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New festivals
Gaps in the market The UK will see a bunch of new festivals taking over greenfield sites this summer – Stand Out chats to the festival organisers, which have opted to launch music events, and looks at their future plans
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he UK festival market is a busy space, occupied by hundreds of music and family-friendly events all vying for a slice of the consumer pie. But this summer, the events industry will see new festivals popping up across the UK. DHP Family has launched No Tomorrow at Wollaton Park, Nottingham, Push is working with Continental Drifts to organise and produce Good Hope Festival on Blackheath Common, and Alt-Fest is preparing to take over the Boughton Estate from August.
Inflatable church, anyone?
But that’s not all. Leicester Music Festival will take over Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road Stadium, Impresario Festivals has created a third edition of Rewind in Cheshire, Live Nation has revealed details of Calling Festival, and Mama Group is invading North Devon with Somersault Festival.
Five-year plan Leicester Music Festival, set to take place on July 25 and 26, is the brainchild of Shane Whitfield and Manoj Keshavji, directors of LMF Leisure. The pair has invested more than £1 million in the project and hope to boost the local economy and put Leicester on the musical map. Whitfield told Stand Out: “I’ve had an idea in my head for five years but I didn’t want to jump in at the deep end. I’d had some conversations with Ricoh Arena, because they are an established venue and are used to hosting live events, but I really believed that Leicester needed an event of this nature. “Since BBC Radio 1 brought the Radio 1 Big Weekend to Leicester, there’s been nothing, and so I felt that there was a market for a festival,” Whitfield explained.
Organisers must be original if they want to “stand out” in a crowded festival marketplace
Whitfield had a six-month long conversation with the events team at Welford Road before putting pen to paper but now Leicester Music Festival has a five-year plan. The stadium can hold 22,000 people but LMF Leisure is aiming for 15,000 per day. Whitfield is looking for sponsors and finalising event infrastructure plans, but he has already appointed Event Production Solutions, which will install more than 6,500 square metres of Temp-A-Path in 24 hours to cover the entire playing surface at the stadium. The ground protection will protect the pitch from fans of Union J, Sam Bailey and Professor Green, which are on the line-up. Next year, Whitfield is looking to add American artists to the bill but only if the inaugural event proves that there is a market for a large-scale music festival in Leicester.
Gap in the market It’s this lucrative gap in the market, which
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David Heartfield, managing director of Impresario Festivals, and festival organiser of Rewind, identified. Impresario has revealed a brand new addition to its portfolio – Rewind North, at Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire. It will join Rewind South and Rewind Scotland, entertaining festivalgoers with their love of 80s artists and fluorescent tutus. David Heartfield, festival organiser, explained all: “We launched Rewind South in Henley in 2009 and Rewind Scotland three years ago. Both have hit capacity at 20,000 so we thought we’d put one in the middle.” Heartfield and his team identified the Manchester area as the perfect location for Rewind North and discovered Capesthorne Hall – the event will take place from August 29-31 and the location was a natural choice. “We had a look at our tickets sales and our audience was not coming from the Manchester area. People will drive a couple of hundred miles for an event and travel to Henley or Scotland but there was a definite gap in the market in the North-West.” As Stand Out types, ticket sales stand at 30 per cent and are following the trend of its sister shows, commented Heartfield. But how will Rewind North stand out? “Each festival does not feature the same artists and we always work to site. The hall has a great setting with a lake so we design the festival for the site we’re going to. There are some component parts such as the silent disco and inflatable church but they do not necessarily appear in the same order,” Heartfield continued. “We might do some giant projections on the house to make things different or we might have a water feature on the lake, we’ll see what happens.”
Somersault is set to take place at Castle Hill, Devon, from July 17 until July 21 with Jack Johnson and Ben Howard headlining – the Castle Hill estate, however, will not be the main focus of the site. Rather, the site will be dictated by the shape of the land and Somersault’s main stage will not stand in front of the main house. Instead, festivalgoers can expect a hidden valley with ancient follies and streams – a site like no other which will not be drowned by corporate sponsorship. Empson and his team are currently engaging a level of sponsorship but he’s confident in the festival – there’s an ambitious three-year plan in place and potential for international versions of Somersault and that’s before gates have opened for the very first time.
