Piss take

[SloopJohnB]

I decided to leave after the headliners in Sunday. When I got to the Emperor field car park is was pitch black and could find the car let alone navigate across the bog!

i got writhing a few feet of the road and my car inevitably sank. I spoke to security who arranged for a tractor which charged me £20 to get towed off....piss take!

dont get me wrong, I’ve done plenty of festivals and can handle mud, but the total lack of any attempt to maintain vehicle road, either with steel roadways ar at least chipping, the allow tractors to charge £20 to get you off is a joke!

[LOCHLAND5]

Emperor road way was knackered at lunchtime yesterday when I came back in .

until it got more empty I think everyone will have needed a tow bit steep £20! 

[SloopJohnB]

17 minutes ago, LOCHLAND5 said:

Emperor road way was knackered at lunchtime yesterday when I came back in .

until it got more empty I think everyone will have needed a tow bit steep £20! 

What can you do though? They’ll make a fortune 

[Jay Pee]

Wife and I both observed that the support effort was largely invisible for quite a lot of the festival.  Or it seemed that way to us.

Maybe that is the plan?  Work behind the scenes during the night etc?

I work for the Environment Agency in the North West and am not sure what plans can be put in place for that amount of rain in a short time on the Saturday but that said, some of the car parks looked like the preparation for the inevitable (at KC) was pretty much none existent.  The staff car park on the left on the way out was like a ploughed field by Sunday afternoon.

The charging for a tow is a piss take mind.  The farmers should be on a flat rate / standby on the Sunday and the Monday with the festival organiser's picking up the tab.

Sloop, please send them an email / message and share the response.

[eastynh]

My first Kendal will also be my last. Shit festival.

Edited July 29, 2019 by eastynh

[Ricci's Special Kebabs]

The festival tweeted that customers shouldn't be charged, obviously the farmers were just taking advantage. 

[LOCHLAND5]

28 minutes ago, eastynh said:

My first Kendal will also be my last. Shit festival.

What was wrong mate ? 

[Jay Pee]

I wouldn't go that far but have a strange feeling at Kendall Calling that i can't quite put my finger on.  I have been to a few of them now and never feel the vibe is a patch on other mid-size festivals we attend

Bearded Theory smashes it out of the park in every respect.  Cost, lack of corporate meddling, less fuckin idiotic teenage mobs in "leavers" sweatshirts who think leave no trace means all will be fine as long as they don't dump their car the in the car park on Monday morning.  You get my drift.

I just don't think it has ever added up to the sum of its parts for me and will be unlikely to return when there are so many other options.

Had to pull a few people up describing it as a mini Glastonbury?!  Clearly folk who have never been in the Pilton Post Code before never mind the festival.

 

[eastynh]

7 minutes ago, LOCHLAND5 said:

What was wrong mate ? 

Place was a shithole mate. People pissing everywhere. People chucking shit it in the air or at the stage. Maybe I am just getting old or spoilt by Glastonbury, I don't know. It was like an indie version of latter day V fest, but on a smaller scale.

Least enjoyable festival for a long while, even though Chic were fabulous.

[Jay Pee]

Have to say, did see a couple of blinding sets but it is a festival and it has to be considered in the round / as a whole.

It is hard work to not get into situations with some of the behaviour.  You will see in some earlier posts of mine that i have in the past stepped up but don't want to be feeling duty bound to do that when kids are being vile wretches. 

On the plus side, most of the idiots there will only do one festival a year so if Kendal Calling continues to be some sort of w*nker magnet for the tent leaving piss slingers, it means there is a few thousand less on the circuit of other festivals that are available.

Can you imagine the scenes if they had Kasabian and Liam the knobend on in the same bill?!

[SloopJohnB]

52 minutes ago, Ricci's Special Kebabs said:

The festival tweeted that customers shouldn't be charged, obviously the farmers were just taking advantage. 

The festival must have let the farmers in....if you don’t pay they don’t tow!

[LOCHLAND5]

22 minutes ago, eastynh said:

Place was a shithole mate. People pissing everywhere. People chucking shit it in the air or at the stage. Maybe I am just getting old or spoilt by Glastonbury, I don't know. It was like an indie version of latter day V fest, but on a smaller scale.

Least enjoyable festival for a long while, even though Chic were fabulous.

That’s a shame mate , once the rain arrived Saturday I guess a lot went into a survival mode and past caring.

the shit covered beach ball after the frattelis get kicked was brutal folk got covered ! Some guy lost it in the end I think he popped it ! 

I do feel there was less work done in being prepared but the weather forecast changed dramatically from where it has been in a short space of time .

 

[SloopJohnB]

29 minutes ago, eastynh said:

Place was a shithole mate. People pissing everywhere. People chucking shit it in the air or at the stage. Maybe I am just getting old or spoilt by Glastonbury, I don't know. It was like an indie version of latter day V fest, but on a smaller scale.

Least enjoyable festival for a long while, even though Chic were fabulous.

