agreed the smaller ones are more juicy and a far more respective/apreciative crowd. robin hill was torn apart by bestival even before the festival started!
i did mostly smaller festivals this year and enjoyed them far more than the bigger ones and it wasnt just down to the mud!
i still enjoyed bestival tho just a shame about the rain.
twas nice driving straight off in me van while all others struggled
shame i had to get towed onto site at waveform the following week tho
I've held 3 of 'our' own this year with friends and they have all gone without a hitch. All the best bits of a festival, cheaper and safer too.
Did one last w/e on a farm nr Guildford and it was fab. Well organised and 300 people, with kids turned up.
Wildheart Gathering in April. 300 people. Great little do.
Buddhafield: 2,500. V sweet.
The list is ever growing.
I don't mind working at the bigger ones though I do mind the endless dross and nonsense which crops up due to ignorance, selfishness and arrogant tossers with money. Some folk paid a grand for 3 days of 'Wigwam experience' at Bestival this year only to find they were flooded out, cold and some had been used as toilets before the owners had even finished putting them all up. This was due to site org. not sorting the bogs out BEFORE staff arrived. Me? I have a shovel
people were using the showers as toilets at bestival too and that was in the crew camping area! sick!
toilets are always the worst thing about most festivals, although some are now using the composting toilets which seem far cleaner and less of a trauma than the porta loo's. again it seems to be the smaller festivals that are leading the way here.
maybee one of those porta toilet thingys isnt such a bad idea for next year(dont fancy driving turds around tho my vans slow enough!)...or a shovel perhaps
We didn't enjoy Big Chill because it wasn't as child friendly as we'd been led to believe. Espescially at night, but even during the day there was an element of people who looked at our kids with an expression of 'what the hell are children doing here!'. It gave the impression of being a glastonbury but without the hippy roots. That was our impression anyway.
Our favourite festies to date have been Sunrise and the Big Green Gathering (although Big Green is actually quite big now!). This year Big Green took time out to let the land recover, even tho they are around £135,000 in dept, due largely to licensing impositions, and could probably have done with raising more cash;
2,000 people make far less of a mess of our otherwise beautiful countryside than 35,000 do.
The damage to the land at both Sunrise and Beautiful days this year was terrible, I really hope both sites recover. The sunrise (dis)organisers have moved their site to somewhere less prone to flooding.
Such festivals will cost you less, will be safer for kids
This is what we plan for next year, more intimate and child friendly. We've never chosen a festy for the bands that are playing. For us it's all about the atmosphere anyway. For our girls 7th birthday last week, we set up a couple of large tents, decorated the garden, set up a a drum kit and mike and amp for the kids to mess about on, and a camp fire for the evening
cost that prevents you, i'll organise a couple of 2 hour shifts for you to do over the week which will be in lieu of your ticket.
Hypnovan; May well contact you about this before the start of next years festy season, it's not so much the cost of the smaller festies, but anything that would help us afford to go to more would be cool
Melvin
Around the World in a Tea Daze
1980 1776CT Laurie engine
1992 Leyland Daf panel van camper
1978 Sherpa Autosleeper DeLuxe
Sprite Major Caravan
Please do let me know if you want to work at Buddhafield or any of the smaller events. It's as easy to contact them directly via their website. Note that there are NO litter-pickers,blocked toilets,utterly monged imbeciles or people selling drugs at many of the smaller events. Yes some folks have a glass of wine/beer and 'a smoke' around their carefully managed fires but you won't see them staring at your kids with a can of Tennants and a spliff, as they are mostly like you and I and simply want to look after eachother and be free and safe outdoors. You won't be wandering around the site for hours because 'the site' tends to comprise a couple of grassy fields which you can easily cross in a couple of minutes. Kids are taken care of by Free Range Kids, hired entertainers, workshops,registered child minders and other parents. Can't praise the smaller ones highly enough. Get involved in them and you'll save a packet while having the time of your lives.