Plans and potential
Be original
Also new for 2014, Mama Group has launched Somersault Festival on the North Devon coast, a five-day music festival with a large outward bound element. John Empson, co-founder of Somersault, explained: “The principle concept is very different to other festivals. The festival site is a hub where people can hang out and then have five days to go and have a surf lesson, or go coasteering or learn photography. The model is a traditional summer camp but with a festival in the middle.” Empson said that the idea for Somersault came together “organically” – the festival, a joint project with Tim Harvey, who is also creative director of Lovebox and Wilderness, has a licence for 20,000, which Empson commented that they expect to sell.
According to Neil Butkeraitis, director of UK Events, the trick is to be original. Just like Empson, Butkeraitis argued that successful festivals keep audiences happy and offer something different. UK Events is the new promoter behind The Hop Farm Festival, Kent, which also has a new production and marketing team for the 2014 event. With fans disappointed by the demise of last year’s festival, The Hop Farm in Kent is working with Butkeraitis, and his team to bring he festival back to life. The “new” Hop Farm Festival 2014 will take place over three-days from July 4-6, offering fans some of the best live music in the Kent countryside. “We have a five-year plan to build the festival up,” Butkeraitis told Stand Out. He
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Impresario has launched Rewind North at Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire
confirmed that he is currently designing the festival site and examining a new site design which will see four stages including a jazz and blues lounge. The idea is to educate its audience about music by hosting a diverse range of bands and artists, as Butkeraitis believes that the very best festivals are those which are diverse and cater for a number of musical genres. “We’re currently going through a full review to make the festival a nice experience. We’re looking at how we can eliminate queuing, and are introducing lots of entertainment at the ticket and wristband exchanges to keep families entertained.” UK Events is working with Arcadia Spectacular to bring dramatic artistic elements to the event, which will feature fire shows and sculptures. Butkeraitis concluded: “We are trying to make people interact with the event – gone are the days where you can just give people a series of concerts. We want people to have a good time, turn up, see what we’re about and grow with us, and to do that, we have to be original.”
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How do you make your festival stand out? Discover how and why the organisers of Parklife, Bounce, Village Green, Greenbelt, Bearded Theory, Beverley Folk Festival, Just So Festival and Sonisphere are developing their events and festival sites
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t’s fair to say that the festival market is maturing, and as a result, consumers are becoming more discerning about which festivals they choose to attend. Thankfully, savvy organisers do not take the business of festivals and ticket sales for granted, particularly as the market continues to grow. According to 2013 research by Festival Awards UK, the recession has led consumers to have a more cautious approach to spending. But what does that mean for organisers? If you are looking for the simple answer then it means audiences are being more picky. However, you’re not daft and you don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to work that out: The perfect formula results in a sold out event and an ever-loyal fan base. Festival audiences should never be taken for granted, so it’s paramount that organisers constantly examine their offer, identify what they need to improve and then get on with the business of developing their sites and processes to deliver the very best experience. And guess what – that’s exactly what’s happening at festivals across the UK. “Listening to our customer’s thoughts on how a site works is crucial, as it’s them that use it,” comments Ben Johnstone, site manager at Parklife.
For 2014, Parklife is increasing its capacity to 65,000 per day – as you can imagine, Johnstone and his team at Ground Control, which produce the event, have had to spend some time redesigning the site to accommodate the jump in numbers. He continues: “One of the biggest changes has been to greatly increase the bar frontage on the event. At present, it stands at well over half a kilometre. With this much bar and the increase in size of the tented stages, it would be impossible to get everything in, so we are creating a central bar area, which houses 190 metres of bar frontage and our main merchandise stand.” Parklife takes place on June 7 and 8 at Heaton Park, Manchester, having moved site in 2013. Parklife Weekender 2014 will be the event’s second year at the new location but this year’s sees an increase in the number of outdoor stages to three. Johnstone and his team have roped in the expertise of an opera designer to create one of the stages. Expectations have been raised. Johnstone explains: “With the increase in capacity, we are having to build on the success of the Parklife Express bus service and increase its capacity from 15,000 to 25,000. One addition is the creation of a temporary bus station inside Platt Fields Park – where the festival used to be held –
here, we will bus thousands of people from the south of the city. The other location will be in the city centre. We are also moving the location of the bus station inside the park to cope with the extra buses required.”
