can’t wait to see The Blaze too because they’re going to be releasing some new tracks (they released a first single in June and they’ll be releasing more stuff soon) along with brand new preview scenography.
Rock en Seine in Paris from August 25 to 28, 2022 (see the full program)