A Very Cornish Festival

Posted in Event Holding, Festivals, Music, Music Tickets

Boardmasters 2013 is the ultimate summer festival situated in the stunning Cornwall itself. Most of us are suffering horribly from the current economic state of the UK and quite frankly it isn’t fixing itself anytime soon. Thanks to this little dilemma I can’t get away on holiday this year as every penny has to be spent wisely and then I came across this fantastic festival in Cornwall. In the grand scale of things, as festivals go, this one is a lot cheaper, and in my personal opinion, has much more to offer.

Music festivals are brilliant for a smelly weekend, bad camping and one big booze up, but sometimes it would be nice to attend a festival that is much more chilled out, AND you won’t need to shower five times on your return home. You get a taste of the culture that Cornwall is so full off and you get the live music scene as well headlining this year some outstanding acts such as Ben Howard, The Vaccines and Basement Jaxx, few amongst many. The tickets range from £99 to £129 which is nothing in comparison to most festivals.

But why is it so good? Well there are different events throughout the day such as surfing and BMX and skateboarding events. There is literally something for everyone to be interested in and that is what a festival, in my eyes, should deliver. There is nothing worse than going to a festival that in the end has absolutely nothing good about. Boardmasters has some pretty outstanding reviews on Bring The Noise, a popular site that reviews many different festivals, so if you are unsure check it out and it will certainly make your mind up!

Cornwall is full of culture, history and brilliant things to do, so it is an opportunity to make a brilliant holiday out of the festival. If camping isn’t your style then get a few friends together and rent yourself a cottage or apartment. They’re self-catered which gives you the freedom of what you get to eat and bring with you. Check out Duchy Holidays who have a range of cottages and apartments available in the Cornwall area. You can choose your accommodation to suit you, so it can be as close or as far away from the festival itself, just in case you wish to remove yourself from all the madness.

surfer

While you’re there you may as well stay an extra day and taste some of the fantastic local sourced food available and chill out on the beautiful beaches. There is a stack to do in Cornwall and there is a tonne of information available on Visit Cornwall to get your brain thinking on different kinds of things to do. But honestly, the list is endless! Just remember, you don’t need to be jetting off half way round the world for some decent weather and beaches, you will be surprised how much the good old UK has to offer once you look into it!

 

Crowd Safety and Control

Posted in Event Holding

Organising big crowds can be a taxing task, requiring you to provide security and facilities while ensuring the safety of everyone there. The best organisation will often go unnoticed, simple implementations designed to contain the crowd without ever impinging on their collective enjoyment. If you’re looking at staging an event, here are a few things you may want to know about effective crowd control.

Turnstiles
A turnstile is a fantastic and subtle method of instilling a crowd with a responsible mindset. Overtly it acts as a literal gateway into the event, controlling the flow of the crowd to prevent surges, but the process of passing through it establishes a controlled professionalism that sets the tone for the event. Take a trip to www.wernickeventhire.co.uk if you’re looking at staging a medium to large scale event.  It’s also worth reading www.sdmmag.com/articles/87562 to see how advancements in turnstile technology can further improve your crowd tracking capabilities.

Security Personnel
Security personnel, or ‘bouncers’ aren’t just for nightclubs. Whether you require just a couple of doormen, or a larger team canvassing the whole event, security personnel lend a human face to event protection. Companies like Event Guard specialise in providing highly trained individuals for events to ensure crowd safety; you can find them at www.eventguard.co.uk. Whoever you choose, make sure they’re registered with the Security Industry Authority, the organisation responsible for regulating the private security industry in the UK. Head to www.sia.homeoffice.gov.uk to find out more.

