Are Josh Homme and Trent Reznor Planting the Seeds for Their Own Music Fest?
The way Josh Homme sees it, if things go well on Queens of the Stone Age's upcoming co-headlining tour of Australia with Nine Inch Nails, the concept could be expanded to a sort of touring festival that's inspired by the curatorial aspects of Trent Reznor's Beats Audio streaming music service.
"Lots of these [current] festivals are like 50 or 60 bands, and it's just too much to encapsulate an idea, it's too grand," Homme recently told Australia's Triple J Radio. "I think the notion of somewhere between six or 10 bands is much stronger. And if the wingspan was a little more lateral, where it [involved] artwork and film and even book recommendations -- I'd be interested to hear what an artist I was into was reading. So perhaps this is the start to it, because there's not a lot of co-headlining going on."
Reznor's words echo what he's currently doing with Beats Audio. "I always think about when [NIN] go out headlining I always choose the people we want to play with through the eyes of, 'Hey, who would I want to go see?'" he said. "Make it an evening's worth of entertainment."
The Nine Inch Nails frontman clarified his statement by pointing out that "conceptually, it takes the idea of a streaming music subscription service like Spotify, and adds a real importance around the idea of curation, and people touching music and presenting you stuff rather than [you] feeling like an algorithm [is] doing it for you. [It's like] having your own knowledgeable indie record store guy showing you around, that's the feel."
NIN and QOTSA kick off their co-headlining tour of Australia tomorrow in Sydney with Homme's wife Brody Dalle opening. They'll stay on the road together through a March 22 gig in Christchurch, New Zealand. Check out the jaunt's complete itinerary here.