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Neil

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Blog Entries posted by Neil

  1. Neil

    server tuning

    By Neil,

    Following the problems of last Monday night (when the Reading/Leeds announcement was made) with accessing the forums - they were incredibly busy - I've been looking at how things might be improved before Glasto ticket day.

    Some changes have already been made that should see a small improvement of around 5%, and a number of other issues have been identified that should improve things a fair bit more.

    Rather than just go ahead and make the changes and then discover that too late that it's made things worse, they'll be some testing done under heavy load before they're put in place. The first tests are likely to happen over the weekend sometime (most probably in the small hours) so if you come onto the forums and find them very very slow, this is likely to be the reason why.

    Once the first set of changes have been made and tested, they'll be further changes and tests made during next week that should improve things even further.

    It's hoped that these things will make a significant difference to the numbers able to use eFestivals at any given moment.
  2. Neil
    This was the first time I've sat thru a licence hearing under the new licencing act, but the procedure was much the same as under the old one. The only noticeable difference is that "interested parties" who are members of the licencing board are no longer allowed to be involved with making the decision.

    This meant that a certain Pilton councillor (I won't name him, this isn't meant to be personal) who has been a member of the board in the past was excluded this time around, tho he was still free representations within the legal remit of the licencing act. And as ever, he moaned and moaned on anything he could, and it's obvious that he'd stop the festival tomorrow if he could, on the basis that he just doesn't like it.

    It was good to see that this year there were no outright objections to the festival going ahead - this is a first. I do presume, however, that this new attitude from the objectors isn't because they're happy with the festival, but just because they've recognised the reality that they won't be able to stop it. Instead, this time around, the objections were attempting to stop the increase in size, and the granting of a four year licence. With the festival so much better run nowadays - and with Michael taken out of the process with Melvin Benn as licencee (there's many that simply hate anything to do with Michael) - it's good it got the licence it wanted.

    At the end of the hearing, I had Chris Malcolmson (who is the council officer [not a councillor] responsible for health & safety [i think]) come up and ask me if I'd be doing the online commentary that I've done in previous years. He said he'd very much enjoyed reading them in the past, which was good to hear - I'm always concerned that along the way somewhere I might accidentally misrepresent what someone has said. Although I've had positive feedback on what i've written in previous years from GF staff and supporters, as I'm of course on their side I'd sort-of expect that; Chris' comments gave my confidence in my writing a nice boost!
  4. Neil

    signs of the summer

    By Neil,

    So this year the bubble has well and truly burst. Alongside the new festivals that failed to get off the ground there were also some established names that failed completely or suffered from lower sales. Meanwhile, the better festivals held their own or grew as they were hoping to do.

    So what happens when Mean Fiddler's Festival Republic's Melvin Benn gets asked about the trends this summer? He doesn't pick on the festivals that suffered, but instead comments that he's heard that sales were down for two festivals whose sales were better or as good as last year.

    What do these two festivals have in common, aside from having been lucky enough to have had good weather in an awful summer? It just so happens that they're the two biggest camping festivals that are outside the Festival Republic / Live Nation / MCD cosy little family group, and one of them is directly up against Melvin's latest project Latitude. Strange that, eh?
  5. Neil

    my wonderful secretary

    By Neil,

    I have - apparently - a wonderful secretary, who calls festival organisers to arrange access for eFestivals staff. This is the latest scam being tried by some to blag their way into festivals.

    Are people really so stupid to think that something like this will work? The answer of course is yes . Does it work? Nope - and these people aren't even clever enough to cover their tracks. Scammers are always a few sandwiches short of the full hamper.
  7. Neil

    it's a small world

    By Neil,

    I've just had a PM on here from an old mate, who recognised the name of another old mate in a post I'd made (tho he doesn't remember me, the bastard ).

    edit: a few PMs later with some reminders, and he now knows who I am.
  8. Neil
    I get endless press releases about various bands playing a "secret show" - it's so secret that they're sending out press releases.

    What's the score with this idiot tosh? Is it something that's been made up as a marketing tool in a "oooo, I got tickets to their secret show, I'm such a big fan" kind of way, or are they shows that they thought they didn't need publicity to sell tickets for but then found they couldn't sell the tickets?

