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S INTRODUCING ALL POINTS EAST 10 days, multiple sought-after acts and an elite production team ensured London’s newest innercity festival became the talk of the town. Promoter AEG Presents and event production company LarMac Live led the committed crew on the UK festival circuit’s latest addition, as Kel Murray reports...
All Points East is a new 10-day event that encompasses a diverse 3-day music festival which included headliners LCD Soundsystem, The xx and Björk followed by a 4-day community-focussed, mid-week programme of comedy, outdoor cinema screenings, and park yoga, plus much more to reflect the vibrancy of London’s Victoria Park as a venue. The event culminated in 3 huge APE Presents… shows. Friday’s headliners were Catfish and the Bottlemen, Saturday saw indie heroes The National take to the stage, and Australia’s best-dressed goth, Nick Cave, brought his Bad Seeds out to close the Sunday finale. Fans were even treated to a surprise performance with Kylie Minogue for her and Cave’s creepy 1995 love hit Where The Wild Roses Grow. In short, APE is a cityscape festival offering a varied and high profile line up in a festival setting. Naturally, the quality of production had to follow suit. The 10 days of programming were underpinned by a truly enjoyable festival environment, technical excellence, state of the art facilities and hospitality areas unlike anything seen before in Victoria Park. The vendors behind events such as British Summer Time Hyde Park (BST) and the team from the world’s number one venue, London’s O2 Arena, promoters AEG, set out to deliver the highest of standards across every aspect of the event.
PRODUCTION Production Manager, Ian Greenway, Director of LarMac Live, spoke to TPi about year one: “LarMac has had a long working relationship with Jim King, AEG’s Festival Director, and more recently, has worked with him and the bigger APE Presents team on British Summer Time in Hyde Park, where we look after all of the creative overlay around the site. LarMac has a bit of Victoria Park history too, having also worked on Field Day over the past 6 years. Familiarity with both the site and understanding AEG’s way of working was a really good start for us to be able to create something really great straight from the event’s first year. “First year shows are definitely harder work, but there’s something about a determined and excitable team who are focussing on a new task that is quite inspiring, and that far outweighs the huge effort!” As far as APE’s main suppliers go - Pearce Hire, PRG XL Video, Colour Sound Experiment, Capital Sound and Music Bank - the team is handpicked. Greenway continued: “There isn’t one supplier on site that wasn’t worthy of being there, and once again, we ask a lot of people throughout this kind of event, and yet our teams delivered brilliantly. “I think it’s really important that production, just as any other department, is allowed to build their team from scratch. We have multiple 52