Festival character The coming summer season also sees the high profile returns of events cancelled in 2012 and 2013. GuilFest is making a comeback to Guildford’s Stoke Park from July 18-20 and Sonisphere will take place too. The rock and metal festival, run by Kilimanjaro Live, will take over Knebworth Park from July 4-6. The three-day event kicks off a busy season for KiliLive team, as Zac Fox, head of operations, points out: “We’ve got a full festival calendar this year with Sonisphere, Wakestock, Belladrum and Vans Warped and are putting a lot of our work into developing their character. “We have established a great community feeling at Sonisphere – it means we can talk directly to our audience and find out what they want,” she continues. “One piece of feedback that we consistently get is that they like the atmosphere at the festival, so we’ve decided to develop this by taking the booking of all food concessions in house. It would be simpler to ring up one guy and get him to
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bring the lot but instead we are going to cherry pick each food trader. We’re looking to get an amazing mix of bespoke units, adding to the festival in colour, interest and hopefully some great smells!” Kilimanjaro Live is also responsible for Wakestock. Now in its 14th year, the threeday event takes place from July 11-13 in North Wales. Again, Fox and the KiliLive team is developing the event, and in October spent a week locked away to brainstorm new ideas. Explains Fox: “We came to the conclusion that Wakestock’s main USP is its stunning location and, therefore, that should be at the heart of the event. The festival will now evolve to become Wakestock Gwyl Y Mor, (which is Welsh for Festival of the Sea).” Wakestock will celebrate all that is great about the Lyn Peninsula plus showcase the best music and wakeboarding, Fox says. “We are going to offer local residents discounted tickets and increase the Welsh influence on the event as a whole. The festival audience generally spend the day at the beach or marina so we’re also developing an idea to open the site up to non-ticket holders during the day, holding produce, artisan and craft markets, hosting Welsh language and English language folk, comedy, spoken word and other entertainment so that we give people who wouldn’t normally attend a festival the chance to have a look around, play on the fun fair and generally enjoy a great day out. We want the local people to be as proud of the event as we are.”
Local crowd Local is a key theme for 2014 – organisers are keen to involve local communities and promote local businesses. It’s a trend witnessed by Adam Hempenstall, director of Peppermint Events, who says that organisers are looking for new bar experiences. Peppermint Bars will be working with Bestival, Secret Garden Party, Boomtown and Field Day this year and Hempenstall and his team will also be exploring and “feeding” the craft beer “revolution” with local ales, beers and ciders. Consumers want local products and so the Peppermint team is working with a collection of micro-breweries to give festivalgoers something different. It’s a notion that Chris Wade, artistic director of Beverley Folk Festival, is addressing too, opening up the event to allow local residents without tickets to wander round the festival’s craft stalls and concession areas. Allowing people to
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Just So Festival takes place at Rode Hall Estate and sees performances in the great outdoors
experience part of the festival and get a feel for the event can lead to ticket sales, she says. And like Kilimanjaro Live, Wade and her team have opted this year to bring the concession management and catering in-house, sourcing traders and food stalls themselves. Again, the bars at Beverley Folk Festival will offer local ales, catering to a local crowd that it wishes to grow in 2014. It’s a trend that Hempenstall is seeing: Organisers are splitting the food and beverage offer and contracting them separately to get higher returns and better levels of service.
Getting it right first time Beverley Folk Festival moved site in 2013 to Beverley Racecourse – the 2014 event
will take place from June 20 to 22 and will increase capacity from 4,500 to almost 6,000 over the weekend. Wade explains: “In 2013, we moved site and so this year, we are building on our move. It’s difficult to move site and get it right first time. Last year, we learned a lot about crowd movements – the festival takes place in the middle of the racetrack and we had one crossing point. This year, we are concentrating on getting the crossing points right and so we’re putting in an extra crossing and putting on street entertainment to encourage people to move more.” Wade and the festival team are also improving signage, having recognised that it’s difficult for festivalgoers to locate “familiar
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stages” on a site that no one is familiar with. Also, the new location has enabled Beverley Folk Festival to offer more camping tickets and increase capacities in the main festival arena by 400.
