Bloc Weekend
However you look at it, 2008 was hardly a vintage year for music festivals in the UK. Glastonbury might have been hailed as a moderate success, but even the grand dame of music-in-a-muddy-field weekends had a tough time shifting all its tickets and courted controversy over with its choice of headliners.
James Cooper
Elsewhere, things were even further from being close to rosy. In fact, the Zoo8 festival, which took place in Kent in July, was widely held up as the worst music festival ever after headliners pulled out at the last moment and campers found a site with neither enough space for their tents nor enough drinking water to sustain them.
Other festivals didn’t even manage to take place: both Wild in the Country and Wax:On Live had to be cancelled at the last minute after organisers ran out of money. Those that did go ahead fared little better. The usually reliable Bestival was completely washed out by torrential rain in September, as was the potentially-amazing-but-always-underwhelming Field Day in London a month earlier.
The problems were clear; on top of the terribleness of the British summer, there were simply too many festivals competing for punters’ time and money. There are only so many £100+ tickets that people can buy to see the same bands performing the same sets in different muddy fields. The Times listed 59 different music festivals it thought were worth attending between May and September last year – that’s an average of 11.8 per month or close to three every weekend.
With the credit crunch, it’s safe to say festival organisers are going to struggle this year. When money’s short, people want to know that they will get a great event for their buck. Not some half-arsed performances, a half-cooked burger and lots of mud.
Thank god then for this year’s Bloc Weekend in March. This event is already shaping up to be the most exciting and brilliant festival of the year for people who even vaguely like electronic music.
The line up
First things first, the line up this year is genuinely impressive. What’s more, it’s not just a carbon copy of every festival set to take place this summer; a rare feat in this day and age. There’s no room for the usual indie suspects out promoting their most recent offerings at Bloc – just some of the biggest names in the electronic music community. Headliners like industry kingpin Aphex Twin, original pioneers The Future Sound of London, Afrika Bambaataa, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Green Velvet and Carl Craig, electro-soul poster boy Jamie Lidell and German mentalists Modeselektor would make the festival an exciting prospect if they were all that were on offer. But they aren’t.
Alongside the big boys there’s the cream of the UK’s dubstep scene (Rusko, Benga, Skream, Digital Mystikz, Kode 9 and Appleblim), disco both new and old from the likes of Egyptian Lover and Heartbreak, some brilliant bassline house from the Wifey crew and about a million other really interesting acts – many making their only UK festival appearances.
Then there’s the venue. The last two Bloc Weekends took place at the Pontin's holiday camp in Hemsby, Norfolk. According to reports, the place was a bit grim - some apparently dubbed it ‘Raveschwitz’ and even an official press release conceded that “the pleasure taken in the holiday-resort side of Bloc may have been a little tongue in cheek” in the past.
However, that old Pontin’s was shut down in 2008, forcing Bloc to relocate west to the Butlins mega-resort in Minehead. Opting to house a music festival – and especially one that takes place in March – in a holiday resort is a pretty fine idea when you stop to think about it. All the stages are indoors and accommodation is in apartments with heaters and cooking facilities and beds and everything. This means that no-one will get wet or cold if it’s raining but the place is near a beach if by some miracle it turns out to be one of those slightly freakish warm Marches we sometimes get. Plus, what other festival boasts “the largest water park in the South West”? None, so get your tickets now.
Bloc Weekend is taking place at Butlins in Minehead between March 13th and 15th.
OTHER ARTICLES
