The 3 day Sunburn festival in Goa struck a blow this year when the police closed it down for playing the music to loud. The music was recorded at 83 decibels when the council restricted it to 55 decibels. The festival was reopened after organisers made a payment to the local council! Sounds like a bribe to be but the party went on.
Afterwards the organisers were unhappy with the restrictions put in place arguing that across Europe concerts and festivals often reach 110 decibels, A person speaking loudly can reach 50 decibels so the 55 decibel restriction imposed was far to low especially taking into account that all the music is turned off at 10pm.
Noise restrictions are are a common problem in festivals even in the UK with many festivals being held by their licence to regulate the noise coming from the sound systems. One complaint of 2008 for many festivals was what seemed like reduced sound levels in the arenas at several festivals.
Glastonbury has been hailed as one fo the best and most organised festivals in the world. The indipendant servey praised all the people envolved with Glastonbury for their organisation, planning and execution of the event. The survey has also raised areas of improvement which is a good thing as everything can always get better.
Noise was a problem of 2008 but an investigation revealed it was the weather conditions that wee making the noise travel further than normal. People 15 miles away made cmplaints of the noise. Personally i think this is ridiculous. No matter how loud something is, 15 miles away is to far away for it to be causing a nusance and disrupting your day. Some people need to get a life!
The farm on which the Reading Festival is hosted may play host to two festivals in 2009. The plans are still dependant on the borough council in Reading but if they are successful they will play host to the Heavenly Planet festival. This isn’t the type of festival we have grown to know. It is a family based festival with environmental messages. It features world music with some of the 2009 performers including
Drummers of Burundi
Sharon Shannon Big Band
Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
The Wonder Stuff
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba
Oyster Ceilidh Band
Toto la Momposina & Colores de Colombia
Boban & Marko Markovic Gypsy Orchestra with special guests Frank London & Roy Paci
Eliza Carthy
Chase & Status featuring Plan B & Takura
The Bays
Bloco Electro
Bill Cobham in The Big Bang
The Fence Collective featuring The Three Craws – King Creosote
James Yorkston
The Pictish Trail
Ku-Da-Mix Orchestra
Glass Half Full
9Bach
Patrick Duff
Sleeps In Oysters
Spiro
TC & Jakes
The festival will take place on the 10th and 11th of July 2009. Weekend tickets are priced at £75
Blake Fielder-Civil has come out and told how he Ruined something beautiful when he got together with Amy winehouse, Speaking in an interview from rehab he said how he was the person who introduced Amy to drugs. He took crack in front of her and when she asked top try some he gave it to her. He has managed to turn Amy from a beautiful woman just out of her teens to a haggled woman who looks like 30 years older than she should.
Blake has said how he is riddled with guilt and how he has filed for divorce out of his love for Amy and so she can go and save her life, something he doesnt seem to think she can do with him, and no doubt the feeling is mutual throughout the land.
I feel that there is something more going on here though, these are purely my thoughts but it seems a little suspect to me that someone who looks like he is out for anything he can get would just walk away from his millionaire wife out of love for her. I smell a rat, and it smells like its just had a pay day to walk away!
Since 2002 Glastonbury have had a field called Left Field, Next year left field will be no more. A spokes person commented that the area will not be Left field in its current form. The festival is constantly evolving (there was a main area omitted and re invented in 2008) and plans have been kept quiet for 2009 but they will be re inventing the area and giving the festival goers something new and exciting in its place.
Left Field combines popular culture with social justice. Although its no longer at glastonbury the campaighn will still live on.
The announcement that the field will not continue at Glastonbury was made last night at the movie premier of Glastonbury Left Field 2008
The Glade festival in 2009 will be moving to a new festival site. The new site will allow them to open for longer and play the music louder which is a gripe all festivals get from fans. The organisers have been scouring the country for a site with good transport links, capacity for 10,000 people camping as well as being far enough away so the noise doesnt carry as many restrictions. Despite the organisers still looking for such a location the event has still been given a date and a price. 2009 will see a 4 day festival with the price currently at £125 for the weekend. the weekend will take place July the 16th - 19th
Councilors in Leeds and the organisers of the Leeds festival are hatching out plans to ease traffic congestion. Last yeah chaos was brought to the Cross Gate area of Leeds on the ring road as 1000.s of people travelled to the festival on the Friday. New plans are being made to try and change the entry point of the traffic to the festival so that the main ring roads in that area of Leeds are not used to gain access to the festival site.
One councillor described the situation in a rather amusing way if you picture what she said in your head!
“I was inundated with complaints. People were stuck on the roads for hours, people could not get out of Tesco, music was blaring out from the cars stuck in the jam, naked women were running up and down York Road as high as kites and some people had to get off a bus and walk to a funeral.”
I love my festivals (of the dance variety) and one thing i love more than anything is to get myself a little present from the festivals ive been to! One gripe i have is that there not the cheapest clothes you will ever by, T shirts are around £20 and hoodies and hooded jackets are about £30 - £40, but non the less they are a reminder of your weekend away. Festivals usually sell a range of clothes from hats, t-shirts and also printed hoodies. Some of the designs carry the Line-up of the weekend on the back of them so you will never forget who you saw.
At the festivals i went to this yeah they both had “villages” which are basically an area of shops and you could buy pretty much anything you wanted from them!! The main money spinner in festivals however is the Lanyards. Its hard to get through the weekend without one as they have all the set times on. This summer i when to a festival at 3pm on a Friday and by 7pm they had sold out of the “cheap” £8 lanyards so i had to fork out £15 for a “special” Lanyard, it came with… you guessed it, a USB clipped into the clip! Wow. After 4 long months i decided to see if anything was on this 50p (real value) lanyard. To my amazement there was! There were a few sets and wallpaper and other downloadable goodies.
In an underground car park in Manchester there is a big party every Friday and Saturday for 12 weeks of the year and its called the Warehouse Project. It throws parties and the music has a great range and appeals to all corners of dance music.
This Saturday (29th November) They have revealed that the very special guest joining Errol Alkan will be non other than Franz Ferdinand! Now Errol plays a kind of Electra style of music but Franz Ferdinand will be doing a full live set at 9pm. Franz Ferdinand have for a while had some of their records cross over into the dance music scene so I’m not to surprised that this has come about.
Tickets for this night have been sold out for a long time as with all the nights at the warehouse project, if you wait for the full lineup to be revealed then its to late.
The full lineup for the night is:
Erol Alkan
Franz Ferdinand (Live)
Hercules & Love Affair (Live)
Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve (Dj Set)
Late Of The Pier (DJ Set)
Switch
Diplo
The Riotous Rockers
Skull Juice
I have reported about dodgy websites selling tickets on here before and now there have been some arrests. 5 people from London have been arrested for serious online fraud. They sold tickets for the Leeds and Reading festival as well as passes for the Beijing Olympics.
The company selling the tickets were called Xclusive Tickets Limited and they sold 1000’s of tickets and left people out of pocket unable to go to the festivals they thought they had secured tickets for.
People should always be advised to be very cautious when purchasing tickets for anything on the Internet. These people took tens of thousands of pounds from people and they did it by offering the most sought after tickets. If an event is sold out then take it that it is sold out. If you then see a website offering tickets and its a site you have never seen or heard of then steer well clear. As long as the Internet exists there will always be people trying to con you out of money and this is an easy way to do it.
