eFestivals interviews festival organiser Rob Da Bank

eFestivals spoke to festival organiser Rob Da Bank about taking the Bestival Reunion Tour which is coming to Liverpool Music Week. The DJ also answered questions about his own festivals, Bestival, and Camp Bestival, and his other project The Association Of Festivals.

The Bestival Reunion Tour was a great success last year, and it's back this year. Is the intention to make it an annual event from now on then?
Yeah, definitely, I was thinking why we're doing it, it's to keep the party going really. I always feel it's kind of absurd to spend your whole year putting on a party that lasts for three days and then it's back to the drawing board. We don't really need to do any marketing on Bestival because the name's out there now, so it's not a marketing exercise, it's to give a bit back to people that have travelled from around the country to come to Bestival and to have a bit of a party really.

You're taking the Bestival Reunion to Liverpool Music Week, have you been there before?
Yeah, loads of times, probably outside of London it's the place that I've partied, and played, and gone clubbing more than anywhere else. When I was a music journalist, I always spent a lot of time in the North of England and the atmosphere up there is always brilliant. And I love getting out of London, to be honest, clubbing in London's great but after fifteen years I've done it, and I love getting out of London and up to places like Liverpool and Glasgow. It's like going to a different country, you get a completely different set of people and a completely different atmosphere.

I've not played the Music Week before but I just know there's a lot of stuff going on, everything from Dizzee Rascal to classical concerts and stuff. So I'm hoping to get up there a bit earlier and check out some other bits, and I'm hoping everyone won't be too exhausted from all the shenanigans to come down to our party as well.

You party is on Halloween, are you building that in to the event?
Yes it is, we're going to do some sort of proper fancy dress thing up in Liverpool. We're definitely going down the fancy dress route, and dressing the venues. Josie my wife who does all the creative stuff on Bestival, she'll be in charge of making them look and feel right. It's very difficult to try and recreate the look and feel of a festival in a nightclub, so we won't be doing that. But we'll definitely try and keep the eccentricity of Bestival, we'll have everything there apart from the mud hopefully.

You personally select all the acts, does that mean you get a lot of people trying to bribe you with drinks?
No, it's surprising actually, Bestival, the actual festival, is quite good after five years and we do get a deluge of people wanting to play from really huge acts to up and coming unsigned acts. But the tour, it's a different kettle of fish, it's a much smaller thing, and it's always a struggle actually. Promoting isn't getting any easier, especially for people like us, we're not a big national promoter, that has got an office of ten people on the phones. We're still a homegrown kind of Bestival vibe, we book it, we have to do all the logistical stuff, which is good fun but it's not really my thing.

I love phoning up and booking an act but after that it's the headache of doing all the paperwork, soundchecks, and the back line, and all that. But we've got a good team, and it's exciting and there's nothing like putting on a big party that works. I think this tour should be another good one.

With doing all these indoor dates, and the weather problems, does it make you want to hold an indoor festival as well?
Yeah, well we've definitely toyed with doing indoor things. Concrete and Glass which has just happened and All Tomorrow's Parties, Meltdown and others, they're not all like traditional festivals. They're all great, but to be honest there's nothing like the feeling of getting outside whether it's sunny or raining. I think the one thing that's come out of this year's festivals, is that god or whoever it is can throw whatever he wants at us but he's not going to dampen the festival spirit.

We only lost 5000 people over the whole weekend at Bestival who left before Sunday. Obviously, I'd rather everyone would have stayed to the end, but I think for any festival, considering the weather that's not bad. I honestly thought on the Saturday morning, "Oh god, people are going to have had enough of this." Especially as a lot of people had come on the Thursday, I was chuffed to see a steady trickle of people leaving but not the mass exodus, that I feared. I think you see the same thing going on at Glastonbury Festival, that people know it could happen. The reassuring is that now it's happened at Bestival, it's more likely to get someone else next time. We're not the first large festival that's going to get hit by a bit of rain.

Obviously Bestival was quite some experience with the weather, do you think you learnt any good lessons to help weatherproof your future events?
I think most people that came said that we could have done a few other bits if you had known there was that amount of rain. But really with 10 inches of rain in two days, two months worth of rain in two days, it was kind of difficult to predict. We could have some more track way put down or we could have had a permanent road in there, and on reflection obviously seeing that amount of water we wouldn't put the BBC stage where it was, but if it had been half that amount of water, it wouldn't have even effected us that much.

I'm not defending the fact that we could have done more, you can always do more, in the circumstances I'm not sure that we could have everyone worked from the Tuesday when we saw the severe weather warnings, right through the festival, 24 hours each day of sort of firefighting everything that we could. The fact of the matter is, we can't avoid the fact that us, or any other festival, could have that amount of rain again and we are actually putting in some more roadway. We won't be putting stages at the bottom of hills again. Although no one has turned around and gone that was a daft idea because no one could have envisaged that much bad weather.

