Our roaming eye has recently been to Glastonbury and amongst the many bands they happened to come across a band called Vest Shirt. Vest Shirt are a trio from Dagenham, they wasn’t on the lineup for Glastonbury but they were distributing a few sample CD’s round the tents close to were they were pitched, the ultimate aim was to try and get somebody to listen to them that was in a position of authority or someone that knew someone in authority,
Vest Shirt promote them selfs as a new age, indie, electro metro pop fusion male harmony choir. The CD’s never got listened to in the campsite, everyone had a competition to see how far they could throw them!
The point of this blog? funny things happen at Glastonbury!
Glastonbury 2009 will kick off today for 5 days of live music and acts in the middle of the english countyrside! The weather has been forcast to be nice but im sure everybody going will have their emergency wellies because after all, this is England!! The official lineups dont actually have any info on what is happening tonight and tomorrow, however a source that we have sent to the festival this year assures me that there are live bands on tonight and tomorrow though only on a small scale.
As always the BBC have got extensive coverage, They have the full lineups as well as audio and video’s from the event that will be updated through the course of the weekend, at the moment the BBC coverage will not start until Friday however once it does start it will be covered on Radio 6 Radio 4 and BBC 3 TV.
Creamfields have announced that Halton Borough Council have approved the licence for 2009 so that creamfileds can go
ahead with its two day festival which it stated to run with last year. Last year £7.2M was generated for the local economy because of the festival, when figures like that are thrown around then you would find it hard if you were that local council to say no! There have not been any word on the times of the licence though i would presume they will be the same as last year which was till 4am on the friday and 12 midnight on the sunday.
This year you can expect to see the likes of Basement Jaxx, Tiesto, Paul van Dyk, Dizzee Rascal, Calvin Harris, Mylo Live, David Guetta, 2manydjs Live and Deadmau5 to name a few.
For a limited time only tickets are priced at £100 for the weekend camping which compared to some of the festivals last year is a really good price.
Setting up a festival is a very time consuming, hard work and cost a lot of money. However everyone can have a fantasy festival. Mine would only start off small! First you would probably need to get some finance, not much point in planning anything without and money, There are some companies were you can buy buiness email lists from who you could email, it may be frowned upon at the start but im sure you can get some response from it. Then you need to book some acts, if i was doing it myself then i would have to aim for one big act and then try and fill the gap with more unknown talent. I recon id go for 3 arenas, we dont want to go to big to start up!!
Next we need the arenas, Basically just some massive tents, i dont even know what they are called, there not really bigtops but there not marquee’s either, You would need some security as well, Home security systems would be no good as we need something more, We need brute strength! we need some circus strong men to look over all the people to make sure they are being good!
Finally i plan to have my festival in the middle of a heat wave! People hate the rain and the wet when they are at a festival but if the festival was in the sun then people would love it!! I would have one of my arenas as an outdoor stage, i would also have a ‘Dancing in the rain’ section to it. A bit like when you can run through a mist shower doing the Manchester 10k run i would set up something similar, I would have fire sprinkler systems set up to fire a fine mist over part of the cowd, if it rained it would be a disaster and it would never work but it wont rain at my festival so we are all ok and it will be loved by everyone! anyway Global managed to have Jacuzzis at last years festival!!
Also it would last for 24 hours, i wouldn’t have a restrictive licence it would start early in the morning and it would finish early in the morning, a little like space used to be in Ibiza but lasting a little longer!!
Festivals have been around the UK for years, the likes of Glastonbury was started up long before i was alive and it will continue to grow every year but were do festivals like this start out? Well a lot of them start out small with what i would expect to be extremely different direction, Im sure Glastonbury didn’t set out to be what it is today. Last year a group of us were looking at Peru Holidays (which we cant wait to go on by the way) and it got us thinking about what festivals we could go to when we are over there. When we looked into it the festivals reminded me of what i always expected Glastonbury to be like when it first started up, Many of them celebrate their country and their culture. The likes Of creamfields im sure have partied in Peru, and if i remember correctly it went down well, however for the people of Peru its the festivals that celebrate their country that will attract the tourists which in turn spend their money.
