FESTIVAL FOCUS
FESTIVAL FOCUS 2018 As is the annual tradition, we at Team TPi have packed our tents and wellies to bring you this year’s Festival Focus. Running every issue from July - October, the editorial crew will be speaking to the wonderful men and women who make festival season what it is; busy, bonkers and brilliant...
CREAMFIELDS 2018 Since launching in 1998, Creamfields has firmly woven itself into the fabric of UK dance culture. As the world around us has changed and musical movements have come and gone, Creamfields has consistently evolved and adapted. It is iconic. Artists and punters want to be part of it and the organisers work hard to give them even more each year.
The 4-day festival, which is held in a field just outside Daresbury, Cheshire, takes place over the August bank holiday weekend and showcases a line-up of leading DJs and artists from the worlds of EDM, house, trance, D&B and grime. Curated by the Cream brand – which shot to fame in the 1990s thanks to its Liverpool club nights – the festival now attracts 70,000 people and over 300 of the world’s hottest dance acts. But it isn’t just the music that has taken Creamfields to legendary status, the event is renowned for its ‘go big or go home’ production ethos – staging, visuals, lighting, sound and special effects that combine to create visual and aural spectacles. To fulfil the ambitious production design for Creamfields 2018, 86 trucks of technical hardware (twice as many as last year) and another 120 trucks of staging were required. All of those elements are managed by LarMac Live, with Production Manager Ian Greenway at the helm. “We’re way bigger
than the biggest global flat-pack stadium tours,” said Greenway. “We pretty much work on the show on a rolling 12-month programme these days and, like any live project, it’s wonderful to see the planning grow legs and become a living entity.” That living entity could be mistaken for a production monster, but Greenway and his teams have tried and tested methods of managing such a behemoth task. He explained: “The by-product of doing the biggest ‘this’ or a world record ‘that’ is that the resources that go in to it spiral too - from things like local crew all the way through to trucking. In our case, we stage all of our vehicles off site somewhere really close and they only get called in when we’re actually ready for them and have space on site to get them processed. There’s still only one gate in and one gate out of course, and a single road one-way system around all of our stages which just means we have to phase our load in and out more carefully.” 62
