Ashton Court - Sunday cancelled!
- Thread starter JTG
- Start date
Hollis said:
you could only get involved if you wanted to do it the organisers' way though. Ask the club promoters.
talk of keyboard heroes is just a shit argument really - these keyboard heroes are the people the festival is supposed to be appealing to, if it isn't then the festival is doing something wrong. simple as.
Hollis
bloody furious
JTG said:
Nah - I'm just interested in what they'd have done so differently.. given the basic costs (and they say the size hasn't increased significantly in the last 10-15 years). Maybe they should have folded the thing up when costs increased.
Clearly what most people wanted was a free/low cost festival. They didn't appear to be able to deliver it.
Be interesting to know how Strawberry Fair manages.. there's not exactly many of the things around.
Hollis, that argument assumes that the critics don't do other stuff in their communities which is of course, bollocks.
But as JTG said even if it were true that everyoe who criticises the way things have gone were "merely" a consumer; then surely they are also the people the festival organisers want to attract.
But as JTG said even if it were true that everyoe who criticises the way things have gone were "merely" a consumer; then surely they are also the people the festival organisers want to attract.
big eejit
She looks like Alan Gilzean
It's a bit of a pisser that events that bring people into the city like the balloon and harbourside festivals seem to survive ok, while events for the local community like Ashton Court flounder.
Anyone know how much subsidy these events get in comparison to AC?
Anyone know how much subsidy these events get in comparison to AC?
Certainly the Harbourside Festival is mostly locals, I don't usually go to the Balloon Fiesta so I can't comment on that, and Ashton Court tended (in later years anyway) to attract people from a much wider area.
Gerry1time
Did a wee in Dirac's toilet
Mentioned before, but i was brought in by jenny and steve to help with the web stuff a few weeks before the festival. Too late in some ways, but that's by the by.
It was really interesting to meet them in the weeks beforehand and hear their sides of the story direct. The booze thing, and i absolutely promise this, was a combination of feedback wanting fewer drunken wreck heads around (from artists, volunteers and the public) and the police requiring it. They're not mutually exclusive, and i did see the feedback forms they had in the office that indicated this.
Not saying that the PR couldn't have been handled better for it, if i'd run it i would have done all kinds of things differently, but with them making a minimal percentage off the bar profits, and knowing full well it would put people off, it really wasn't about making more money. They knew full well that if anything it risked making them less.
The other element i saw a lot of was them surfing the web and reading the stuff written about the festival/them personally and getting upset by it. Not referring to urban here, they didn't know of it as it turned out, but other bristol forums, and things like the BBC site were regularly checked. They also got lots of horrible and really personal emails direct to their inboxes too. There were times people battled them over stuff, then disappeared when they invited them in to see for themselves (mainly things like the accounts and the like), hence my saying 'keyboard heroes'. You can't email someone to accuse them of being misleading over the accounts, then just disappear when they offer to go through them with you face to face.
I'm gutted the festival's gone. I think there were mistakes made, primarily not knowing what sort of festival to put on (who was, or should have been , their audience?). If they'd seen the people who were complaining online as their audience, then they would have expected no one to turn up on the saturday. To be honest i half expected it to be empty having seen the stuff online. But it wasn't, it sold well, and if it hadn't have been for the rain, then we'd still have the festival, probably in better shape than before.
Sorry for the rant, i'm not entirely defending what happened, as i said, i could see and can see things that could have been done a whole lot differently and better. But seeing what those guys went through to keep it running this year, they personally have nothing but my complete and utter respect.
It was really interesting to meet them in the weeks beforehand and hear their sides of the story direct. The booze thing, and i absolutely promise this, was a combination of feedback wanting fewer drunken wreck heads around (from artists, volunteers and the public) and the police requiring it. They're not mutually exclusive, and i did see the feedback forms they had in the office that indicated this.
Not saying that the PR couldn't have been handled better for it, if i'd run it i would have done all kinds of things differently, but with them making a minimal percentage off the bar profits, and knowing full well it would put people off, it really wasn't about making more money. They knew full well that if anything it risked making them less.