When we are there we will be taking in a couple of festivals hopefully but when we do it should make a nice change, UK festivals are hectic and non stop, Im rather looking forward to something more relaxed and hopefully take in the local atmosphere and local food and drink!
Every year there are countless amounts of festivals spread out all over the country, there are many different ways to get to festivals but boil it all down and a lot of people still just drive their in the car, Unfortunately, Cars at festivals can be great targets for criminals wanting to grab a few car stereos for the car boot sale the following Sunday! Take Global Gathering for example, You Pay your VIP ticket price and that will include access to park in their VIP car park which on the nice little map they produce is opposite the VIP camping area! Ok im sure i recognised some Multi Camera Security Systems covering the car park, their the same system that look over the entrance and other parts of the festival, but this doesn’t stop people. Due to an oversold VIP area there were people camping next to their cars when we got back to ours after the festival, Their was also a windscreen smashed in and talk of a car being taken. Now this could just have been a one off incident, isolated, after all there were thousands of cars there, maybe we were unlucky enough to be close to a victim, however there were some very nice cars parked in the VIP car park, Now im not talking Bentley’s or ferrari’s, but i am talking Focus ST, Golf GTI’s etc, still looking at 20k+ cars. Basically my advice would be not to take nice cars like this, if you have access to a cheaper car take it! If you do need to go in your nice car it may attract attention, the car we saw with its window through certainly wasn’t a cheap car! Has your car got GPS Vehicle Tracking If it is does it have a sticker on the window saying it has, very small details like this could mean the difference between your car getting stolen and your car not getting stolen.
Festivals are a great time of the year, I love them! however you need to be careful and have your whits about you. Going in the car is extremely convenient but just be careful you’re not to flashy as when your in the festival having a good time you have no idea who is eyeing up your car!
Its not strictly festival news but glastonbury is only 8 weeks away and the volunteers of the town have been out in force cleaning graffiti of wall in the town, Soundds lovely! Problem is that some of the graffiti was painted on by Banksy the famous street artist who’s work is admired by the likes of Brad Pitt and is valued in the 1000’s.
The image was of Paddington Bear and is the second painting by Banksy that has been removed when cleaning the streets! The person who owned the wall it was painted on is said to be looking at their insurenace to see if they were covered and they have also been told they can make a claim against the Councill as the drawing was valued at £5000 and the owner of the wall already had a buyer who wanted to buy the painting!
South West 4 have announced Richie Hawtin as the headlining act at this Years South West Four festival held in clapham common. Richie Hawtin will be headlining the The End stage alongside Dubfire, Steve Lawler, Timo Mass and more. Richie Hawtin is conssidered by many to be a Techno God! He can generally be found in dark clubs playing sounds to lot of people goiung nuts like he can also be seen in Cocoon in ibiza. This year he will be in Clapham Common! as wrong as it sounds he is a building block to what seems like an excelent lineup to South West Four!
Dance Island takes place on the 4th of July in 2009 and is only a one day festival just like the old days!! Dance island is held in Cambrideshire and this year has Chicaine as headliners which a really good live and Pendulum doing a Dj set. Dance Island is agin another festival that often flys under the radar of festival gossip! The lineup for 2009 is as follows.
Lab 4
Danny Rampling
Altern 8
Dave Pearce
Kutski
Read the rest of “Dance Island 2009 - Lineup” »
South West Four will take place this year on Clapham Common in London on August 29th 2009 between 12pm and 9pm, considering the limited amount of time and the early close the lineup is jammed packed! there shouldn’t be any problems seeing someone you like in a lineup like this!
Tickets for this event are priced at £40 and can be found on TicketMaster. The luxury lineup for this years event is:
Kiss Main Stage: Hosted By Ministry Of Sound
Sasha
& John Digweed
David Guetta
Eric Prydz
Mark Knight
Scarlett Etienne
Special Guest: Sander Kleinenberg
The End Presents ‘Shake It’
Dubfire
Timo Maas
Steve Lawler
Layo & Bushwacka!
Nicole Moudaber
The Gallery
Armin Van Buuren
Markus Schulz
Tall Paul
16 Bit Lolitas
Special Guest: Bt
Global Underground
Danny Howells
Nic Fanciulli
Nick Warren
James Lavelle
Jim Rivers
Anil Chawla