New home Moving an established event can be daunting. As Wade explained, getting site infrastructure right in year one at a new location is a difficult task but it’s one facing Bearded Theory and Greenbelt, which both have new homes for 2014. Bearded Theory is moving to Catton Hall, Derbyshire, from May 23-25, and Greenbelt is heading north from Cheltenham Racecourse to Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Paul Northup, creative director at Greenbelt, explains: “After 15 happy years at Cheltenham Racecourse, last summer we were faced with making the difficult decision to leave our Gloucestershire home because of extensive redevelopment work taking place at the racecourse over the next two years. The upheaval and impact of the work involved with this redevelopment project would have meant us having to build a hugely diminished festival – one that wouldn’t feel like Greenbelt for our punters.” The Greenbelt team had already identified and visited Boughton in 2012, as part of a
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scoping exercise. It investigated a number of other strong optional sites in the weeks following its 2013 festival but a decision was made to place the all-age, family-friendly faith and justice festival at Boughton House. Northup adds: “The festival will look and feel very different at Boughton. It’s a greenfield site for a start. This obviously presents challenges to the way we plan and build our event. But they’re positive challenges – as we’ll be building in a beautiful natural environment where the actual location will play a characterful part in creating what we are convinced will be an exciting festival experience. We’ll be able to work with the site and our surroundings, rather than having to occupy a built environment and dress it up as a festival. This is an incredible opportunity for us to rediscover what Greenbelt looks like back in the field, as it were,” he continues. “It’s not so much that the venues and the programme will be radically different – although we will be re-naming and re-imagining both our venues and our programming – it’s that the physical environment in which we make Greenbelt this summer is so different from the one at Cheltenham Racecourse that the festival will have an utterly different and, we hope, more magical feel to it.”
Family-friendly events are growing in popularity – Just So Festival, Lollibop and Bounce all have changes on the cards for 2014
Location, location, location The organiser of Bearded Theory festival has confirmed that its new move will allow the event to build “permanent foundations for future years”. Catton Hall is an established festival location, hosting Bloodstock and Big Session in 2012. However, SBH Events is currently looking at venue options for Lollibop Festival, which has previously graced Regent’s Park and the Olympic Park. An announcement is expected at the end of March when dates and location will be revealed. Lollibop is just one of a number of growing family-friendly and children-orientated events. Last year, Sledge launched Bounce Festival at Old Deer Park, Richmond, and 2014 sees its return with some new developments. Laura Capell, managing director of Sledge, explains: “We plan on increasing capacity from 8,000 to a maximum of 12,000 in order to keep Bounce Festival growing at a steady rate. In terms of production, the main change this year is that
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Clear communication For organisers that are moving site and making changes, communication and effective messaging is key. It’s something that the Bearded Theory team has kept in mind. So much so that over the last four
Silver Stage will also be supplying We Are FSTVL with a S5000 TriSpan raised on 0.5m base extensions to create an extra special VIP arena – a S2000 canopy will also be used to create a VIP walkway, and, in addition, two S2000 structures in closed configuration will be used for a small VIP DJ stage and silent disco. We Are FSTVL, which launched in 2013, will return to Damyn’s Hall, Upminster, on May 24 and 25 with more than 150 artists playing across 16 stages. Two brand new stages are planned as are improved toilet and car parking facilities and a vast transport hub to house a national coach service.
In 2013, we moved site and so this year, we are building on our move. It’s difficult to move site and get it right first time months, likes on the festival’s Facebook page have grown organically by 50 per cent – if Bearded Theory communicates the event changes clearly then the transition from one festival site to another will be smooth. Bearded Theory’s John Atkin explains: “In a way, festivalgoers can be a slightly conservative lot – they know what they like and they like what they know. We believe it’s very important for people to be able to visualise a site before they get there, so they’re already beginning to feel relaxed and comfortable, rather than feeling like they’ve been dropped in the middle of a field with no sense of location. Much of the Bearded Theory layout will feel familiar, though of course moving to the new site, with more space, gives us the chance to do more of what we’re good at.” Bearded Theory will utilise the site’s woodland areas to create Locked Inn The Woods, a chill out arena in woodland glade with atmospheric lighting plus the surrounding parkland is giving the organisers more opportunity to spread out, so there’s more room for a variety of campsites.
