Music: Asia Pacific gets Festival culture

Woodstock, Isle of Wight, Knebworth, Glastonbury , Big Night Out ... Names evoke memories of weekend or week-long concerts featuring a multitude of bands and artists, tents, mud, greasy food and long queues for toilets no one in their right mind would want to pee in.

But events like Wembley Stadium's one day, one night affairs delivered an entirely different sort of experience. Car parks that cars don't get bogged down in, toilets that flush, lighting, effective crowd control.

Watching Queen or Led Zeppelin at Knebworth was magical, but watching The Who at Wembley was comfortable, or at least something a bit like it.

South East Asia is at last getting into the festival idea.

Last month, Singapore hosted the latest in its one week long jazz and blues festivals: being Singapore, it was neat, tidy and well organised. The regional granddaddy of festivals is the Kuching, Sarawak, Rainforest Music Festival. This year's event is from 8 - 10 July and mixes music and other cultural entertainments with workshops and other attractions. Think WOMAD with decent weather. (link: Festival website) Now with government backing, ticket prices are exceptional value at just MYR300 (approx GBP60) for a three-day pass bought in advance. A package including accommodation is probably a good idea: the venue is 35km outside Kuching and there aren't many places to stay. See the website for details. Travel to Kuching by air isn't as easy as it once was with routes from Singapore being heavily cut back but via Kuala Lumpur, there are lots of flights.

On 22,23,24 JavaRockingLand takes place across three stages. This is probably the nearest thing to a "western" rock festival anywhere in the East. The impressive line-up includes Good Charlotte, Happy Mondays, The Cranberries and Thirty Seconds to Mars plus a whole raft of other indie and rock bands.The full website is at http://www.javarockingland.com/2011/. A three day pre-paid pass is IR880,000 (including tax). Don't panic: that's only about GBP65.

With ticket prices to see The Script in Singapore recently costing almost GBP100 per seat, JavaRockingLand represents extremely good value. Jakarta is well served by and international airlines, including budget carriers.

Kuala Lumpur is hosting the MTV ASIA World Stage Asia. This one-day event a short distance outside the capital takes place on 24 July. Being Malaysia - which is concert-resistant and regularly does not issue performance licences until a matter of days before an event and delays until the last moment the employment passes needed by bands and their crew - the line up is sketchy. Indeed, the only bands so far announced are local band Pop Shuvit and Thirty Seconds to Mars who plan to hop over after their Jakarta show. The authorities in Malaysia - where there are national and state plus other bodies with a say - have acted to cancel events at very short notice. But that has not prevented events by Linkin Park, Hoobenstank (and, less important for us) Justin Bieber being held. The MTV event will be in Selangor where there have been noisy but minor objections to foreign rock and other entertainment in recent years, although they have quietened down since the personal intervention of the Sultan. Since then, the Arthur's Day concerts, sponsored by Guinness, have been held without obvious difficulties.

Keep an eye on the website at http://worldstage.mtvasia.com/home.php. We could not find ticket prices and arrangements. They are supposed to be at http://www.i-city.my/ but the website has no information other than to suggest looking for them on facebook.com. Sorry: too much like hard work after already following three links to find the above information. If i-city.my want to update this article with hard information, then they can fill in the Contact Us form (click link below). They reckon they will get some 15,000 people to the event.

The scale of these events shows that, at last, decent music is marching across Asia which has been something of a rock-cultural wasteland for a decade or more.

That Rock is making a comeback and providing promotional opportunities is emphasised by the involvement of Tony Fernandes' (of AirAsia fame) Tune Group which is organising (not just sponsoring) a series of gigs this year. The desperate Bieber was the first but when he asked Twitter users who they wanted as a follow up, the overwhelming responses were for both classic and modern rock acts of the highest quality.

It seems as if what is beginning to happen is that the three major economies in the immediate region - Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia are beginning to compete to deliver high-quality music in what has, for many years, been a rock-cultural desert.

Much of the credit for that must go to the organisers of the Malaysian Formula One Grand Prix who, following on from Silverstone's lead, started putting on a post-race gig, then built around it with a raft of alternatives including a spectacular techno dance party.

When Singapore began its F1 foray, it decided to go one better and ran, within the F1 weekend, a music festival. This year's star attraction is Linkin Park but there are many more acts lined up.

There is huge pent-up demand for concerts in the region- and people travel from country to country to see them. As countries fight for the tourism dollar, rock events might be seen as a core around which to build an industry that targets the 25-50 age group who have disposable income. There's money in those pockets but it is increasingly difficult to extract unless one sells a fadish tech product.

Concerts put bums on seats on airlines, heads in beds in hotels and cash over the counter in bars and restaurants.

It's cheaper and faster to set up - and a lot less contentious - than, say, a casino industry. It carries few - if any - social risks (unlike gambling to which many countries are turning) and even less likelihood to attract organised crime.

And when people leave, everyone is smiling, not just the lucky few.

It's a win-win situation.