UK: As part of the company’s commitment to ongoing expansion, Arena Group has welcomed John Farrell to the senior management team as the new Group COO. Arena Group continues to grow both organically and through acquisitions, and John’s addition to the team adds additional resource to support Group management and leadership teams given the ever increasing international size and spread of the business. Farrell brings an illustrious business track record to the Group, and most recently worked for Morrison Utility Services. Previously John also worked as Business Director with both Amey plc and Enterprise plc, where he worked as a…
Author: Festival Insights
UK: With just under four weeks to go, Parklife festival has now officially sold out. Offering a huge array of acts that span dance, hip-hop, grime, indie and pop, this year’s festival will see Manchester locals The 1975 headline on June 10, followed by a heavily anticipated performance from Frank Ocean on June 11. Further acts confirmed include grime collective Boy Better Know, plus A Tribe Called Quest, Two Door Cinema Club, Stormzy and Jess Glynne – while American hip-hop supergroup Run The Jewels have just been added to Sunday’s Main Stage. Spread across eight stages of music and catering…
UK: From September 23 – 24, The Vinyl Festival will make its debut at The Printworks in London, providing a weekend-long immersive vinyl experience. Consolidating all aspects of vinyl culture under one huge roof, festival-goers can dig through thousands of crates of vinyl on sale from 100 stalls of the UK’s most exciting independent labels and record traders, plus a further 48 stands showcasing the newest developments in audio technology, hardware and vinyl care. There will also be Vinyl Valuation area, where collectors can have their records evaluated by a team of experts. A selection of street food and fully…
UK: elrow will join forces with Lovebullets to bring two shows to Glastonbury’s Glade area on June 22 & 23. With the theme ‘Nomads, The New World’, the shows’ visual aesthetics will juxtapose the extraterrestrial with the ancient – encompassing stone-age cave dwellers, medieval knights, Bedouins and ancient Egyptians dancing alongside giant blue ‘space people’ and an array of bizarre creatures. Lovebullets, hosted for the past eight years within Glastonbury’s Shangri-La, will be held for the first time in The Glade this year. Making up an essential part of Lovebullets’ immersive festival programme ‘The House that Love Built’, elrow’s Glastonbury…
Frazer Grant is the CEO of EDCO Event Diligence. Grant and his team have been working with event professionals and their teams for over 10 years, providing professional support and engaging training across the whole of the UK and Ireland. The myriad challenges facing those who put on events and festivals these days can be incredibly daunting. Penalties for serving underage drinkers at one of the bars, failing to operate effective alcohol management plans, and not communicating with responsible authorities appropriately are expensive and damaging. These are some of the reasons why having support from engaging onsite training professionals works…
ICELAND: The xx are set to bring the latest in their highly acclaimed Night + Day series to Iceland this July. Night + Day has travelled from Lisbon to Berlin, and most recently to Brixton, where it ran for eight days in March and saw the band perform a record-breaking sold out seven night run at the 5,000 capacity O2 Academy Brixton. This time they are taking it to Skógafoss, a waterfall two hours east of Reykjavik, where guests can stay for three days. Limited to 6,000 tickets, the festival marks the first time the Skógafoss site has been used…
UK: A collective of festival organisers, pub-venue owners, artists and young voters are aiming to inspire political engagement with 18 – 25 year olds ahead of the General Election on June 8. The collective – including some of the UK’s most popular festivals such as Boomtown Fair, Shambala, and Love Saves the Day – has launched a series of campaigns and initiatives to raise awareness on the upcoming election and how to register to vote. These include: ‘Vote this year, get free beer’, the Mayday Mayday website and a national awareness campaign among festival organisers. The aim of all three…
UK: With its fifth birthday celebrations set for May 26 – 28, We Are FSTVL has sold out. However, in anticipation of reaching capacity, the festival has reached an agreement to expand the site and offer a limited number of extra tickets. Reece Miller, Director of We Are FSTVL, commented: “Due to unprecedented demand for our fifth Anniversary, We Are FSTVL 2017 has seen record breaking sales and a demand for tickets like never before. We’ve been working hard on very detailed plans and a large amount of improvements with all local authorities & Met Police for several months, and…
SPAIN: Primavera Sound will return to Barcelona’s Parc del Fòrum from June 1 – 3, and for the second consecutive year its main concerts will be live streamed by Red Bull TV, which in its 2016 debut obtained over 360,000 views. The crew responsible for the live stream will comprise 220 professionals who will work together to offer over 50 hours of high-quality, multi-channel transmissions. In total, 20 kilometres of fibre optic will be laid down and 30 cameras will be used, coordinated by three creative directors specialising in live music: Paul Dugdale (The Prodigy, Adele), Liz Claire (BRIT Awards)…
UK: Visa has announced that it will be sponsoring Boardmasters this year, which is set to welcome 150,000 attendees to Cornwall’s Watergate Bay for music, surfing, shopping and more from August 9 – 13. Visa will be working with its strategic global partner Square to bring 100% card acceptance to Boardmasters for the first time in the event’s 36-year history. With the roll-out of Wi-Fi throughout the entire festival as part of the partnership agreement, Visa will equip merchants with 350 mobile point of sales terminals. This is set to completely change the way festivalgoers make purchases at the festival.…