    Either way, they're generally for bands I wouldn't for a second waste my time on seeing. Does anyone get suckered by these really?
  9. Neil

    on the blag

    By Neil,

    Why does the world and their dog think that eFestivals is here to provide their organisation with a special and personal service for free?

    Very regularly, eFestivals gets emails from research assistants who want to get us to do their research for them. Very often, the info they're after is easily available and easily findable on the website, but they can't even be bothered to look. Not only that, they are very often offended at being told that us doing work for their commercial benefit will cost them.

    Then there's governmental organisations. Just because they're an arm of govt they think the world is at their command, even more so if they're an arm of govt that's used to having people jump on their command (hello old bill! ). Taxes are paid by individuals and companies so that these arms of govt have a budget with which they're able to operate in the commercial world by buying in services when needed - so cough up or go away.

    If we were sat here all day twiddling thumbs then perhaps they'd get what they want. As we're not, we're not going to put down what we're doing that pays the bills to do what you're too lazy to do yourselves.

    Alongside our charitable commitment of giving at least 1% of our turnover (turnover, not profit) to charities eFestivals is happy to help many non-governmental and non-profit organisations for free, but to all other organisations the answer is no.
  10. Neil

    rumours

    By Neil,

    I've just visited the official Download forums for the first time in several years and they're hilarious.

    First up was me noticing the forums becoming unusable for a while with a "server busy" message ... which happened to coincide with school's morning break time. At a guess - because i've seen it year on year on the eFestivals forums - a large number of the people posting there are not attending the festival and know they're not; they're posting just to pretend to be 'cool'.

    Anyway, the point of my visit was to look at what people were saying about the news piece that eFestivals published yesterday (here) where we say who we think are the Download headliners this year, and to compare what's being said over there against what people have posted on the efests Download forum.

    There's a large number of people on the official forums who don't want to believe what we've said or who think we've guessed at these names, while the occasional person points out that we've got it right in previous years before the bands were officially announced (which may or may not be true ... I can't remember if we've always had it spot on for Download or not, but if not we've had the majority of it right). The people who think we're guessing often suggest that we guess by reading what people are saying on forums such as those and then make a stab at guessing right.

    We don't. We rarely take any notice of what people post on forums about which bands are playing, either here on eFestivals or anywhere else (the 'anywhere else' would have us checking other forums, which we don't do unless there's a specific reason to check something). The problem is that too many people like to claim that their grannie's cat's uncle's budgie knows some insider that has told them that so-and-so are playing, and invaribly these turn out to be false.

    Over the years eFestivals has built up a number of sources who have proved - via sending us accurate info year-on-year - that they know what's what, and the majority of our info this early in the year (before stuff starts appearing on bands websites) comes from these. We normally can't give any info on who these people are and where they've got their info from, because it will drop them in the shit with wherever they've got the info.

    While we have a lot of confidence in what we publish - particularly if done in a news piece such as yesterday's - we only ever state absolute confidence in what we're saying if we have that absolute confidence, and that mostly depends on what exactly we know about the person sending us the info and where they're telling us they got it (and whether we believe all they might tell us ... because of what they're doing, they might be telling us porkies about where it's come from).

    Our year-on-year record with rumours is, IMO, very good, and as far as we're aware is far better than anywhere else manages, but that doesn't mean that we guarantee any rumours we give; after all, they're rumours. Only festival organisers are in the position to really know what's what. We do our best including double-checking what we're told via a number of different ways, but they'll never all be 100% perfect as we're using imperfect info.
  11. Neil

    MyFestivals groups

    By Neil,

    Many people appreciate the tight moderation of the main forums here, as it keeps the forums focused on the festivals they're about - unlike other forums on other websites, they don't become full of posts about what someone had for lunch and other very-off-topic things.

    To give those users here who would like more freedom to chat about their favourite festivals and anything else, we've now added MyFestivals Groups. Anyone can create a group along with a forum for that group, and the leader of a group gets to say who can join the group - if a group is public then a user can apply to join the group and the group leader aproves them as a group member. There's also the ability to create private groups, where the group leader invites people to join.

