One More Disco

After weeks and weeks of awaiting reply, I finally received confirmation of a press accreditation of ZOO8 Festival in Kent at 9pm, the day before the festival began, a great unorganised start to a great unorganised weekend.

After travelling 2 hours 30 to get to Port Lympne Wild Animal Park, Kent, I had to wait in a que for 3 hours, surrounded by already drunk people, who were rowdy and going to the toilet in the nearby field. Once the 3 hour que was over, there was apparently another queue for ticket exchange and camping wristbands, luckily I avoided that que by jumping straight to the press box office. I found my friend, dumped my bag and went to explore the festival itself.

Nothing seemed bad, a large main stage, some carnival rides, a large tent (the Tap N Tin stage), another large tent which would host Drum N Bass and Dance music throughout the weekend, 3 smaller tents holding unsigned bands and DJ’s and a silent disco tent. All in all, a good layout and a fair amount of people around were enjoying themselves, this weekend was set to be a good one, the weather was good and the atmosphere was booming.

Day One at around 9pm, and the problems started to arise, the security into the VIP camping area was not on form, a large group of my friends were camping there, and I did not have a VIP pass, neither did alot of my friends, yet on an hourly basis, we came and went as we pleased, and no-one took notice. A bit of a let down considering it would have cost an extra £36 for a VIP camping pass, the toilets were constantly blocked and smelt worse than anything you have ever smelt in your life, the showers had overflowed for the entire weekend and nearly every tent in the VIP campng area was robbed at some point.

Not only that, but the main stage was meant to be hosting a live performance from Dizzee Rascal at around 9pm, at which time, an event promoter/ organiser came onto the stage, to announce Dizzee Rascal would not be appearing. This came as a shock to many a fan, especially as he was on Radio 1 two days before speaking about how he was excited to be playign such an unusual event. Luckily, Lethal Bizzle took to the stage and destroyed the arena, playing clasic hits of his own and then freestyling over other loved tunes. After his set, Mark Ronson took the stage, I’ll be honest, I did not watch Mark Ronson’s set, but apparently he was amazing.

Looking back, I am glad Mark Ronson was an artist I missed. The next day, I was speaking to a well informed friend, and he explained to me the reason Dizzee Rascal did not play is because the organisers of the event had run out of money ALREADY! Mark Ronson (costing a total of £85,000!) had demanded his £9,000 deposit to be paid in cash, this causing a huge dilemma. The organisers and promoters of the event, went around and collected all money possible, and paid Ronson in change, i.e pound coins in bank money bags. It is also rumoured that producer/ DJ Ronson also took 4 hours to soundcheck, which is the reason the entire day was out of time and why there were ques to enter the event for up to 5 hours. And one more thing, Mr Ronson sent a runner off to buy him 80 towels, if anyone knows why you would need 80 towels, I’d be very interested in hearing it, because I am baffled!?

Day Two, off to a bad start as the gates to the main arena were scheduled to open at 10am, and were then closed until 12noon. Once entered into the arena, the Tap N Tin tent was closed for the most-part of the day, due to a dislodged post inside, meaning all acts meant to be playing in there during that day were moved to other stages, acts were cancelled, resceduled and mainly the entire day was complete havock.

I only made time to watch 2 acts on the saturday, one of which was Hadouken!. Not my favourite band, but I will say they played an amazing set; the main bit that caught me was when the vocalist stood on stage and said “This song goes out to the promoters of this event”, went into a track and in the middle said “pay your f**king artists, you c**ts!”, which for me basically summed up the entire weekend.

The main artist I was disappointed to see drop out on this day was Cut Copy, scheduled to do a 2-hour DJ set from 12am- 2am, I was looking forward to it. However, 2 “hot-on-the-scene” DJ’s from my hometown of Maidstone were quick to step in for the slot. Myself and friends arriving at the tent to see them play at around 12am, were some of around 30 people in the tent dancing, not a bad turnout considering not many people have heard of the boys. But to my utter surprise, by around 12:30am there must have been a good 200 people in the tent, having a good time, dancing to the tunes we all know and love. The boys have fantastic stage prescence and know how to work the crowd. Their names are Liam K and Guppy, watch this space, I predict big things for these boys.

