Festival cancelled and I’m not surprised. Y Not?

Andy Jones
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read
Credit: @JoePantling1991

It’s never a good thing when an event is cancelled. It’s bad for the organisers, bad for the people at the event, and bad for the locals who have to put up with the traffic chaos.

Y Not Festival near Matlock, Derbyshire, was cancelled today and I can’t say I’m massively surprised. Caveat here — I didn’t go this year, or last year, or the year before — it’s been 7 years since I last went.

The cancellation notice posted on the Y Not Festival website

The reason for the cancellation is stated as “adverse weather conditions” and sure, it definitely looks like a muddy one, and they have had a fair bit of wind and rain over the weekend (it’s Derbyshire after all!), but there seems to be more to it.

Looking through the tweets and Facebook posts, it seems that the festival organisers just weren’t prepared for the bad weather.

Obviously there's an element of mob mentality to social media - if one person makes a complaint, then others quickly jump on it.

The thing is, I volunteered as a steward at Y Not Festival back in 2010, and the problems (not the weather) were similar. Back then, the festival was in it’s infancy — it was in its fifth year as a festival, and had started as an annual sixth form party up to 2005.

Stewarding the festival wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. I had a 2 hour “induction” which supposedly gave us everything we needed to know to get started, and then had to do 4 five hour shifts over the course of the weekend. The reward — getting to see some of the festival (The Futureheads, The Mystery Jets and The Subways were headlining that year).

Other perks of being a steward were also being able to camp in a secure crew camping area, and free lunch and dinner each day.

When I arrived to set up camp, crew camping was “unavailable” for stewards, and we had to go in general camping — which was fine, until there were cars being broken in to and tents being stolen from.

I signed on to my first shift, which consisted of directing people in the queue for the festival to get their wristbands. It was going well until I was told off for not moving the queue quickly enough — the festival organisers wanted me to send more people through to get their wristbands, which led to people queueing for another queue and a load of people tussling for a small window where they could collect their wristbands.

These were festival organisers though, so I got on with what they asked me to do — surely they knew what they were doing?

After my first shift ended, I went to the food stand set up for cast and crew to collect my free meal. The food stand was a porta cabin with 2 windows — one was on the stage side of the backstage area and was for stage crew and festival organisers, and the other was on the opposite side of the porta cabin and was for stewards.

There were 2 people serving luke-warm jacket potatoes with tinned chilli on top, and they spent the majority of their time concentrating on the other window — meaning that it took 45 minutes to get anywhere near getting served, and by the time some got to the window, they had run out of food.

On day 2, I signed on for my second shift. The festival was pretty much under way, so my role consisted of walking around. Yep, that was it. I was given no direction about what to do. I wasn’t given a litter picker even, because I wasn’t assigned to an “environmental steward” role.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so bored in my life. The organisers weren’t really interested in what the stewards were doing, and my second 5 hour shift, I gave up and left the site.

It was my first festival stewarding experience, and the lack of organisation is what put me off staying there any longer. Stewards were treated as second class on site, and I’m really not surprised when I see people complaining on social media about a lack of stewards in the right place.

It doesn’t seem like anything has changed in the last 7 years. The festival has become bigger, but the organisation has lagged behind. I hope that the festival organisers do the right thing and refund the fans who have had such a disappointing weekend. It’ll probably take them a while to “organise” that too though.

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