    The groups and the forums are each moderated by the group leader, so groups are free to use their group for whatever they want. The group leader can resign if they wish and pass the mantle onto another group leader.

    We hope this will be a popular new feature - have fun. :-)
  12. Neil

    server tuning 2008 pt 2

    By Neil,

    Well, today is the first 'busy' day of the year, with T in the Park officially announced in an hour or so. With RATM having already leaked the line-up, traffic has been busy on the site since first thing this morning, and the servers have been coping absolutely fine - no stress at all.

    For those who might have been on the site at around 8:30 this morning and experienced difficulties, that was for an entirely different reason - I was doing a little more pruning of non-festie posts, which is very server intensive (and intensive in an entirely different way, hence the problems). I'd meant to do this maintainenmce last night, but it didn't happen for a variety of reasons (whoops).

    Anyway, I guess that in around an hour when the official announcement is made the forums will be much busier, and it'll be good to see just how much of a difference there is this year compared to last year - the guesstimate I'd make right now is that the forums will cope (at normal speed) with 3+ times the traffic than they managed last year.
  13. Neil

    now with added eye candy

    By Neil,

    With more staff on board, there's more time to spend on doing all those those things which there was never time to do...

    The latest change is added eye candy on the main news page.

    As time allows, similar things to pretty up the site will be added.
  14. Neil
    The latest changes to to the website have now gone live, with the re-jigging of the photo albums/galleries now just about complete.

    The photo albums pages have now been split into years, and a photo from each photo album added alongside that album. For albums from this year, there's the option to view the album as either traditional galleries or, via a Flash application, as a slideshow.

    One result of the changes is that currently the eCards program is a bit messed up. This will be fixed and improved over the coming days.
  15. Neil

    server tuning part 4

    By Neil,

    The new server is now in place, which adds around 80% to the load capacity that was available last Monday when the Reading/Leeds tickets went on sale.

    Had this new server been in place on Monday, then I believe that no issues would have been experienced by people using the site at that time. And as there were around 50% more users online simultaneously on Monday across the whole website than this website has experienced previously and things mostly ran OK, I think that's a pretty good indication that website capacity is now (with this new server in place) well over twice what it was last year on Glastonbury T-day.

    And realistically, I'm expecting website traffic for this T-Day to be lower than the traffic was on Monday for the Reading/Leeds announcement & ticket sales - there's fewer people buy tickets for Glastonbury than do for (jointly) Reading & Leeds, plus there'll be less people around in general at 9am on a Sunday morning.

    I'm very hopeful that the whole website including the forums will stay usable on Sunday, with the worst scenario hopefully being that the forums will be a little slower than normal. But of course all this is dependent on the numbers which hit this website, which can't be known until it happens.

    To help keep the load down further a few temporary tweaks will also be made - mostly to do with the website chatrooms, because chatrooms can put a heavy load on servers; a number of chatrooms will be available hosted on a number of different servers, but they won't be fully integrated into the forums as they normally are.
  16. Neil

    RSS feeds

    By Neil,

    As a part of the website redesign (which will go live within the next week sometime) there's now an RSS feed available of the latest eFestivals News.

    For all the information, please see here.
  17. Neil
    What you like is what you like; you don't have to agree with me.

    Ali Campbell
    UB40's ex-frontman is now out on his own. The fall-out with his brother and other UB40 members looks like it's pretty large - perhaps as large as Ali himself now is in his ill-fitting suits - because the set contained absolutely no original UB40 compositions as far as I could tell. All you get linking back to then is the classic covers - 'Red Red Wine', 'Kingston Town', and the like.

    Meanwhile, Ali himself puts in very little effort, crooning away and hoping that by charisma alone he can pull it off. Sorry Ali, but you just don't.

    James Blunt
    Just about everyone's favourite rhyming slang, everyone's favourite hate figure, even James' quite often - he's not scared to take the piss out of himself .... but it's not like he's short of reasons why. He might sell shit loads of records but they're surely being sold to the Westlife crowd who wouldn't know a challenging composition if it hit them in the face. Status Quo could show Blunt an extra chord.

    Perhaps Blunt manages an endearing performance. I wouldn't know, I was long gone.
  18. Neil
    I'm not one to get all mawkish about the death of someone I don't know. And if you try juggling knives then why be surprised if they cut you? She did what she did and the consequences are hers.

