What could be better?

[Tony Carter]

I guess its half rhetorical. I keep thinking (ignoring the line up and ticket price!) What could you reasonably impreove about Staffs...I really like the site but am sick of people pissing everywhere and the food is mediocre compared to other festivals...any other regular V people (this was my 6th year) kept awake at night by this question.

[Big Vern]

Well the line-up is always going to be personal taste and the ticket price would be great if it was lower, but it's only ever going to go up as artists demand more and more for live gigs as less revenue comes from music sales these days.

As a first timer at this year's V at Stafford I thought the place itself was absolutely fine. We had no issues getting in (arrived on the Friday in a camper van about 13.30 and only queued for about 30 mins to drive onto the camper van site) and no issues getting out (left on Monday morning about 10.30, took about 45 mins to get onto the motorway).

I thought the festival site itself was good, not much distance to walk between stages or amenities like food, toilets, fair ground etc.

Food I thought was pretty good choice, especially in the V Healthy Village.

The main and pretty much only problem I saw, was the huge amount of knobs who attended. I had been warned by friends who have been a few times to V that it is becoming more and more of a chav fest and this is indeed what I found. How do you stop dirty primates who think it's funny to throw cups of piss into the crowd, other than everybody else turning on them? I'm sure that would soon stop it.

Perhaps V needs to adopt the whole registration process of purchasing tickets and printing photos on the tickets like Glasto? Perhaps security should actually do their job instead of just standing there getting paid to "appear" to be working. If security mingled in the crowds and ejected people who were throwing beer and piss, people might think twice about doing it.

Pretty much all of the rules that V produce are blatantly not enforced so why bother printing them? Things like no tents in the camper van field, there were loads of them. No flag poles in the arena, there were loads of them. No crowd surfing or you will be ejected. I saw nobody get ejected, just carried off over the barriers and put back into the crowd.

Until V start enforcing the rules and policing the crowd, nothing will change and it will just get worse, which is a real shame because it could be a very good festival

[Sparticus]

Nothing will change. That isn't cynicism, it's realism. In the grand scheme of things, v sells out instantly every year even with a price hike, so in the eyes of the organisers it's a success. This site* http://cms.britishrock.cc/cms/festival2009.php can tell you of all the european alternatives on the same weekend as V. Both times i've ventured out the country for a festival i've found a better audience (the belgians being polite and very chilled and the germans just being mental!).

*hope i'm not treading on efestivals toes here, just this page seems to be better for providing european festival info, whereas efestivals has a much better coverage on uk festivals.