Fencing
One thing your event will certainly need is a clearly defined space. Not only does this delineate the perimeter of your event, but is imperative in conjunction with turnstiles – otherwise people would just walk around them! However, it’s important to strike a balance between secure fencing and aesthetics; you don’t want to make your crowd feel imprisoned! Written in the run up to the Olympics, blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/iainmartin1/100170508 details how too much domineering security can feel sinister and overbearing for a crowd. Check out www.topfencehire.com for the kind of fencing you’ll need, a happy medium between effective security and unthreatening aesthetics.
First Aid
You must have a first aider on site indeed, it’s a criminal offence not to. No matter what you do to ensure crowd safety, accidents are inevitable. In those instances you must be prepared, so visiting www.sja.org.uk and enlisting the help of St. John’s Ambulance should be your first port of call.

Crowd control and crowd safety are massively important for any event, and it can often be simple things like turnstiles and fencing that work most effectively. Prevention is better than cure, and even the site of certain security measures will be influential enough to establish a certain mindset in people, all of which contribute to a much safer, more controlled event.

Festival Season is Nearly Here

Posted in Music Tickets

I’ve been a regular at music festivals for many years; to me they’re kind of a staggered summer holiday. I’m not one for going abroad to fry my skin whilst lay at the side of a pool for a fortnight. I’d much rather be at a festival enjoying the atmosphere and euphoria that comes from listening to my rock gods in a huge crowd of like minded people.

Last year was something of a first for me because rather than just attending a festival, I worked at one too. Whilst attempting to book my ticket for the Bloodstock festival, I found a link asking for volunteers, which out of curiosity I followed. I was really pleased to find that they needed people to work as volunteers in the first aid tents. My first aid certificate was in date so I applied, and to my surprise was asked to work some shifts over the course of the weekend. If you’d like to find out more about volunteering for a festival and getting in free then check out the vInspired website.

I arrived on site on the Wednesday before the festival began. It was weird seeing such a mass of people all busily working on the structure of the stage, putting up crowd barriers and erecting more marquees than I could possibly count. It was like witnessing a load of worker ants all busily toiling away. After pitching my tent I joined the ant colony and was soon busy making ready the main first aid tent, which included helping put it up.

It was incredible just how much had been done by the end of the first day. By the following day, the site needed to be ready to welcome the first arrivals. There was much work to be done still, but seeing the incredible level of organisation and the amount of people on hand, I had no doubts that it was going to be ready on time.

It’s hard for me to describe just how much equipment was being ferried into the site. Even as we were relaxing after our days work, another shift of people had taken over and bringing in masses more equipment to be set up tomorrow.

Moving such heavy weight equipment like PA systems and the stage scaffold across fields has to be done by tractor and trailer. Anything else will just make a mess of the ground or get stuck. The festival had a small fleet of tractors that they had bought from a dealer in used tractors. I was told they’d have a secondary purpose of towing cars off the site if the weather turned the fields into a mud bath similar to last year’s Isle of Wight festival which became infamous for its problems – the report about the problems is still available to read on the BBC website.

My weekend was extremely busy in First Aid. It was good to be able to help some people that injured themselves. I did get to see some acts over the course of the weekend when I wasn’t on duty and even when I was working, I could still hear it perfectly. It didn’t look like there would be any cars getting towed out of the mud. Most of the cases in first aid involved people with sunburn and heatstroke. As for the most unusual casualty to present himself at first aid, I think I would do well to maintain patient confidentiality and say no more about his ‘injury’.

Band Merchandise

Posted in Music

The Midlands music scene has quietened down a lot since the 90’s when bands like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Wonderstuff and Pop Will Eat Itself were up there with the country’s top indie bands. These days they only seem to come out of hibernation to do a few gig’s (mainly hometown ones) around Christmas time.

I’m hoping my band is going to create something of a Midlands revival. We’re getting regular gigs in local pubs and bars on a regular basis and I think it’s only a matter of time before we end up supporting a bigger act on tour. We’ve all made the decision that, if an offer comes our way, we will give up our jobs to go on tour. It’s a risky thing to do, but one that we’d happily take. Even my mum thinks we should do it – she reinforced this with one of her clichéd pearls of wisdom ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’.

