Music Festival Poster

It’s finally summer! Summer, for those not from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, means double digit temperatures and warm, if any, winds and long hours of sunshine. To Torontonians, it just means next week might not have surprise snow showers.

But undoubtedly, one thing most people look forward to during the summer is the outdoors. Last week, I finally saw the basketball nets on our streets thaw and people staying out of a nice, heated building for more than ten minutes. Toronto as it may be, this means summer is here!

Music festivals are my favourite things about the summer. Every cold winter, I would wait in heavy anticipation for the next year’s juicy lineup at Reading and Leeds, Glastonbury, Pinkpop, Rock Werchter, Download, Eurokéenes, Rock Im Ring and a ton other European and North American summer music festivals,  to see whose shows would I be hoping to get lucky and livestream on YouTube.
Yeah, for all my enthusiasm, there wasn’t a major music festival for miles around where I lived. But hey, thank goodness for YouTube and other enthusiastic fans, right?

Last year, when I’d moved to Toronto, I read a long article outlining the reasons why Toronto’s outdoor music festivals were dying. A major contributing factor was the lack of space in the heart of downtown, a place which is otherwise an artist’s favourite Toronto venue with smaller bands playing at the scores of pubs, bars and taverns, and with more iconic venues like the Danforth music hall, the Royal Conservatory, Lee’s Palace, the Bovine Sex Club, Phoenix Concert Theatre, and the likes of the larger, more ambitious arenas like the Scotiabank Arena (formerly the Air Canada Centre, happy purists?). If you’re planning on popping down to Toronto anytime soon, I hope you were taking notes!

So I thought, heck, just for an imaginary two days, let’s bring back the music to the Toronto outdoors! And while we’re at it, let’s also fill up my portfolio, shall we?

So I present to you all, Toronto’s all new Hi-Breathe Festival!
For two days from 24th to 25th July, join fellow festives and music lovers at Trinity Bellwoods Park in downtown Toronto for music as diverse as the city itself. From the big name headliners (including Morrissey returning to Canada in more than a decade) to artists you’ve never seen before, prepare to leave amazed.

Tickets will go on sale later this month…

Not! 

It’s a fictional festival, for goodness sake, if anything here is supposed to amaze anyone, it would be either the surprising genuineness of my poster and pitch (*ahem* quality, innit?) or your total gullibility.

Before you phone up Ticketmaster demanding your fair share of tickets (capped at 8 per person) to this super exciting looking music festival you’d read about online this week, there’s no such festival happening, but you can check out the lineup anyway. Half these bands don’t exist yet, so that would sure have made for an interesting day. Maybe it would be the start of the next Monkees, who knows?

Note: I had better band names on the first draft. Then I lost internet connection and my supposedly faithful autosave showed its true colours.

Made in Adobe Spark. So remember, ladies and gentlemen, always manually smash that Ctrl+S a few hundred times yourself; goodnight.