The other element i saw a lot of was them surfing the web and reading the stuff written about the festival/them personally and getting upset by it. Not referring to urban here, they didn't know of it as it turned out, but other bristol forums, and things like the BBC site were regularly checked. They also got lots of horrible and really personal emails direct to their inboxes too. There were times people battled them over stuff, then disappeared when they invited them in to see for themselves (mainly things like the accounts and the like), hence my saying 'keyboard heroes'. You can't email someone to accuse them of being misleading over the accounts, then just disappear when they offer to go through them with you face to face.
I'm gutted the festival's gone. I think there were mistakes made, primarily not knowing what sort of festival to put on (who was, or should have been , their audience?). If they'd seen the people who were complaining online as their audience, then they would have expected no one to turn up on the saturday. To be honest i half expected it to be empty having seen the stuff online. But it wasn't, it sold well, and if it hadn't have been for the rain, then we'd still have the festival, probably in better shape than before.
Sorry for the rant, i'm not entirely defending what happened, as i said, i could see and can see things that could have been done a whole lot differently and better. But seeing what those guys went through to keep it running this year, they personally have nothing but my complete and utter respect.
A genuine question about the common festie issue of "bringing your own booze" v. having to pay £3++ for a every drink:
I can see why the powers that be like the idea of people not bringing their own, because they can control to some extent how pissed people can get, and specifically have a closing time after which they can be fairly sure people have stopped drinking.
But I can also see why the sheer cost of this puts off those on a budget - a day of drinking at full bar prices (or more!) is f***ing expensive.
And yet surely a compromise is possible: It cannot cost much to have a basic beer tent selling cold cans from bins full of ice.
Surely someone could make it pay, flogging cold tinnies for no more than £2 each, or 3 for a fiver, squat party stylee?
That way, more people wouldn't be so upset at a BYOB ban, and the cops / council etc would still have the "control" that they want.
And given the wholesale price of slabs, you would still make money, so long as you weren't being greedy......
Giles..
I can see why the powers that be like the idea of people not bringing their own, because they can control to some extent how pissed people can get, and specifically have a closing time after which they can be fairly sure people have stopped drinking.
But I can also see why the sheer cost of this puts off those on a budget - a day of drinking at full bar prices (or more!) is f***ing expensive.
And yet surely a compromise is possible: It cannot cost much to have a basic beer tent selling cold cans from bins full of ice.
Surely someone could make it pay, flogging cold tinnies for no more than £2 each, or 3 for a fiver, squat party stylee?
That way, more people wouldn't be so upset at a BYOB ban, and the cops / council etc would still have the "control" that they want.
And given the wholesale price of slabs, you would still make money, so long as you weren't being greedy......
Giles..
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Why *should* someone make it pay?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Well, it didn't work on that basis. Because people like me boycotted it. It shut down. I don't argue that the two are directly causal but the certainly are in part.
I let myself in. Things.
I let myself in. Things.
Callie
Pivoting
Well be careful what Things you let yourself into, some may be dangerous.
do you think ashton court festival went up its own bumhole trying to be something its not? i think that might be a factor too, i never saw it in the early days...i was probably part of its demise
but what i saw wasn't much to do with bristol or bristol people...there just happened to be a lot of them there.
do you think ashton court festival went up its own bumhole trying to be something its not? i think that might be a factor too, i never saw it in the early days...i was probably part of its demise
but what i saw wasn't much to do with bristol or bristol people...there just happened to be a lot of them there.butchersapron
Bring back hanging
120 000 people over the weekend minimum with bands that were my mates headlining playing for free to this shambles in a very short time. In that intervening time people like simple minds being paid 20 grand to appear and figures dropping....
I do think that they were postioning it to be a readings style money maker in future years. In fact, i'm 100% sure of it. But they fucked it up - for all of us.
I do think that they were postioning it to be a readings style money maker in future years. In fact, i'm 100% sure of it. But they fucked it up - for all of us.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Crispy said:
It didn't work. It was never going to. They fucked off everyone who did the usual fund rasing rounds. Why and how? Why did they lose the community that had supported it over the previous decades?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Crispy said:
And to be clear that was a ref to alcohol, not the festuival as a whole.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Callie said:
Because they became about something else. Not what the thing was set up for and had run for all those years for. So yes. In broad brush strokes.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Missed me, i was hiding in the cracks of pedantica!
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
It can be. It's multi-use.
