Bearded Theory 2020

[Paul ™]

Yeah would have been a scorcher

X

[Zebes]

Should have been our first bearded theory this weekend 😔 With the weather forecast as it is it would no doubt have been a cracker

[Paul ™]

From the official BT Forum - 

 

This is going out on social media this evening (The video link will be on Facebook, website and twitter and the quiz just on the facebook page hosted by Freedom):-

We are gutted we have not got to meet you all today in this beautiful weather. Thankfully, the festival can and will survive this and we just need to make sure everyone that attends does also. We will be back.

Friday, we have a festival quiz hosted on this page at 8pm. Then Saturday and Sunday at 8pm we have a very basic film going up featuring the following acts.........

Asian Dub Foundation - The Mission - Alabama 3 - Dub Pistols - Dr & the Medics - Les Carter - Black Uhuru – The Alarm - Mad Professor - Reverend & the Makers - Nova Twins - James - Ferocious Dog - Subgiant - Gaudi – Back to the Planet - Wheatus – Cara Dillon - Please y Self - Newcranes - Little Steven - Buzzcocks - Men they Couldn’t Hang - Rev Hammer  - Dan Donnelly - Inner Terrestrials - Random Hand - Joanovarc - Atilla the Stockbroker - King Blues – The Farm – Damn  Cargo - 3 Daft Monkeys – Blackballed – Cheeky Girls – Bar Steward Sons of Val Doonican - Wildhearts – Terrorvision – Mik Artsitik – Spikey Mike comedy show – Lucy Spraggan – Derange – Jess Silk -Lancashire Hotpots – Gaz Brookfield – Wagner - Blair Dunlop - Beans on Toast

The film also includes messages from a few of the team (who were brave enough to do it) and our favourite agents who we work with every year

Thank you to the amazing bands who have done this for us

[Paul ™]

Saturday Video

[bucko]

Big high five to everyone who helped put the video together.

I really enjoyed that. it did have the bearded feel to it and helped with thie awful feeling i've had over the last few days knowing i wouldn't be in the fields this weekend.

Cheers everyone stay safe and lets hope we can do it for real soon.

[Paul ™]

Sunday Video

[maninkilt]

Well no cancellation yet, things are opening up so looking good for September ?

Edited June 10, 2020 by maninkilt

[Paul ™]

Think they already said they are going to make a decision next month. 

[Neil]

17 hours ago, maninkilt said:

Well no cancellation yet, things are opening up so looking good for September ?

I dunno about looking good - plenty of festivals with close-by dates have already cancelled (and i guess, not necessarily always their own choice) - but it is now starting to look like it's not impossible it'll go ahead, tho perhaps with 1m social distancing.

[dotdash79]

Email was due to come out today, but cancelled due to rain and poor internet connection. i wonder with the level being changed if they think they have a shot.

[Gilgamesh69]

1 hour ago, dotdash79 said:

Email was due to come out today, but cancelled due to rain and poor internet connection. i wonder with the level being changed if they think they have a shot.

What email? I didn't think they were going to make a decision until July/August?

[hoils]

Email cancelled due to rain. Marvellous! 

[dotdash79]

10 hours ago, Gilgamesh69 said:

What email? I didn't think they were going to make a decision until July/August?

 

 

[Paul ™]

Open letter to Oliver Dowden MP (Culture Secretary)

Please tweet it to him if you Twitter

 

Quote

Hon Oliver Dowden CBE MP
House of Commons
Westminster
London
SW1A 0AA

 
June 24th, 2020

 
Dear Rt Hon Oliver Dowden CBE MP

SPRING GATHERING FESTIVAL (DERBYSHIRE UK) – COVID 19
 
I write to you as a festival organiser having traded successfully for 13 years operating an award-winning festival each May in Derbyshire annually.

The festival welcomes thousands of visitors worldwide and is a huge economic boost to the local economy. The festival secures various local and national suppliers to operate from plant machinery, staging, local breweries, hotels, fencing, arts projects, local schools, health and safety personnel, artist programmers and much more. The event has a positive contribution to the local economy of over £2.5 million and a further £1.4 - £1.7 million directly invested in the suppliers mentioned prior and the performing arts.

The festival donates a good margin of its profits annually to various local and national charities, national causes and schools. In the past 13 years we have raised and donated nearly £500,000 and in the past 12 months we have provided financial support to the local village hall overhauling their PA equipment costing several thousand pounds, financially supported food banks, Oxfam, Teenage Cancer, a school that assists with terminally ill pupils, youth clubs in deprived neighboring areas and financially supported vulnerable families who were not able to secure NHS treatment for their children.

The money that we don’t donate we reinvest back into the event to ensure it has a robust business model. We have made sure we have a strong working capital to ensure we can ride out the peaks and troths of a very fluctuating business that can be affected by so much be it bad weather, decline in ticket sales or pandemics. We are fortunate to have planned our business model in this way as despite having communicable disease insurance we were refused recompense due to Covid-19 not being known at the time the policy was taken out and further still we have not been eligible for a single grant to support us though this period. We do not have offices or staff and we do this in addition to our full-time jobs, working in bedrooms and employing subcontractors to ensure our overheads in the main remain minimal.