Feedback from last year’s inaugural event has allowed the We Are FSTVL team to make important infrastructure changes. Organisers must listen to their audience to identify their needs, and it’s something that Just So Festival takes seriously too. Comments Sarah Bird, its director: “Our audience are very vocal and give us lots of feedback. The most common request we’ve been receiving is about allowing caravans to the festival, so this year as well as growing our allocation of space for camper vans, we’re allowing caravans for the first time. We’ve seen a real growth in demand for
both glamping packages and live in vehicle passes over the last 18 months.” Just So Festival takes place on the Rode Hall Estate from August 15-17. It’s a family arts festival which sees performances in densely, wooded areas and by lakesides. “There are no huge site changes for 2014, although we’re always developing areas,” says Bird. “For the first time in 2013 we used an area of the woods that’s a natural arboreal amphitheatre and we plan to develop that further with more performances. We’re also going to expand the programming down at the lake” Bird and her team are keeping overall capacity at 5,000 and every year, they shift the focus more towards the weekend campers by reducing the amount of day tickets they sell and increasing the weekend camping ticket allocation. The Stage Management Company, Classic Canvas Cheshire, UK Loos and Liquiline will be working on Just So Festival this year, which will also see a new waste management team brought in to reduce the time it takes to clear the site and improve the festivalgoers’ experience.
Comfortable levels The festival experience is extremely important – some organisers are working behind the scenes to implement new measures that are not necessarily seen by an audience. For 2014, Metal Culture has big plans including the introduction of dedicated zone managers to support production health and safety and to look at the issue of noise monitoring more closely.
Brand new plans New for 2014 and TwistUp Productions will be running an exclusive backstage area at Glastonbury’s Unfair Ground – a 10metre dome with a bar will offer Spanishstyle catering – and TwistUp will also offer Spanish-style catering services at VW Whitenoise Festival at Euston Park – another festival which has moved site for 2014.
Beverley Folk Festival moved site in 2013 – it is building on the move for 2014 and has taken concession management in-house
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we will be bringing the entire site closer to the road, whereas last year it was set further back in Old Deer Park. The reason behind this is because the festival was well received by residents and deemed a success, therefore the council has allowed us to move closer to the road to maximise our branding and awareness.”
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Village Green, which takes place in Southend, has had a new premises licence granted
The new measure is needed as Metal Culture, which organises Village Green has been granted a new premises licence, so there is potential to grow the main Village Green event to include the Sunday as well and turn it into a weekend festival. Says Sean McLouhglin, founder of Village Green: “We developed Village Green as a one day multi-arts and music festival, as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2008. The first year attracted 8,000 festivalgoers. In 2013, that number grew to 34,000. “But last year we decided to use the infrastructure that was in place for the Saturday to add on a separate, free, oneday festival for local schools, which we called Village Green – The Next Generation. This took place on the Friday before and presented a fantastic opportunity for the young people of Southend to showcase their music, film, visual art and performing talents on a full size saddlespan festival stage. We also ran lots of workshops and masterclasses that enabled the kids to try out all kinds of new skills through art, music and performance activities, journalism workshops and much more. “This year, we have applied for an increase in numbers in the park on our licence and have just been granted it. However, we don’t intend to grow it any further. The festival takes place in Chalkwell Park, which is in the middle of an urban area so there is a finite
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amount of space, and a finite capacity. Our focus is on keeping the numbers of people in the park at a comfortable level.” Metal Culture contract a number of organisations to work on the event including Phase Hire, Rawleys, Ethix Management, Acorn Event Structures, Eagle Hospitality, Vicarage Marquees, Firefly Solar, Headline Security, Gigtent and DCRS. McLoughlin continues: “We are an arts charity, so our emphasis isn’t on growing numbers, but on constantly improving the
quality and diversity of the festival. This year we have a new space in which we are creating a ‘Kid’s Village’. This will be an area full of arts installations and child-orientated music and activities. We hope to be working with local schools to get a host of junior ‘tour guides’ who will take people through the space and explain the work to them. We are also developing the involvement of more event management students with the production side of the event.” Watch this space.
Parklife is increasing capacity for 2014 to 65,000