Models Elsa Hosk, Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Lais Ribeiro, Gizele Oliveira and Rose Bertram helped promote the original Fyre Festival – @rosebetram
“What some of you don’t know is that I spent 10 months in solitary confinement. Whenever anybody finds this out the first thing they always ask is how I spent that time. The truth is, the best part of those days was running in place in my prison-issue underwear staring at the wall in front of me.”
This might sound like a curious opening gambit at a press conference about a music festival. But Billy McFarland is no ordinary festival organiser. McFarland is the convicted felon and entrepreneur behind 2017’s Fyre Festival, the most disastrous non-festival of all time, an event so calamitous that it has become the morality tale of the Instagram age.
McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison for wire fraud and ordered to pay $26 million in restitution to victims. He was released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Elkton, Ohio, in 2022, and now he’s back. Fyre Festival 2 is set to take place on Mexico’s Playa del Carmen between May 30 and June 2.
Talking via video link at Fyre 2’s first press conference on a Mexican beach, which was itself live streamed on social media, McFarland is sorry. “Deeply” sorry. “I know I messed up, and I know that you all know that I messed up. I have a long road ahead to attempt to make right for all these wrongs,” the 33-year-old says. You can say that again.
When he wasn’t jogging on the spot in his penitentiary kecks – quite the image when compared to the tropical promotional social media videos featuring influencers such as Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner that accompanied Fyre 1 – McFarland says he was visited by constant “dreams and nightmares”, the latter about how he’d let people down. Reliving these moments made him “sick”. “For me Fyre Festival 2 isn’t about the glitz and the glamour. For me, Fyre 2 is about a second chance to do right by the people around me and against all odds to fulfil my promises and to turn these nightmares into dreams,” he says.
A recap. In 2017, New Yorker McFarland and his business partner, the rapper Ja Rule, convinced around 6,000 people to part with up to $12,000 each to travel to the Bahamian island of Great Exuma for what was billed as “an immersive music experience on the boundaries of the impossible”.
They were right on one count. Fyre was a calamity. Rather than featuring music from the likes of Blink-182 and Major Lazer, the festival site – having been constantly moved due to poor planning and lack of permits – resembled a refugee camp with scant infrastructure. Rain turned a disaster into a catastrophe, and paradise on earth descended into Lord of the Flies as the 500 or so stranded festival-goers who’d already arrived entered survival mode. In perhaps the most enduring image from Fyre, the gourmet food promised transpired to be two sweaty slices of processed cheese on sad-looking sliced bread in a white Styrofoam box.
The infamous cheese sandwich
The train wreck was turned into two jaw-dropping 2019 documentaries, one on Netflix and one on Hulu, watched by millions of increasingly aghast viewers. Horror unfolded upon horror. Fyre Festival became shorthand for “utter sh-tshow”, and would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
Most astonishing was the gaping chasm between promise and reality. Months before the festival, 400 celebrities and influencers posted ambiguous burnt orange tiles on Instagram to generate a buzz (“the best coordinated social influencer campaign ever,” McFarland said). The world’s top supermodels, also including Emily Ratajkowski, were paid fortunes to frolic on beaches (with a pig) and ride on azure water on jet skis in the aforementioned pre-publicity video, with Jenner reportedly then paid $250,000 for one Insta post. It worked. “Move over, Coachella” ran one press headline when Fyre was announced. But gloss trumped content: the promises were empty.
A scene from the documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
There was a terrible human cost that saw suppliers, local workers and crew not paid. Maryanne Rolle, a Bahamian caterer, lost her life savings. Angry mobs formed when things fell apart. Then there was the financial cost that saw festival-goers lose their money (although the “rich kids stuck on island” scenario was dubbed “Darwinism at its finest” by a guest on Conan O’Brien’s US TV show).
So warped and desperate did things get that Fyre 1’s stoic producer Andy King admitted to Netflix that he was prepared to carry out a sex act on a senior customs official to secure the release of four shipping containers filled with Evian bottles (he never had to). “An elephant of a clusterf—” was how a former Navy Seal described Fyre in the Netflix programme. At least the rumours of rabid dogs roaming the site were thought to be, mercifully, unfounded.
Many celebrities involved issued apologies for promoting the event. The decade in which social media came of age had egg on its face. McFarland was sent down. Ja Rule, it should be said, was neither arrested nor charged, and was dismissed from a class action lawsuit.
The planned location of Fyre Festival 2, in Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Fyre 2, we are promised, will be different. This is what we know. Organisers plan to sell 1,800 tickets and they say that permits are already in place. Unlike last time, McFarland is working with established partners: a Mexican production company called Lostnights, hotel and accommodation providers and a proper ticket company.
Around 40 bands and artists will perform at night (the first line-up will be announced next week). The one artist already confirmed is rapper and former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown, known as AB, who released his debut single Whole Lotta Money in 2019 and has seen his monthly Spotify listeners rocket from 13,571 to 101,000 since he was announced three weeks ago.
During the day festival-goers will be offered “activities and adventures”, McFarland says. These include “wake surfing with a top professional at the Mayan water park”, driving all-terrain vehicles “throughout the jungle”, and snorkelling with whales sharks, some of which, McFarland says, punters will be able to do alongside the music artists as Fyre “brings the talent off-stage” and “connects” them with guests from around the world. Other activities “may” include survivalist challenges, cliff jumping and free diving adventures, according to Fyre’s website.
