Festival Coverage : Gottwood
- Written by Kenneth McMurtrie
Gottwood is returning for another 4 day weekend of electronic musical entertainment amidst its idyllic woodland setting on the Isle of Angelsey from 20 to 23 June. Headliners at the boutique event this year include Luke Vibert, Extrawelt, Wolf Music and 2 Bad Mice.
Weekend tickets are £95 for 70+ hours of entertainment (if making the trip from the Irish Republic you can get from Dublin and back and camp for £150). Click on the festival name at the top of this article for full details.
Tom Elkington was kind enough to answer a few questions we put to him on the intricacies of organising an event of this sort:-
MG) How far in advance of the event do you start planning/booking acts?
Tom) About 10 months before
MG) How easy is it to keep each year’s line-up as fresh as you’d like (i.e. few acts playing the same set as the year before)?
Tom) This year we decided to have a completely fresh lineup. We still have the same family of residents and promoters who have been with us since the beginning but all the “headline acts” are Gottwood virgins. We like to keep things fresh and different from your average electronic festival lineup.
MG) What’s the biggest act you’ve ever had to turn down an appearance from?
Tom) Answering this would do us no favours if we wanted to book that act in the future!
MG) What’s the strangest rider request any act has ever submitted and were you able to meet it?
Tom) One of Mr. Scruff’s many bizarre requests was a Cattle Grid - and yes we managed to fulfil it! He also asked for an inflatable sandwich that is also edible - we didn’t have so much luck meeting this requirement ... luckily enough he still played for us!
MG) Do you ever get massively let down by volunteers failing to clean up the site at the end of an event?
Tom) Yeah keeping volunteers motivated after the event has finished is very hard. However we have a great team of people who are very willing to help us out, despite just having gone through 4 days of heavy partying! There is a real sense of community at Gottwood and there are always some people willing to help us out.
MG) Festivals seem to be more prevalent than ever in the UK – have you noticed any negative impact from this in recent years?
Tom) Yeah we are still a very young festival and only going into our 4th year, however there have been so many new festivals pop up since. It is an extremely saturated market and it is very hard for new festivals to surpass the first year without being in huge amounts of debt. Luckily enough we have established our “Gottwood Family” now and being a small, intimate boutique festival we never want to go over a certain number of people as this will result in Gottwood losing what people love the most about it.
MG) Have you ever considered franchising the festival to other UK or international cities/foreign countries or is it’s sense of location a major part of it’s success?
Tom) Gottwood is very much about the location. Not many festivals can say they have a site quite like it. We are set in the woods, 15 minutes walk from the beach in an area of outstanding natural beauty. We have only unlocked a very small part of the site so far ... people haven’t experienced the lake yet ...
Having said that, we have been looking at Sri Lanka as a place of interest ...
MG) How much time to you get to see performances yourselves over the weekend?
Tom) Not much time at all! I would say that the 3 of us get about an hours sleep each day over 4/5 days as we are constantly making sure everything is in place. We like to be very hands on as we like to be in control of our vision. It’s vary rare that there is nothing that needs to be done, however we do make sure we set aside some time to see how favourite acts.
MG) Have you ever had to miss an important life event due to festival related business/promoting a show?
Tom) Yes, missing out on seeing most of the artists we book seems like missing out on a very important life event!
Luckily enough, no serious life event has clashed with us so far.