Oxegen | |
---|---|
![]() The Oxegen logo, circa 2010s | |
Dates | August 2013[1][2] |
Location(s) | Punchestown Racecourse, County Kildare, Ireland |
Years active | 2004–2011; 2013 |
Website | Oxegen.ie (archived) |
Oxegen /ˈɒksɛdʒɛn/ was a music festival in Ireland, first held from 2004–2011 as a rock and pop festival and again in 2013 with dance and chart acts only. The event was regularly cited as Ireland's biggest music festival,[3][4][5][6] and, by 2009, it was being cited as the greenest festival, being a 100% carbon neutral event in Ireland,[7] although this claim is highly disputed[by whom?] as green-washing[citation needed]. It was previously called Witnness,[8] which ran from 2000 and was sponsored by Guinness. The event was promoted by MCD and was sponsored by Heineken. Oxegen was originally a three-day festival, but from 2008 onwards, it was expanded to four days.
It took place at the Punchestown Racecourse in County Kildare, Ireland and has an average attendance of around 60,000 a day, with around 50,000 of these camping on site for the duration, and the rest travelling to the site each day. It took place on the same weekend as T in the Park in Scotland and shared a very similar lineup each year, but Oxegen was generally regarded as Ireland's version of the Glastonbury Festival, with the 2008 festival sharing three of the same headliners as its English counterpart.[9]
Oxegen attracted significant attention from outside Ireland, with many of those attending travelling from overseas experiencing a "mass exodus" to the festival.[10][11] Members of bands such as The Killers, Snow Patrol and R.E.M. have spoken positively of their experiences at the festival. Celebrities frequently attend, including models Helena Christensen (a regular attendant)[12][13] and television personality Chris Pontius,[14] actor Josh Hartnett,[12] and Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones, who was pursued by "half the journalists in the country" and many of his own relatives for much of the 2008 festival.[13][15] The event has also attracted some negative publicity, particularly following the 2006 festival. This is attributed to such factors as the age of admission (17) and easy access to alcohol.[16]
Oxegen, for two consecutive years, was named as the Best European Festival in a poll which included festivals from France, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom and other countries, leading The Sunday Business Post's Nicola Cooke to describe it as "one of the most successful music festivals in Ireland has [sic]".[17] Leagues O'Toole has described it as an "enormously successful, award-winning, established brand [...] aimed at a young audience out for a good time, a post-Leaving Cert rite of passage perfect for acts with big singalong tunes that sound great in the mud".[18] Oxegen received a mention in the Colum McCann short story "Aisling".[19]
In April 2014, organisers announced that the Oxegen festival would not be going ahead that year, citing a lack of suitable headline acts.[20]
promises_to_be_back_in_2013
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).a_breather_for_a_year
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).The two big events that bookend the Irish summer are Oxegen and Electric Picnic, both now enormously successful, award-winning, established brands. [...] On one hand you have MCD's Oxegen, which starts on Friday, July 9th, a three-day music extravaganza at Punchestown Racecourse in Kildare aimed at a young audience out for a good time, a post-Leaving Cert rite of passage perfect for acts with big singalong tunes that sound great in the mud.
Now it's Colum McCann's turn. His new short story entitled Aisling, in the summer issue of the Paris Review , is quite a departure from the realist prose of his National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin. [...] And although it's very short, at under two and a half pages, he manages to include a wide range of Irish references, from Loreto Foxrock to Oxegen and the Trocadero.