“Fyre Festival 2 is about being a dreamer, a traveller and an adventure seeker from around the world and converging at Playa del Carmen, to try to live like Jack Sparrow or to live like Lara Croft for three days,” says McFarland, adding later that “Playa is officially on Fyre”.
But jumping off a cliff like Johnny Depp comes at a cost. Four tiers of tickets range in price from $1,400 (£1,080) for standard entry (flights and accommodation not included) to $1.1 million (£850,000) for a party of eight under the “Prometheus” package. You read that correctly. For three times the price of the average UK house, you and seven mates can “live like the Gods of Fyre” for four days. This package includes private air charter from Miami to Cancún International Airport, a private yacht transfer to Playa del Carmen, a dedicated chauffeur and the choice of accommodation between a four-stateroom yacht, a four-bedroom luxury villa or a three-bedroom presidential suite in a hotel.
The “Fyre Experiences” listed above are not included in the bottom two tiers of tickets and must be bought as add-ons, while “several” of the experiences are included in the so-called Phoenix package ($25,000 for two people) and Prometheus Fyre Gods get the lot. The festival has not disclosed how many tickets it has sold in any of the tiers, but you can see why would-be punters might be wary given, you know, what happened. Plus Fyre’s 8,700-word Terms of Service state: “All ticket sales are final. NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES” although the terms go on to state that if the event is cancelled or rescheduled for reasons other than a natural disaster, organisers may “at our sole discretion offer to refund the base ticket price of the cancelled event”.
Billy McFarland leaving court in 2017 – Getty
Seeing which bands play this year will be interesting, given what happened last time. Many punters only found out that headliners Blink-182 were pulling out when they released a social media statement mere hours before the festival opened, saying they weren’t confident they could put on a show to their usual standards.
There’s obviously no suggestion that will happen this time, although Fyre 2 has already had its fair share of issues. It was originally due to take place on Isla Mujeres, an island off Cancún. But in February a member of the island’s tourism directorate, Edgar Gasca, said they had “no knowledge” of the event, which was presumably behind its move 50 miles south to its new mainland location.
But McFarland’s commercial partners are confident. The infrastructure genuinely seems to be in place. Manuel Reta, head of artists and commercial relations at production company Lostnights, says the company has 20 years’ experience of putting on big events. “Just this year alone we’ve hosted over 30,000 people across different private, public and corporate events that we produce. Not only in the area but across [Mexico] and the world. We are very excited about what we’re doing here,” Reta says. Past events have included the Hell & Heaven festival at which metal band Kiss played and the Day Zero dance festival in the Mayan jungle (“stunning production” says Mixmag).
Playa del Carmen’s secretary of public security Raúl Tassinari González, looking official in his police uniform, was also present at the press conference to give support. Another Fyre partner, introduced as simply Fernando, says that all the permits from local authorities have been received and that the “biggest party” is planned. Meanwhile local luxury accommodation partner Daniel Martin says, “This is a huge thing that’s happening. It’s real.” Reta and others suggest that this is just the start and that Fyre could return to Playa del Carmen for “many years to come”.
McFarland praises his partners. After all, it takes cojones to get on board with something so notorious. “I can’t underestimate what they have been through. [People] have no idea the ridicule, the threats, the questions these partners have received on literally an hourly basis from family, friends, business associates and journalists around the world,” McFarland says, adding that they “took the arrows” and “stood up tall”.
McFarland now sounds chastened, serious and aware of his mistakes. This is, after all, the man who refused to actually fire his employees last time around as that would have meant having to pay them unemployment benefits. In a sign of how things have changed, McFarland shows a decidedly unglitzy video at the press conference. No supermodels here, it looks more like something made by the local tourist board. Perhaps, in an inversion of Fyre 1, he plans to under-promise and over-deliver.
Still, not everyone is convinced. As the Mexican press conference got underway, so did Fyre’s Instagram comments section. “LMAOooooo this is a joke”, “Stupidest festival ever” and “Billy this had better not be a scam” were just some of the entries. And my own personal attempts to interview McFarland have been like nailing jelly to a wall. I first made contact with him in February and was promised, on multiple occasions, an interview.
He phoned me from his native New York one Friday evening in early March for a pre-arranged on-the-record chat, only to reveal that he was “not giving interviews right now” and didn’t have authorisation to speak by his festival partners. McFarland then suggested an interview the following Wednesday – confirmed “1,000 per cent” by his Fyre 2 right-hand man – which didn’t happen. It was the journalistic equivalent of being promised lobster and getting those cheese slices and ropey bread.
From solitary confinement to all this. Is Fyre 2 hubris, madness, genius or a shot at redemption on McFarland’s part? It’s hard to tell. Will it happen? There’s no reason to think it won’t. The more pressing question is whether people will buy tickets given recent history. They’re two slightly different things. “It takes a lot of bravery to stand up to the heat of everything that Fyre brings,” McFarland says, referring to the team working on the festival. The same could be said for all the wannabe Jack Sparrows and Lara Crofts out there.
