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Glade Festival Cancelled Allan McGowan am@vip-booking.com
Elsewhere in this issue festival news has been very upbeat – in the Great Escape article we refer to the PRS for Music findings that the festival sector was responsible for a large percentage of the 2009 growth in live revenue, and the Bergenfest, Summer Sundae link up has got the festival twinning project off to a very good start. But not all events are experiencing good times and much as we have talked about the support of local authorities for events, the police can still decide to forbid a festival taking place, even if there is local authority support. Lawyer Ben Challis finds this worrying and alerted VIP-News about the cancellation of The Glade Festival. Amongst other things Ben acts as General Counsel for the Glastonbury Festival and helped found non-profit organisation A Greener Festival with the aim of encouraging music festivals to adopt environmentally conscious initiatives. He also pointed out other
Ben Challis
events that have become casualties in similar circumstances, such as Moonfest 2008, and this year’s Strawberry Fayre. The Glade Festival scheduled for what would have been its 7th edition on July 15-18 this year at Matterly Bowl near Win-
chester has been cancelled, even though, as organiser Nick Ladd states, “The Police themselves said that the Glade 2009 was ‘a well run event with low crime figures’. The local council was in full support of the event and the local people were in and almost 2 to 1 majority support of it but the police still tried to stop it. Ticket sales weren’t strong but they weren’t that bad either – the thing that tipped us into cancelling was the fact that at police and licensing authority insistence we had to spend a total of £310,000 on stewards security and policing. That’s more than we spend on music. The police bill alone had gone up from £29.000 in 2009 to £90,000 this year.” The Glade Festival, started out as a stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2001 aiming to provide a dedicated underground electronic music stage for the best of nonmainstream dance music within Glastonbury.
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Trade Fair Showcase Festival Conference Networking Film Market Awards virtualWOMEX Copenhagen, Denmark 27 – 31 October 2010
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