Eddy Says

Eddy Says: Latitude, longitude and the thin blue line

By | Published on Wednesday 21 July 2010

Latitude 2010

Last Friday, as those of you who were there and those who tuned into The Remix will know, Eddy and his merry band of Losers went on a jaunt down to Suffolk to headline the Sunrise Arena stage at the Latitude festival.

It was show that, by all accounts, was a bit of a high point for the band. But it also reminded Eddy of a problem facing many of the UK’s festivals, one which has already forced one of our favourites to cancel this year, and one that needs your urgent attention.

Frustratingly, there was next to no phone signal at the lovely Latitude, so my usual volley of festival related tweets were missed. Thanks for the many prods and ‘oi – why so quiet?’ messages.
The drive to this part of England is amusing for me because it’s like being in a timewarp, or the Twilight Zone. When I was in bands decades ago, journeys to far off gigs in jam packed transit vans were a gastronomic void. All you could get en route were Ginsters Cornish pasties (if you were lucky) or those awful motorway service stations that just served ‘heart-attack-on-a-plate’. There were no M&S food-stops then, no Waitrose, just cigarettes, sweets and crisps from petrol stations. This was the world I came back to on Friday afternoon, along the A12, my flashbacks fuelled by Cornish pasties.

Along the way Losers + Midimidis + Losers PR Ben + Roberto Pieroni, our incredible sound guy for these big gigs, listened to Empire Of The Sun, to get our juices flowing for the performance we’d hopefully see if we got there on time.

We did. What a site! The lurid allegations we heard on the news seemed unbelievable looking at the crowd and feeling the atmosphere. It came across like a slightly older, more swollen Secret Garden Party. Lots of mums and dads and kids, and enough grey hair to make me feel much much better about myself.

“Let’s find the main stage… Empire Of The sun are about to come on”.

The main stage was HUGE. There was stadium seating around the back of the field, so the oldies had somewhere to sit down, and it made the place look classy, like how I imagine a classical music festival.

The massive LED screen flickered into life and the stage was suddenly awash with silks, billowing in the strong wind. Multi-coloured, shiny silk flags, mad costumes, dancers filled the stage… we got ready for the spectacle Nick Littlemore and Luke Steele had been promising for over a year.

I remember asking about them playing at SGP and being told (this is last year) that they were turning down offers of below £100,000 because it “didn’t cover what they had planned”.

Whatever this was, it had been toned down and made more realistic, but it was still quite a show; the dancers were skilfully choreographed and made fresh costume changes for each song – the costumes were wild, colourful, stylish and outlandish affairs. Luke had his mental headpiece on, and the drummer looked like the one of Fisherspooner (but on steroids) when they had that mad stage show.

To be brutally honest, which those who know me well know I am in the habit of being, I was a little disappointed: For starters, no Nick Littlemore. I’m sorry but that’s really not good enough… that’s half the fucking band! And there was way too much backing track. The drums weren’t even mic’d up. Luke sang live. Drummer pretended. Guitar player writhed a bit but I couldn’t hear any evidence that what he played was coming out front. Even the lovely acoustic guitar on ‘We Are The People’ was already there.

Still, the spectacle kind of let them get away with it. You could forgive the 1980s Top Of The Popsishness about it and just get lost in the visual extravaganza. The computer graphics on the screen behind them were very cool, too. There was no denying, this was a SHOW, and for a few moments there, when your disbelief was suspended, when the dancers were in full flow and their costumes swished in the breeze that carried those beautiful melodies across that field, it was the greatest show on earth.

We saw the whole set before we had to go find the Sunset Arena. I was told it was “the other side of the lake, in the forest”. The words ‘lake’ and ‘forest’ are especially welcome when spoken in the context of a festival, especially ‘forest’. Secret Garden is based around a gorgeous lake, Rockness has its amazing lochside setting, but neither of these has a forest. It’s that, I think, which makes Latitude so special.