Jim is the producer of the show, and it's not like it was his first wet show, he's done plenty of wet Creamfields, Rock Nesses, and he did a show last year where it was still underwater two months later. So we're all well versed in wet shows, we've been to enough Glastonburys. It didn't take us by surprise but I don't want to do another muddy one that's for sure.

All joking aside, with The Association Of Festivals that we've set up, this is exactly why we've set it up. It's not like it can help us avoid bad weather, but it can help us be prepared for it in sharing costs of track way and knowledge of where not to put generators and things like that. I don't think any festival's above that, you see it happening at Reading and Glastonbury. I remember when the BBC Stage got flooded at Glastonbury. We all get effected by it, but the more we can be prepared for it the better.

How is the AIF going by the way, are there a lot more festivals taking an interest?
We've had about another 20 join, so I think there are about 50 altogether now, and an awful lot of people interested in becoming a friend of AIF, from security firms to people who run bars. We've had a couple of board meetings and things are really starting to shape up, and very soon we'll be announcing some of the work we're undertaking, so I'll make sure eFestivals knows about it. We just want to get them totally right, so they haven't been announced yet, we've got two or three key things that we're working on. It's exciting everyone that's on the board is already saying that it's making a difference to their festivals.

Have you enjoyed putting both festivals on this summer?
Yeah, obviously Bestival was a muddy one, but we came out of the back of it and felt more of a sense of accomplishment than ever before, probably because it was such bloody hard work between the two shows, suddenly it's all over and the summer has flown by. But, I've really enjoyed it and feel more upbeat than any other year. I think maybe when things get a bit more challenging it means you get through them a bit easier somehow.

Are you already underway with plans for the next two in 2009?
Yeah, absolutely, we're quite bad in that we don't give ourselves much of a breather or a break afterwards, we just start start to hammer straight in. I've started booking acts already...

Any clues as to who they are?
Not really no, I've nearly landed one of the headliners for Camp Bestival and I've got some ideas for Bestival. I don't want to launch myself straight into it now, because it's only October. But I'm finding with the amount of festivals that are on, and I think I'm right in that we had different headliners from most of the festivals this year, but, there was a complaint this year that a lot of the festivals were having the same acts. I think everyone feels that they want to be unique, whether you're a V or a Reading, through to a Bestival or a Big Chill. You do feel this kind of need to try and get ahead of the game, if you know what you want you need to chase up. When I first started Bestival I wouldn't start booking until February and March and now October and November are the months where I know I really need to get in there or I won't get the acts.

How are the ticket sales going for them both?
We were a bit worried after Bestival. Although, after the initial bit of negative feedback from people who had left early, and we took all that on board. Obviously, the weather did ruin some people's weekends. Then suddenly, people were telling us that was the best one we'd ever done, and they had been to all five. There were an awful lot of people saying it was the best Bestival yet, and we've sold out the early bird tickets really quickly and the tickets are going faster than ever, so I'm really pleased.

Camp Bestival is ticking over, which for a show in its second year is really good. It's healthy actually and touch wood it carries on like this. The way we're going we'll sell out earlier than ever.

Glastonbury went on sale the other day, I don't know how well they are doing, I thought Glastonbury was amazing this year. After a couple of years of the weather situation, I'd felt a bit jaded. Then to have it at Bestival this year was kind of full circle. But. I'm really chuffed that Glastonbury had a good year for weather.

Camp Bestival has moved a week is that to capitalise on the holiday season for kids?
It is yeah, the feedback from the show was that for people that had brought kids it was the highlight of their summer. At the end of the summer holidays a lot of kids have been asking, “When are we going to that party, we went to?” So we'd be daft if we didn't try to capitalise on that. The feedback from people who came without kids, for some of them it was a bit too tame, a bit too nice, but some of them are saying they are coming back as well. I don't think it's going to turn into an entirely family festival, but I think that's definitely the way we want it to go. We're going to expand the kids area behind the castle towards the sea even more. We're going to make that bigger, because it was just about big enough to cope with all the kids. We envisage there will be even more kids coming, so I'm pleased.

We felt there was a niche there for that sort of show and we've gone into it. It's not going to be any bigger, it will stay at 12,000 but there will be more land, and the campsites will be better organised. Holding my hand up I think the car parks and the campsites were far from ideal this year, and that's top of my list of priorities to make sure that the facilities at Camp Bestival are as good as we can get them.

Rob Da Bank will be playing at the Bestival Re-union tour at MTV Liverpool Music Week on Friday 31st October at Nation, Wolstenholme Square. to buy tickets, click here.

For more information on Liverpool Music Week and to buy tickets, click here.

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