    All the same - and I don't say this lightly - the world of music has lost a huge talent. In the 13 years I've been writing about festivals and the acts I've seen there, I can't think of any act who's talent has jumped out and grabbed me in such a strong way as Amy Winehouse.

    I first saw Amy and heard her music when she was on the Jonathan Ross Show in 2003 or 2004. While what she played wasn't my thing it was impossible to not be struck by her authenticity and talent. On the basis of that I first saw Amy perform live on the Jazzworld Stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2004 (when she was promoting her debut album 'Frank'), and was hugely impressed. I saw her again a few weeks later at T in the Park and that was re-enforced. And then at Summer Sundae that same year, as a sub-headlining and not-cut-down set I saw her at what for me was her best - a charisma and talent that told me she'd be a huge star.


    Summer Sundae 2004

    In 2005 at Cornbury Festival I forced some friends to see her. They knew her only from snippets on TV and hadn't liked what they'd seen, but couldn't help but agree with me after having the full experience. The words they used were "jaw droppingly amazing".

    The next summer (2006) saw her at Bestival, doing 'Valerie' with Mark Ronson as a cameo. The words from my review of that festival say "a guest appearance from a stick-thin Amy Winehouse – pure class!". Yet while I said 'stick-thin' - something which to me was very noticable - that was her fat compared to what she was to become. But her slide had clearly begun.

    Fast forward to the summer of 2007. 'Back in Black' had been released in October 2006 and deservedly went massive, and she was now a huge star and a tabloid fascination - with her publicly displayed problems detailed almost daily. While I was grabbing a beer backstage at Glastonbury's Jazzworld she wandered in with friends who looked like they had similar 'issues', and pushed past me to get to the bar - not that she needed more intoxicants by the look of her. Later that day she was a disappointment with her Jazzworld set, while her Pyramid Stage performance the next day was even more shambolic. It didn't take a genius to guess where it might end.

    Today she's being put in the '27 club' of talented musicians who died at that young age. To my mind she's deserving of the comparison by her talent, but sadly not with her output - just two albums (and one of those passed most people by) is a poor amount in comparison to those others.

    Musicians come and go, and some leave something lasting behind. She's left us her music, but with her death it's music that's the loser. There's so much more she could have been, there's so much more she could have left us. What a waste!
  19. Neil
    The cancellation of some of the more major festivals this year have brought a lot of easy headlines for newspapers and the music press, with a raft of reasons suggested as the cause - the olympics, the recession, poor bookings, expensive tickets, and the like.

    Those things are of course in the mix and it would be foolish to dismiss the effect they have, but there's much more going on to effect the festivals scene than just those.

    Back in 2006 I wrote this article titled "Regulation, Retro and Rubbish", and having just revisited it I can see I called much of it right.

    Regulation has tended to tighten again, the change of licencing laws being just a false dawn. Spontinatity is now only permitted if it's been included in the programme and a full risk assessment is carried out. The freedom that festivals once represented and gave the central appeal to the whole idea is long dead and buried.

    Retro came and stole the show, and with the dominance of so much dreadful indie landfill it deserved to. But when it goes huge for pop acts like Take That and even Steps can get in on the act then it's time recognise that retro is hitting the bottom of the barrel marked sub-standard, and it's time to move on.

    And the rubbish - both kinds - have got more rubbish. When The Hop Farm's booking of Bruce Forsyth is the freshest thing to happen in festival bookings for years then it's time for a re-think.

    I said back then "with festivals now so firmly mainstream that they’re something even your grannie might do, are the fashionable days of festivals numbered?."

    The grannies have eaten the festivals.
  20. Neil
    The weather has been dreadful lately, it's hard to believe that the country is suffering a drought. And last summer's festival weather was dreadful too, the worst I've encountered across a summer since I started running eFestivals back in 2000.

    With this year's summer festival season just about to start, I'm betting there's lots of festival organisers and festival goers wondering when it'll stop.

    For some they're now in the two-week range, when the more reputable weather forecasters are prepared to give general-ish forecasts for that long into the future. So up pops one of the festival season's more ridiculous happenings.