There is something so calming about being in a forest. It’s a feeling not unlike the rush you get when you get to the seaside and the salt and ozone in the air just instantly lift your soul. Maybe a forest does that with oxygen? I do love it so. As we walked past the lake and into the trees, one of the Midimidis said the word ‘Ewok’ – and that hit the nail on the head. We were in the Ewok forest, from ‘Return Of The Jedi’!

There was so much going on; soundstages, bars, camping area, little random art installations, all in this forest, and the paths all led to this massive tent in a clearing: behold the Sunrise Arena.
In slight disbelief that we’d be playing the same slot as Tom Jones the night before, and Darwin Deez two nights after, we found the stage manager and got put in a river taxi (a fucking river taxi!) to pick up our gear. This was a first. Beats a golf-cart hands down.

The good things I’d heard about Latitude were all born out. Nice, mixed crowd. Lovely organisers and nice crew. While it’s no Secret Garden in terms of randomness and attention to detail, when it comes to the site, or the wonderful sense of otherworldliness that comes with the fancy dress element, it’s a really good festival experience. One of the very best out there.

Our set at midnight was something we’d been looking forward to for a long time, and I think we did ourselves proud. We’ve never played better, even though we’d not played several of these songs live before. Up to this point we’d played our remixes for about 40% of the set. Now we’re doing almost all original material.

We were very chuffed by a text from Goldierocks, who was in the crowd, saying “AWESOME – please give me your album!” and by one crowd member who stopped me and used the word “mind-blowing”. Thank you, good sir, for that.

But there was one thing on my mind before and after the gig. Glade festival. This was the weekend Glade would have been. I’ve played at almost every one since year one, I love it, and I miss it very much.

You probably heard the festival was cancelled but you may not know the inside story why. It was due to a massive rise in the cost of policing the event, imposed by Hampshire Police, from £29,000 last year to £175,000, an increase never justified to the promoters, nor based on any past incidents at the Glade. The increase was due to the insistence on a disproportionate level of policing for an event of its size, and also due to a new police chiefs directive that UK festivals are to be charged ‘maximum overtime’ for the police officers.

This left the Glade having to pay £55 an hour for a standard uniformed bobby – that’s over £400 a day, more than most of the DJs playing there! – this despite the fact that they knew about the event eleven months in advance and had plenty of time to plan ahead for it and so have no reason to charge overtime rates.

The most worrying point, which has echoes of the Thatcherite clampdown on raves back in the day, is that this year the police have now reclassified music festivals to being ‘serious risks to public safety’ – in other words the same as a football match. This is astonishing. Unbelievable that anyone could seriously argue that thousands of like minded souls wanting a shared artistic experience could be the same as two huge gangs of opposing fans spoiling for a fight.

Interestingly the same ‘re-classification’ has not been applied to events like Reading and Leeds, only to the non-corporate festivals, run by individuals, or collectives, who don’t have the massive weight and legal teams the big boys do.

It is capitalism at work, and on that level, you can’t blame the police, who do a brilliant job on the whole, while being underfunded and underappreciated. But unfortunately, by doing this, they are jeapordising our cultural heritage and depriving good people of something they thoroughly deserve, while depriving artists, musicians, actors, crew and support staff of the work they need in a seasonal industry. It’s really very disappointing and I hope the police will reconsider this move, as they are hurting pro-police taxpayers, and that must surely go against the grain.

We must spread awareness of this issue, otherwise ticket prices will go through the roof, and the festival calendar will be homogenised, with only the big corporate-sponsored ones surviving, and all the lovely little ones, that make our festival scene so special in this country, all falling by the wayside. That would be awful.

Talk about it. Tweet about it. If you know somebody in the police force, talk to them, lobby and bring it home that we’re on the same side here, we are citizens of a country we’re proud of, with a music and arts culture that is the envy of the world, and we don’t want that to be choked to death at the point of actual delivery.

The music and arts festival is a really important part of our landscape now. We’ve saved 6music. Now we have to turn our attention to this. It’s just as important.

Eddy xx

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