Basically Bestival SHOULD have been cancelled for safety reasons but because so much MONEY had been spent on it, it was allowed to go ahead. The site was already unmanageable days before any punters arrived due to the site traffic and a total lack of any contingency plan. Security staff were refusing to work due to having no support, radios (NO Radios!!!, place to put their feet up after a 12 hr shift etc or any way to ask for help if they were able to do their job), the wristband thing went AWOL when I ended up with 4 different ones........staff were given the same bands as punters and were treated the same too....which is a bad thing when you're trying to run an event and some spotty teen/ hired goon stands in your way when you try to get back into the field you have spent a week setting up.
I spoke with Robbie about this, in my bestest counselling style so as not to provoke any reactionary diatribe and he was so far in denial of what had happened that he was actually denying that any of this had happened and that everything I had said was basically a fabrication...lie...what a pillock! A very wealthy, arrogant and irritating pillock.
The grassland will recover, unlike the attitudes of the Da Bank's, the druggies with more dosh than brains who they like to attract to their events and the habitat which was consciously destroyed before our very eyes. If Bestival doesn't go ahead next year, the mongers will simply go to anyone of the other hundreds of 'festivals' and do the same there, so he's simply cashing in on that guarantee.
Please note that just because they are called 'festivals', doesn't mean they are festivals. A festival is a unified celebration (Buddhafield,Wildheart,Out of the Ordinary,Kimberley etc etc) of something like a Solstice, Full Moon, Equinox etc etc and not a celebration of Amy Winehouse's addiction, Grace Jones's pathetic lifestyle or Rob Da Bank's bulging bank balance.
Yes the grass will grow back but I hope that whatever the weather, Bestival is kicked off the festival circuit for good. It's just yet another place for 20-30 somethings to get trashed on illegal drugs under the guise of being a music festival.
I spent some time observing the Main Gate where Police with sniffer dogs were systematically searching bags and people - Great, I thought, but what actually happened was the people who DID bring in drugs (staff were not searched on entry and there are thousands of them, so there's an immediate breach), sold them for a small fortune and/or got totally trashed when they probably would only have been slightly trashed.
The alternatives were available but for example, the guy with the Guarana bar was told by Police to remove all herbal highs, even though it was part of his contract that he could sell them!!! Hebal highs are legal, controlled substances, have the same strength as any other drug but no/less side effects. I didn't encourage anyone to use them, just acknowledged that they are available. I lost count of the amount of times I was offered Ketamine,Acid,E, Skunk, GHB,Coke etc etc and anyone I caught off their faces in any of the spaces I was helping to manage, was duely ejected back out into the pouring rain and sludge or I had to physically carry them to the medi-tent. Bad news. It was more like a refugee camp for acid casualties than a music festival.
Rant over.
Drop me a line next year and i'll help you to sort something out.
We've had some of our best times at festies with ours and others children, our master plan is to get involved with a musically themed play area where parents can bring their children to have a go with instruments they may not normally get the chance to do.
Melvin
Around the World in a Tea Daze
1980 1776CT Laurie engine
1992 Leyland Daf panel van camper
1978 Sherpa Autosleeper DeLuxe
Sprite Major Caravan
I'd show you mine if I knew how to post photos on this forum. There's an 'Img' button above what i'm writing but [img] when I click on it all I see is '[img]' and no prompt to browse and add a pic. See
Right.
1. I now have a photobucket account with some pics on.
2. I don't know how to create an avatar because I cannot find any instructions - just some stuff at the bottom of the 'profile' page which doesn't tell me much.
3. I cannot post pictures (see 2)
4. There is no 4.
5. If it ain't blairingly obvious, I have no patience to figure out how PC's work and so it probably won't happen unless it's a very simple matter.
6. (see 4)
i've not done my abatoir but Mel says you go into your profile
& you can upload straight from your pc, you have to shrink your
chosen picture first,. i haven't the patience to do mine either!!
with photo bucket click on the word 'imgcode' not html or whatever it says underneath your picture, then it's copied & you can 'paste' it directly into
your reply box forgetting about all that stuff up the top there:( quote code list list= img url ect ect) ,.
Around the World in a Tea Daze
1980 1776CT Laurie engine
1992 Leyland Daf panel van camper
1978 Sherpa Autosleeper DeLuxe
Sprite Major Caravan