Despite this prudence the event still amasses circa £150,000 to £200,000 per annum in operational costs. These costs are incurred each time we plan for an event to happen and have been incurred in 2020. The costs include Health and Safety, Artist Programming, non-refundable supplier deposits, counter terrorism planning, site management and accounting (I am happy to furnish you with the management accounts to bear witness to this expenditure).  Our festival had been scheduled to operate in May but decided to postpone to September at the end of February considering the pandemic. It is now very likely we will have to cancel the revised September date and look at future dates instead. If we cancel September and decide to operate in 2021 on a date to be confirmed, the same level of cost will be incurred again and without no guarantee it will able to happen.

You will have seen the various concert promoters and other festivals opting to defer to 2021 but without any clear guidance or pathway from Government. We are a responsible event and have protected our suppliers and customers against loss by underwriting the amounts with our working capital, which has been carefully saved over the past 13 years. We cannot afford to postpone to a date based on hope and we need you and the Government to issue guidance and a clear pathway into mass gatherings. Noting the fact, we are witnessing thousands of concerts and many hundreds of festivals opting to defer but on no sound basis other than blind hope.

Please can you confirm to me that you do not expect a business sector that contributes £3 billion per annum to the economy, to operate without clear guidance otherwise we will bear witness to a huge collapse in the industry.

I personally, as an event organiser am not asking for financial support, but we are asking for clear guidance, transparency and an industry wide pathway to operate mass gatherings in a safe environment. This is needed before we can commit to any further operational costs which will bankrupt many businesses reliant on this work.


Yours faithfully


Richard Bryan
 

 

[Dancers Stand Very Still]

Assuming this doesn't go ahead this year, does anyone have an indication of which weekend it might be in May 2021? I've had a little look through previous dates and think I'm correct in saying the Thursday's (would) have been: 2015 - 21st; 2016 - 26th; 2017 - 25th; 2018 - 24th; 2019 - 23rd (was there one? - nothing on Clashfinder); 2020 - 21st. This leaves me a little unsure as to whether the festival will begin on 20th or 27th in 2021. My assumption would be the 27th as this leaves the Monday as a bank holiday to get home and recover! Also, assuming the line-up is similar to this year's original line-up, there is a gap (Sat/Sun) in Echo and The Bunnymen's tour dates that weekend and they'd be in the correct part of the country too (Nottingham > Manchester).

Edited June 27, 2020 by JHad

[Paul ™]

Thursday 27th - Sunday 30th May 2021

The late May Bank Holiday is Monday 31st.

 

[BluePaul]

Statement on the website today - doesn't look promising for September...

https://beardedtheory.co.uk/covid-19-update-june-30th-2020/

[Neil]

2 minutes ago, BluePaul said:

Statement on the website today - doesn't look promising for September...

https://beardedtheory.co.uk/covid-19-update-june-30th-2020/

Ouch. Brutal, but probably realistic

 

[ivan]

With Leicester currently all over the news that could be the decider unfortunately.

[dotdash79]

4 hours ago, BluePaul said:

Statement on the website today - doesn't look promising for September...

https://beardedtheory.co.uk/covid-19-update-june-30th-2020/

Reading that, it looks like they aren’t sure about next May

[Paul ™]

1 hour ago, dotdash79 said:

Reading that, it looks like they aren’t sure about next May

The way I see it, is that they can't commit to a firm date and sell/rollover tickets for it, as it's an unknown if it will go ahead.

I guess it comes down to costs, as they would incur costs to prepare for an event (again) that might not happen.

 

[spudthemariner]

On 6/30/2020 at 11:19 PM, Paul ™ said:

The way I see it, is that they can't commit to a firm date and sell/rollover tickets for it, as it's an unknown if it will go ahead.

I guess it comes down to costs, as they would incur costs to prepare for an event (again) that might not happen.

 

Aye, they've been hinting that this is (likely) the case for a while now. I'm kind of expecting that it'll be September 21....decision by the end of July in any case, so not long to find out I guess. Excellent coms as ever from the BT team!

Then a long wait for another event that we've paid for a year - 2 years in advance!

Bloody rubbish isn't it...ugh! 🙄😒

[Neil]

On 6/30/2020 at 11:19 PM, Paul ™ said:

The way I see it, is that they can't commit to a firm date and sell/rollover tickets for it, as it's an unknown if it will go ahead.

that's not stopped just about every other festival.  

Fingers crossed that everything works out going forwards somehow for BT, same as with every other fest. I can imagine there's a long list of agonising choices.

[Paul ™]

That's true, and all those who have done are doing it in blind faith.. as no one knows what will happen 

Guess some of the larger corporate festivals can suck up the operating costs even when not running, I feel BT wouldn't be able to and that they don't fancy the risk.

But yes hopefully all will be back to normal next year 

[Neil]

30 minutes ago, Paul ™ said:

That's true, and all those who have done are doing it in blind faith.. as no one knows what will happen 

Guess some of the larger corporate festivals can suck up the operating costs even when not running, I feel BT wouldn't be able to and that they don't fancy the risk.

But yes hopefully all will be back to normal next year 

if everything is back to normal next summer, hopefully just about every fest can pull thru.

But even Live Nation have been severely fucked by all this, they've sold their arse to the lovely liberal Saudis, and there was something else (I forget what exactly now) the other day which I think was about selling future profits in some way or another - certainly something which showed it was desperate times that they're having to be creative to work around.

I'm still desperately holding onto the idea that festivals will be allowed to operate in the future the same as they have been in the past, but I'm slowly losing faith in that one.  

Edited July 5, 2020 by Neil