Festival Going

Following on from my post a while ago about the vicissitudes of Reptile, the start of this month saw another shock to the Goth fraternity with the sudden cancellation, with a fortnight to go, of AltFest. AltFest was a new, and vastly ambitious festival intended to take place near Northampton and which was supposed to bring together Goth, Metal and general alternative music in a wide-ranging event the type of which had never been attempted before. When news of its cancellation emerged there was a lot of sympathy for the organisers who are, after all, themselves part of the alternative community, and who insisted they faced personal bankruptcy as a result of the failure of the event. They blamed the cut-throat state of the festival market which ensures that suppliers and agents demand so much of their fees upfront that ticket sales must reach a certain volume long before the event actually happens in order for the whole thing to work: and, if it doesn’t, promoters have to take a decision at a certain point whether to proceed or not. The event might still have worked; it doesn’t matter. It has to have proved its workability before it begins, which is a great burden to place on a new event; and AltFest didn’t make it.

Now it seems as though this isn’t an isolated occurrence. Another festival, Jabberwocky, which described itself as ‘alternative’ but was distinctly more mainstream than AltFest, has joined it in its fate – this time with a mere three days to go. It seems that some more blame may in this case attach to the promoters who have something of a track record in cancelling events, but that aside there is the same pattern; and the same scramble among many of the acts to secure another place to play to avoid wasting their time completely. There is something of a perverse mechanism operating here: such caution over making a loss that making a loss becomes more likely.