Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand

Subject: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 08:59 AM

http://theglamourcave.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/musicians-get-police-escort-to-isle-of.html

An account of the Isle of Wight festival disaster by Frank Moon, who opened the main stage with Cerys Matthews last night.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 11:30 AM

featuring the bands Pink Floyd, the Stranglers, and Primal Scream? And a hit song called 'Road Rage'?

Why am I not surprised that things were not well-organized, peaceful and logical? Not that I'm prejudiced; it's just that rock events have a bad rep.

I do think that words like 'chaos' and 'disaster' are overdoing it. Disaster is when somebody gets killed or paralyzed.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Leadfingers
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 11:47 AM

Fiasco seems a far better word !

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 01:08 PM

Yes. also schemozzle

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,Auldtimer
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 03:15 PM

??? schemozzle ??? What, Who, When, I don't understand. Please please please, what is a schemozzle???? I need to know.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Jack Campin
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 03:18 PM

I think it's the same as a guddle.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,Auldtimer
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 05:24 PM

A guddle!! I know what a guddle is fine, I spend most of my time living in one guddle after an other. A guddle. Story of my life.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Jack Campin
Date: 22 Jun 12 - 05:52 PM

BBC photo gallery

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: vectis
Date: 23 Jun 12 - 05:41 AM

I don't know what people expect the Island has a limited road system, many very narrow lanes and can only take so much traffic. When the roads are full that's it, gridlock. In this instance everyone tried to pack on to a mere 5 miles of narrow road.

I saw one chap comment that because it was raining everyone was going to travel by car instead of by foot and bus. this means more traffic was on the road than had been anticipated and planned for.

The last pop festival in 1970/1 had 250,000 visitors and the shops ran out of the food needed to feed them so we ended up running soup kitchens to keep them going until the ferries could ship them out and these had mainly come in on foot.If they had all had vehicles then most would have still been in Lymington waiting for a ferry by the time the festival ended.

Festivals like this on the Island are a nice idea but a nightmare to run properly due to the underlying infrastructure being severly limited. The physical size of the place doesn't help either.
Having lived the first part of my life limited by those Bl*&%£ ferries I am so pleased that I live on the Mainland now.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 23 Jun 12 - 05:53 AM

Naw, it's a boorach.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Bonzo3legs
Date: 23 Jun 12 - 06:58 AM

I was there with my ex wife for the 1969 festival when Bob Dylan played - we were already there on holiday. I can well understand the shambles, my current wife and I spent a weekend there in the late 1990s and couldn't wait to leave. The general standard of service on the island was appalling.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,Guest RR
Date: 23 Jun 12 - 11:38 AM

Yes, fiasco will do nicely, farce would also suffice - I am local to the Island, & can't for the life of me understand why they can't site the thing out in some of the abundant countryside - oh, wait, yes, it's because the aforementioned Mr Giddings owns all the camping site land nearby, so he MUST hold it in the middle of Newport, causing extreme misery & grief to thousands of hapless old folk, families with kids, & even messing up funerals ( it's true ); you wouldn't believe the number of horror stories the man's greed/ego have engendered..

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: nager
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 12:34 AM

I am also an ex Caulkhead who was there for the 1969 and 1970 festivals.. Dylan, Hendrix, The Who, Joe Cocker, Leord Cohen etc.
A lot more people attended those festivals back then but most came by foot/public transport.
My family still lives on the Island and reckon the latest one is a complete mess - thanks largely to the weather.
Happily the weather is a lot better here in Australia!

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Acorn4
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 04:00 AM

It's in army slang a "GMFU".

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Royston
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 11:37 AM

The IOW festival is not a "rock" festival. It's social worker pop and acoustic stuff. Cerys Matthews is a great singer, formerly of "catatonia" fame and Road Rage was a pop anthem, circa 2000. What is extraordinary is that anyone was so stupid as to imagine that a festivel that large could ever succeed on a tiny and miserble island with no roads or services and one ferry port with a handful of boats operating from it. Bizarre.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: SPB-Cooperator
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 11:44 AM

3 ferry ports

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Steve Parkes
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 11:56 AM

Well, one of the ferry ports -- Fishbourne -- was so clogged that the ferry couldn't unload because the last lot of cars was still trying to leave the port; but the traffic was backed up all the way to the festival site (and back to the next town BEFORE the port) because cars weren't being let in as there was too much mud ...

I guess nobody checked the weather forecast. It was pretty awful for people trying to get to work, to school, to funerals, to hospital; carers and even emergency vehicles couldn't get through.

Pretty quiet here in the West Wight though!

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Steve Parkes
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 11:59 AM

BTW, Giddings has said he won't give any refunds for anyone unable to get there; presumably he means to pay acts that couldn't get there?

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,999
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 12:00 PM

schemozzle

Yiddish term for 'big screw up'.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: SPB-Cooperator
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 12:31 PM

Surely the priority would be to compensate Islanders and small firms who couldn't go about their daily business.....

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST
Date: 24 Jun 12 - 07:44 PM

What's with the semantics? If you'd been stuck in your car in a traffic jam overnight, having spent a load of money on tickets for you and your teenage kids to have "fun" - as the woman interviewed on Today had - you'd be within your rights to describe it as a "disaster", wouldn't you?

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 25 Jun 12 - 03:33 AM

A good example of how licensing laws SHOULD have prevented an event that clearly simply overwhelmed local infrastructure.

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 25 Jun 12 - 11:09 AM

What's with the semantics? Guest, the Mudcat is one of the semantics headquarters of the world. We live for it.

You might be within your rights, legally speaking, to call your miserable day a disaster, but it's still not a disaster. If a ferry had foundered and 200 had died, that would have been a disaster.

Richard, I agree. How do the promoters get away with attracting far more people (actual sales or no) than could be accommodated? In this day of instant communication, it would have been easy to get the word out to "stay home, because you won't even be able to get off the ferry."

Subject: RE: Isle of Wight festival chaos first hand
From: GUEST,Seayaker
Date: 25 Jun 12 - 11:20 AM

If people had been ordered by the organiser to stay away they might have a legal right to a refund?

Just guessing.