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Zoo Thousand – Where It Went Wrong

Posted on 09. Jul, 2008 by Ashley in Festivals, Live Reviews: All, Zoo Thousand
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Zoo Thousand Music Festival: been there, done that, didn’t buy the tee-shirt.

This festival for many was a hit. Headliners Mark Ronson (& the amazing Version Players) played a storming set with so many invited guests helping out! Ash & Funeral For A Friend and Flogging Molly all playing to a busy main stage crowd.

For many more, this festival was a complete load of utter bollocks. Me included.

Things started to go wrong when people started turning up. Not a good start. Organiser Danny Blanche says “People turned up much earlier than predicted on Friday”. I was on site at 7.30 and there were about 100 people waiting to get into the campsite to pitch their tents. By 8.30 this number had doubled and this continued until about 10am when the gates were opened. By this point there were huge amounts of people queueing to get in.

Once people were through the 5 hours queues to get into the campsite they were greeted with an over crowded field with no free drinking water and a distinct lack of toilets.

A source told me that the organisers gave them selves one week less than originally planned to prepare the actual festival arena. This lead to gates into the arena being opened 2 hours late. This led to the first two acts being dropped from each stage.

This, for a festival hoping to accommodate 20,000 people on its first day, was not the best of starts. Across the whole day things behind the scenes were not going well.

The promoters had been in negotiations with Primary Talent UK (agents to Dizzee Rascal and many of the acts across the weekend) regarding payments. A myspace blog (that has now been edited) offered apologies but explained that the promoters had missed 3 scheduled payments. My source revealed the true cost of having Dizzee play: £80,000. Gees!

Rumours had been circling for weeks about poor ticket sales and with this in mind many professional acts cancelled their booking. This left stages empty for hours. On Saturday, the rowdy crowd started chanting “play some fucking music” while waiting for The Rascals to play. The band were spotted backstage, I guess they weren’t paid either.

Other acts due to play on the main stage, but didn’t include Roni Size/Reprazent, Friendly Fires, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Athlete and acoustic artist Frank Turner. “I’m a working musician, I earn little money and my budgets are shoestring. I can’t afford to take risks with running a whole paid-up band and crew and fuel down to Kent for a risk of not getting paid” explains Frank on his blog.

This does highlight the business of music. What annoys me is that a lot of people turned out to see the big acts that didn’t play and its shameful that they were there just for the money. There were a lot of seriously disappointed people who feel they wasted their money.

The festival was plagued with more than just cash flow problems. One of the main tents, Tap N’ Tin, was closed for most of the weekend after the organisers found the structure was unsafe. Whilst the choice of food on offer was far better than most expected the price was considered extraordinary. On Friday, the very serious issue of medical attention was revealed.

After being injured by a drunk reveller, one girl waited 20 minutes before a St Johns technician came to investigate. A source revealed that there were actually no first aiders with in the festival arena. A frustrated security guard had to physically leave his post to get medical attention for the girl.

“Obviously, none of this was ideal or planned – and not the quality of experience that we had aimed to deliver – and for that we unreservedly apologise to all those affected by the situation. We want to stress that this was our first festival and that we have dealt with all problems directly and will continue to do so in preparation for next year” explains Danny Blanche.

Last year, KM Group managed to stage a very successful multi-day event on the same site?

The organisers took on more than they could handle. My message for them is this:

Next year, forget the big name big money headliners. They are too expensive and are not necessary. Book more breaking acts. Restrict the number of tents a ticket holder can bring on-site. Provide better access to toilets, free drinking water, first aid, help & information.

The organisers must learn from Zoo8, and if the Aspinall Foundation is willing – Zoo9 will be worth a shot.

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