Day Three, and I didn’t think anything could go any worse. Does It Offend You, Yeah? and MSTRKRFT were on the bill to play today, so I was more excited than ever, today was the main day for me to be there. Started off the day in the dance tent, which was playing some massive tunes, but I discovered, dancing to electro music in the daylight doesn’t seem to work the same as in a completely dark club, is it just me!?

Anyway, standing in the VIP bar (which I wasn’t meant to be in) drinking cider, awaiting the arrival od Does It Offend You, Yeah? to the stage, (one of my favourite bands by far at the moment, so I was really looking forward to their perfomance) when one of my friends came and announced that the band would not be performing, yet again due to lack of funds of the festival. You cannot imagine the horror on my face and shear annoyance I felt. But it was okay, because MSTRKRFT were going to be doing a set later in the day, right? WRONG! Yet again, the MAIN act I was looking forward to seeing, did not show up, and yes you guessed it, due to a lack of festival funds. Time to go home.

All in all, I had a fantastic weekend, but not due to the festival itself, my weekend was made up by the company of my friends and the small amount of acts I did see, and the best act I saw all weekend, was the boys from Maidstone… now thats saying something.

ZOO9 will be taking place next year apparently, and lets hope to god that they have lived and learned from thwir mistakes, it’s been said that due to the lack of funds, the Port Lympne Animal Foundation had to step in and give money to pay for artists to play to keep the festival up and running, because it was at risk of having to close on the second day due to a “miscalculation”. Read below the “official” reasons for the mishaps throughout the weekend, as written on the Zoo Thousand Music Festival Facebook Group. There are a few things I didn’t mention, but I can imagine you will get the jist, the entire weekend was a mess! Maybe see you next year!

“We hope that we can explain why certain things did not run smoothly at ZOO8.

Queuing: For health and safety reasons we had to open 2 hours late. We encountered problems with the scanners for the E-tickets and found that the clampers for the wristbands slowed the whole process down. We fixed this problem by separating normal ticket and E-ticket holders on Saturday and moving the location of the wristband exchange to the box office location.

Water: We had placed 20 water bowsers with taps around the campsite and the arena which were filled and re-filled with drinking water.

Camping: We tried everything we could to extend the campsite by opening other areas, but were unable to move into another field because the infrastructure to support it was unavailable to us at the time.

Toilets: There were more campers than we had originally planned for, however, facilities were not stretched inside the festival walls and overall we had enough toilets to deal with this amount of people we had based on The Event Safety Guide. Extra contractors were brought in to help clean and maintain the portaloos around the clock.

The line up changes: A 2 hour delay on Friday meant we were shuffling acts from the start. Also, during the Gallows set on Friday night the main king pin pole of the Tap ‘n’ Tin tent moved, making the whole structure unsafe. Because of this we had to move as many acts as we could onto other stages including into the VIP tent, but inevitably we would have to cancel some acts. In the case of Wiley, he was on site and was paid in full, but his tour manager wasn’t prepared to let him play in any of the smaller arenas.

With regards to Dizzee Rascal; we had agreed a payment structure with his agency and made all the correct payments on time. On Friday we had contacted his agency and were told he was coming but no one could get hold of him. We continued chasing this up to no avail and so had to make the decision to move Lethal Bizzle into his slot. Like a lot of you we were all personally very disappointed that Dizzee Rascal didn’t show.

Roni Size/ Reprazent were paid in full and even began setting up their kit on stage. No one from their agency is available to comment at present, however, this does require further investigation.

Regrettably, we had to cancel Athlete.

Also, some of the artist agencies look after more than one act, so, when we were required to cancel an act playing in the Tap n Tin Arena (which was closed for repairs) that in turn meant losing acts playing elsewhere at the festival.

Regarding other acts we’ve heard people query: Pendulum, Ash, Skinnyman, Stanton Warriors, Mitchell Brothers, Dogs and Chas ‘n’ Dave were all present and all performed, however, some in different arenas than were advertised originally.

If you want to get in contact with us then please e-mail us on info@zoothousand.com and we will reply to you as soon as we can.

Just for the record, no one from the Zoo8 camp got arrested or escorted off the site by the police.

The organisers would like to apologise to anyone who did not enjoy the festival as much as they had hoped but rest assured any lessons to be learned from this year will be learned and will make next year a better event.”