It started with a cheese sandwich. Not just any cheese sandwich: A limp, processed slice on a bed of sorry looking lettuce, served in a polystyrene box. This image for me, and many others, was the first indication that Billy McFarland’s $12,000-per-ticket Fyre Festival had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
And that was only the start of it.
Let’s rewind to April 2017. There I was, idly scrolling through Twitter. I hadn’t paid that much attention to it all at this point. I remember seeing tweets and articles about some of the bands lined up to play, most of them being acts that I wasn’t particularly interested in, apart from, maybe, Blink-182. But then came reports that there were heavy rains on Great Exuma, the Bahamian island that was to host the luxury music festival, and suggestions from the festival goers who had already arrived that there was nothing luxury about the island, and in fact, the festival was still in the process of being set up. Then Blink-182 pulled out.
Twitter went wild.
News reports and photographs showed the festival site in disarray, and a lot of very angry young rich kids crying about being stranded there with no accommodation or food and no way off the island.
As a reader and writer of psychological thrillers, I was hooked. But after the initial reports of the disaster, with co-founder Ja Rule issuing a statement that “it was not a scam” and “it was not my fault”, the story disappeared into a cloud of denials and lawsuits.
I mostly forgot about it, until January 2019, when a Netflix documentary brought it all back and laid it all bare.
It turned out that the festival had been set up to promote and launch the Fyre music booking app. A service for the super-rich to book headline acts for their own private events. The team working on the development of the app were working on this just like any other development role, unaware that behind the scenes, their boss, McFarland, didn’t actually have the money or the means to pull off the festival as promised. It was promoted via Instagram, where several A-List influencers got behind it – rapidly distancing themselves from it when it all fell apart, having not disclosed that they were paid to help promote it.
The event itself was an unmitigated disaster. The infrastructure was not in place. Instead of luxury cabins that they’d been promised, the attendees were to be put up in a tented village reminiscent of a refugee camp, with mattresses that had been left outside and soaked by the rain. Belongings went missing. In-fighting started quickly, as the kids who’d gone there expecting five-star treatment were left to fend for themselves in scenes that could have come from a modern version of Lord of the Flies.
There was no other accommodation available on the island. They had limited cell phone and internet coverage. There was a lack of sanitary facilities, and they had no running water. There weren’t even enough tents – leading to people being forced to sleep outdoors on what was little more than a disused gravel car park. People collapsed from heat exhaustion and lack of food. Several had to be hospitalised. They were eventually locked inside the airport, while the small planes from Miami started to ferry them back to the mainland, with other planes been called in to serve as rescue aircraft.
Meanwhile, McFarland resorted to desperate measures to try and limit the damage, reportedly asking his event producer, Andy King, to offer sexual favours to the water supply company. The only heroes here were the Bahamian people who worked tirelessly to try to put things right, to look after the attendees as best they could. The people, who have, as yet, not been paid.
The fiasco took down the whole company, including the baffled app developers who had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. Billy McFarland was convicted of fraud to the tune of $27m and sentenced to six years in prison, where I am sure he is not having a luxury experience.
There’s so much material here for a thriller writer that it was almost difficult to know where to start. I, like many others, were deeply entrenched in schadenfreude. As I watched the documentary, it was hard to feel sorry for the rich, entitled brats who’d paid $12,000 for a ticket to this thing. It was fun to relive their horror, as every single luxurious item they’d paid for slipped out of their grasp. And when it seemed like they were trapped… well, the story began to write itself.
I travelled to the Isles of Scilly for research, and spent time on the uninhabited island of Samson. Billy McFarland originally sold his festival as being on a private island owned by Pablo Escobar. Perhaps the first of his lies. I started to think about what else he’d lied about, and how easy it had been to get people to trust him – to sign up for something of such high value, with no guarantees.
Just like the Fyre attendees, I got trapped on an island. The Scillonian ferry broke down on the day we were supposed to return to the mainland. We desperately tried to find another way back, but the flights were all booked, and it would cost too much to charter a boat. I began to feel some sympathy for the Fyre Festival kids, awful as they might have been. And I knew that the characters in my book were going to be even more hideous. Because it’s fun to watch horrible people squirm. And as I worked to shape the villain in my story, I began to think more about Billy McFarland, and I started to think – what if it wasn’t just an accident caused by his bad management of the situation? What if it wasn’t about him getting in over his head?
What if someone planned all this to punish those rich, entitled brats? And right there, was my story.
The Last Resort by Susi Holliday is published December 1st by Thomas & Mercer, at £8.99.
