Nowadays the UK has two big rock and metal festival: Download Festival and Bloodstock Open Air.
There are other rock and metal festivals around like Damnation and Hammerfest, but they aren’t a tenth of the size of these other behemoths.
But once upon a time, there was a third serious contender: it was like Download festival but with some changes – mostly for the better! I am talking about Sonisphere.
Sonisphere was a world-wide festival, taking place in 7 countries.
It existed in the UK from 2009 to 2016 and was held in Knebworth.
But eventually the festival stopped happening in the UK, and even topped altogether.
So, what happened?
Well, in this blog post we’ll take a look at that, but first, let’s discuss the festival itself.
What made Sonisphere so popular?
Soniphere
The festival in the UK took place at Knebworth, which is a pretty hallowed ground for rock and metal music.
The biggest change between Download festival and Sonisphere is that Sonisphere had the two main stages facing each other, with staggered stage times meaning that while one band was performing on one stage, the other stage was setting up for the next band.
For the audience this meant a very easy move between the stages and no issues of sound bleeding from one stage to the other.
So, that’s one of the reasons that Sonisphere was very popular in its time.
The question is: why did its time come to an end and why is it not around any more?
The Lineups – Good and Bad
While Sonisphere was around, it had some fantastic line-ups.
In 2010 in the UK, the headliners were Iron Maiden and Rammstein.
In 2011, the headline act on the second stage was Bill Bailey!
Let me tell you, being amongst a crowd of metalheads and watching Bill Bailey headline a stage at Sonisphere was in-freaking-credible!
However, towards the end of Sonisphere life, their lineups started to go downhill.
It seems that it just became harder to book A-list band, when they were competing with other festivals.
Aside from splitting an audience between Download and Bloodstock, Sonisphere also had to deal with the bands being split between the festivals.
There are only so many headline-worth bands out there, and they were being booked by the other festivals too.
It seems that Sonisphere 2012 was cancelled for this exact reason.
The organisers stated after cancelling the festival that year that the reason was that “co-ordinating the festival to an appropriate standard this year had proved more difficult than expected”
At this point the 2012 headliners were to be KISS, Queen with Adam Lambert, and Faith No More.
Me and my friends were big fans of Sonisphere and waiting with baited breath to see the headliners that year: I can’t tell you how underwhelmed that headline set made us.
The festival was then paused for the year, but promised to return in 2013.
That also didn’t happen however, and the reason stated was that they again struggled to get a strong enough set of headliners.
Sonisphere 2014
However in 2014 the festival came back and with a strong headliners of Iron Maiden (again) and Metallica.
Sonisphere 2014 saw Metallica do a ‘By request‘ setlist style system, where each ticket let you vote on a song to play, and the top songs would be played.
Frustratingly for me, many people used their vote to choose classics like Master of Puppets, rather than some of the bands more strange and fun songs, like ‘So what’ by the Anti-Nowhere League, or Die, Die My Darling by The Misfits.
The 2014 festival was a celebration of 40 years of music at Knebworth, referencing Knebworth festival, which first took place in 1974.
2014 year was a highlight for the festival, and as it turns out, the swan song of Sonisphere, as it was the final year the festival took place in the UK.
Sadly, 2015 again saw the festival cancelled because of difficulty booking headliners.
The final year that Sonisphere existed anywhere was 2016, and even then it only took place in one country; Switzerland.
Split audience
Every year, there is an audience for Download festival and Bloodstock.
The size of that audience may grow or shrink slightly as people have more or less money, but it’s a pretty consistent number and there is a big enough audience for both festivals to run every year and do well.
Adding a third entry to the rock and metal festival scene just split that audience further, meaning there were fewer people to attend any one festival.
Except of course for those rare people who can afford (and have the energy) to attend more than one festival per year.
Basically, Sonisphere festival ended because they couldn’t afford to keep it running.
This is quite a common issue actually.
Putting a music festival on costs a lot of money, and recouping those costs is a hard battle, as many festivals were finding during the lockdowns on 2020 and 2021.
From the horses mouth
Sonisphere festival was promoted by K2 and Kilimanjaro live, two companies that deal in music festivals.
Stuart Galbraith, CEO of Kilimanjaro Live did an interview in 2018 where he stated that were no plans to bring back the festival.
The amount of money we used to risk on Sonisphere went up and up because of the cost of talent and the cost of running the festivals went through the roof
Stuart Galbraith
So it seems that Sonisphere is gone forever, which is a shame!
Sonisphere is where I first discovered The Defiled. Sonisphere was one of the few times i got to see Motorhead. And did I mention Bill Bailey yet?!
Wrap up
Sonisphere was a fantastic festival that simply couldn’t carry on with the competition.
It existed for a few, scattered years in the UK before disappearing forever.
The rather lacklustre communication from the organisers to fans was always an issue with Sonisphere, but the 2016 festival also didn’t happen, and the way that this was announced is the lowest effort ever.
A user commented on a picture the Sonisphere Facebook page posted, asking if the festival was on in 2016.
This is how they replied.