    Everyone of course wants great weather for their festival, and there's nothing that will stop them finding it - in theory at least. People will trawl around the various weather forecasting websites looking for the best one, and will then try and convince everyone that the weather they'll get will be what is forecast by the best forecast and not by the worst forecast.

    Perhaps there's a place for a new weather forecasting service, where only good forecasts are ever given? It'd certainly get a lot of traffic from festival goers.

    PS: cheer up folks, this summer IS going to give us some great weather.
  21. Neil

    Wanted not wanted?

    By Neil,

    I'd say not, but as I've only viewed it from the M1 what do I know? Is there much to love about Luton?

    Anyway, the 'Love Luton' event - I hesitate to use the word 'festival' - offers a line-up including The Wanted. And Olly Murs. I can't say it's top of my own list of where to go this summer.

    Tickets are now £15, and anyone who bought at ticket at the previous higher price will be sent a free extra ticket.


  22. Neil

    pay to say

    By Neil,

    Payola was a big thing in the past; it probably still goes on - taking money from record companies to feature their products on mainstream radio to help push sales - but it's probably so engrained into the music biz now that it's no longer considered a scandal. From a moral point of view it probably makes bankers look honest.

    There's a second version of payola, which works within what is known as journalism. It's not actually journalists who do it of course, because writing fiction is not what journalists do. Anyway, it's no less the norm for writing than it is for radio plays.

    Which gets to mean that on occasions eFestivals gets offered blatent or not-so-blatent offers of 'incentives' to attend events, where the expectation from that incentive is to write nice things to either help drive ticket sales before an event or to enhance the repuation of an event after it's taken place.

    The masters of payola in music journalism has long been the dance scene, and with the almost-demise of the superclubs in the UK it's home is now Ibiza.

    This year we've been offered a blatent cash payment by an agent of an Ibiza based club night who are running a festival in the UK. They were told to fuck right off... and while I can't be sure - and I generally want festivals to succeed - it seems that this event is going to bomb badly. I'm not going to be losing any sleep if it fails as it deserves to.

    And this year an Ibiza events series has been paying for journalists to fly to Ibiza, and is providing them with accomodation. Again, they've been told to fuck off but it appears to be the case that an attempt has been made to subvert our principled stand - meaning that they've paid for a writer's treats but that writer has now found they don't have a platform for their writings. Good. Rather than them fucking over the public they've fucked over themselves.

    Anyway ... have you read that something in Ibiza is good? Chances are it's a lie. A lie that you're being asked to help fund via your ticket purchase.

    Ibiza is a great place for a holiday. It's also a great place to get ripped off by sharks running hugely erxpensive events, if not via the ticket price then by drinks prices - at sometimes over £10 for a small bottle of water (and that was 10 years ago).

    How big a mug are you?















  23. Neil

    not so wet wet wet

    By Neil,

    My own visits to camping festivals are over for another summer, and despite officially being the wettest summer on record I've not seen that much mud.

    Last summer I went to eight camping festivals. In every case there was more rain than any sensible festival goer would want, much use of wellies (tho I did get away with properly-waterproof trainers once or twice), and it was often far colder than you'd expect even with a British summer (the official stats confirm last summer as colder than this one too).

    This summer has been quieter for me, going to just five camping festivals (partly because so little of the line-ups of so many grabbed my interest). With the worst of the summer rain being in June and July, I guess I got lucky with four of those having been from mid-July until now, because the result has been pretty good.

    Of those five festivals, only one was badly muddy; another one was cold and dull. Of the remaining three, two have been in glorious sunshine without a sign of mud, while the last one did had a few heavy but short showers but not enough to get muddy and was otherwise pleasant with warmth and fair amount of sunshine.

    It might have been officially the wettest summer on record, but for festivals it's not all been wet wet wet.

  24. Neil

    I'm sorry, Dawn Penn

    By Neil,

    I once wrote a review saying how dreadful I thought Dawn Penn was as a live act. I saw her a second time and that didn't change my mind. Both of those times she was backed by a DJ and not a live band.
     
    I saw her again yesterday at Bristol's Harbourfest, with a live band. She was great!
     
    That was a hard crowd to win over, too - and she got them.
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