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‘Cursed’ Hop Farm Festival discontinued

By | Published on Thursday 25 September 2014

Hop Farm Music Festival

It’s all gone a bit non-idyllic down on the (hop) farm right now, kids, with the news that Kent’s ‘new’ Hop Farm Music Festival – ie not Vince Power’s ‘old’ event of the same name – has been shelved.

Confirming he was discontinuing the event for good, the organiser of this year’s Hop Farm music event, man-who-isn’t-Vince-Power Neil Butkeraitis, described the Paddock Wood-based site as “cursed ground” in an interview with Kent Online this week, adding: “I’m absolutely gutted”.

Butkeraitis resigned as director of Hop Farm Music Festival Ltd earlier this month, citing financial disagreements behind the scenes at the fest. The company, which ran the event for the first and only time earlier this year, has also gone into liquidation, with the possibility of a number of Butkeraitis’s other companies being taken down with it. Double gutted.

He tells Kent Online: “In ten years in the industry this has never happened to me. The event was delivered under our £3 million budget – what didn’t stick up was ticket sales but the festival was part of a three year plan for the site. Even though everyone locally enjoyed the festival and we had some big acts lined-up for next year, now three of my companies look like they will go into liquidation”.

So, that’s where the new ex-Hop Farm Festival boss is at, what about the old ex-Hop Farm Festival boss? Well, as previously reported, Power vacated the Hop Farm site last year after the 2013 edition of his festival there was cancelled due to bad ticket sales. Power did initially say that he would relaunch the event at an alternative site, weirdly planning to still call it the Hop Farm Music Festival, though that plan never came to fruition.

In addition to that, as was reported last month, Power was hit with a High Court injunction recently banning him from staging live music events in the UK until he settles a dispute with PRS For Music over the fact previous editions of the Hop Farm event seemingly went ahead without the required licence from the collecting society.



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