Our local pub gigs are getting to be quite popular. We’ve got quite a following locally now and it’s nice to see regular faces turning up pretty much everywhere we do. We’ve even started to make some money from gigging. Most venues pay us for our time – jobs don’t come much better than this – we all love what we do so getting paid for it is the icing on the cake. All the money from our work is getting ploughed back into the band – paying for transport and equipment and some studio time.

We’re also looking into getting some Merchandise made to sell at our gigs. We’ve been selling CD’s for a while now; they’re fairly cheap to produce so there’s a good profit on each one we sell. We don’t burn our CD’s ourselves, that would take way too long, instead we use the services a company that deal with CD duplication. It works out better for a band of our size than selling our music via download sites like iTunes – the cut they take and the likelihood of us being found amongst the zillions of artists on there doesn’t make it worth our while. If you’d like to find out more about revenue from legal music download sites there’s some useful info on the music think tank site.

We’ve been asked several times at gigs for band t-shirts. It seems like a good idea to me. Not only do we make some money on them, but the shirt wearers become human billboards for our band. Now that’s devotion for you. We’d only be looking to get a small number of shirts printed in the first instance. We have found a company that produce branded promotional gifts including t-shirts hoodies and baseball caps. We’re going to plough the money from our next two gigs into getting t-shirts printed.

I hope that talking so much about the money side of the band doesn’t make me sound mercenary. In all honesty I see it as a necessary evil. Without making enough money to keep the band running there is no band. It’s a means to an end and helps us to keep gigging and playing the music we love.

How to Survive at Music Festivals

Posted in Music Tickets

Even  though it’s still cold and snowing outside I can’t help thinking about what the summer has to offer and which bands, DJs and artists I can see during festival season. I’ve been to my fair share of festivals and although you can’t prepare for every eventuality there are a few major pitfalls you can avoid mainly by keeping an eye on your finances and being well prepared before you set off.

So put on your wellies, grab a daft hat and read on to find out how to survive at festivals this summer.

You don’t have to spend a lot to survive at a festival, just be careful with your money and take as many light consumables with you as you can. Banal, everyday items like serviettes, plasters, toilet rolls and even bottles of water often receive incredibly hefty mark ups if you can even find them on sale. Spending £5 on a shower is not uncommon at some festivals and you won’t be receiving the luxury you may expect for that kind of price tag. When I go to a festival I try to carry as little personal belongings as possible, the less you take the less weight you have to carry and the less you may stand to lose.

I try to take a decent sized rucksack like the ones from Eastpak. I tend to fill my rucksack with lightweight small items like a few t-shirts, a lightweight jacket or thin hoody, changes of underwear and socks, a bottle of water and fill small containers with just enough sun cream, shower gel and shampoo to last the weekend as liquids of all varieties are surprisingly heavy. Light items of clothing can be a godsend as often you realistically won’t get a chance to have a decent wash or shower and I’m slightly cringing when I’m writing this but it’s better to have clean clothes and not have had a wash than skanking out in the same outfit for three days!

At a festival the emphasis is on watching as many bands and acts as you can, not creature comforts! Similar to camping, when you visit the countryside you don’t want to sit around watching tv, you want to be outside enjoying nature and the elements. Some festival goers will take almost the entire contents of their living room with them, I’ve even seen people take nice chairs, arm chairs and sofas to festivals. Although it’s an amusing conversation starter they take a lot of effort to get to a festival and will almost definitely end up caked in mud and abandoned by the end of the event!

It may seem clichéd but I think the most important thing to take with you to a festival is your friends. Travelling to and from an event with a group of friends is a much more memorable experience and I find it enhances the experience noticeably more to have people to recount your stories and memories with. It can also be another practical way to save money by travelling in a group as many festivals are in remote areas and can often only be accessed by taxi which will work out astronomically cheaper if shared.

So whichever festival you’re going to this summer, whether its Leeds and Reading, Glastonbury, Rockness , Bestival or anywhere else have fun and make it one to remember.