Yeah....the toilets we crap in the arena....nowhere near enough....did they remove some urinals at the back of the main stage part way through the weekend? That seemed to make the pissing everywhere so much worse!

[SloopJohnB]

1 minute ago, LOCHLAND5 said:

That’s a shame mate , once the rain arrived Saturday I guess a lot went into a survival mode and past caring.

the shit covered beach ball after the frattelis get kicked was brutal folk got covered ! Some guy lost it in the end I think he popped it ! 

I do feel there was less work done in being prepared but the weather forecast changed dramatically from where it has been in a short space of time .

 

I was sat outside Tim Peaks on Sunday, and you could see a massive pile of bark shavings just sitting there....why the hell didn’t they spread that?

[LOCHLAND5]

28 minutes ago, SloopJohnB said:

I was sat outside Tim Peaks on Sunday, and you could see a massive pile of bark shavings just sitting there....why the hell didn’t they spread that?

They had spread a bit but it wouldn’t of helped, if they had spread before the rain it would of kept heavy traffic areas better but they couldn’t of done anything for the main stage the metal grid road stuff is expensive to hire and it was a lake on one side when the doves were playing from what saw on my way to catch a bit of idles . 

[LOCHLAND5]

A allegation of rape and a up skirting incident!

https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/17801534.arrest-made-kendal-calling-rape-reported/

[Curlygirl]

I was saying before Kendal this year that I doubt I would return but I’ll give it one last chance. Ive decided I won’t be going again. The dynamics have changed so much in the last 5 years. Most of the young’uns were fab, so don’t take this as an attack on all of them, but the minority that weren’t fine were horrid. Rude, obnoxious, cheeky, pissing everywhere, throwing pints (possibly of piss), throwing rubbish, barging through crowds with no words of excuse me or sorry. I pulled a few of them up and just got abuse back. Maybe I’m just getting old and spoilt by Glastonbury and Bearded theory. 

[DomDom1984]

There was definitely more of an arsehole element than I was expecting. I think I'm immune to that though after years of T in the Park and TRNSMT.

[Scargilla]

Sadly we have to echo a lot of the feelings on here.

We've been to pretty much every Kendal calling going bar the first 3 and last years... we've always had a lot of time for Kendal calling and always recommended it to friends and family but sadly we're drawing a line through it after this years experience.

 

Firstly the festival just doesn't have the same feel to it anymore, it used to be so friendly and so relaxed. Now it's got to the point that i'm actively moving the family away from groups as you can see they are close to kicking off. As mentioned it's not fair to tar all the kids but some of them we're just disgusting this year.. we witnessed various groups physically pushing people out of the way, some of which were older festival goers just so they could run to the front so kick a football at each other. They had no interest in the music it was just a pissed up kids club for them. On various occasions they got an ear full from us but it fell on deaf ears.

 

The festival just doesn't seem to give a sh^t anymore... we remember all the effort they put into making signs, hand made art and all the little touches they did.. seems like every year there's less and less to look at and it's just becoming a bland money making festival site. There seems like less toilets and less facilities inside the site too...

 

The emperors field was a bit of a joke this year, maybe we just got unlucky but it seemed so cramped. We remember about 5 years ago having plenty of space between tents, the site had it's own shop, little catering vans, large covered pizza style catering place with chairs and tables, a phone charging point with one free charge, plenty of toilets, plenty of places to wash up... this year it was crap. There were tents on top of each other in our field, we could only find one sink where before you'd stumble across 3 or 4, the selection of catering is getting less and less... it's just doesn't feel worth the extra cash now. 

 

I hope they can pull it back to what it once was, if they do we will be back in a heart beat.. but for now it's off our calendar.  

[Paul ™]

Tractors definitely weren't charging for towing today in the Live In field or Staff car park. 

[Jay Pee]

I would be interested to hear from anyone else who was at Bluedot last weekend and then Kendal and what they thought of the slightly surreal transporting of pretty much every facet of the Bluedot Festival (Minus the science and the Chorlton Hipsters) up the M6 to Kendal ! It was quite weird the first walk around on the Thursday.

I am trying not to be too down about it as we had some great experiences with some great mates but it is the little things that compound one another to create a less than favourable overall experience.

Middle Aged Real Ale Drinker Alert:  I just copied this from the Website:  Kendal Calling’s real ale festival features lots of different ale’s from breweries in the Lake District and even our own ale – Kendale and Oh Deer!

Purity beers (very nice they are too)  who were clearly the Grande Fromage at Bluedot and Kendal Calling are brewed in Worcester ! I suppose that is relatively local.  Where were the Jennings Beers?  Where were the Hawkshead Beers?  Perhaps the organisers could not squeeze them enough on the their margins...

[jamj]

Been going since 2012, with only one year out in 2017 as couldn't make it.  This year I just wasn't feeling it and not sure at the moment if we'll be back.

On arrival into emperor's carpark it was a shit show, normally they'll park you in the usual rows, filtering from the bottom, they directed us and loads of others past the last row and told us to keep going towards the bottom of the field, we and others ended up with no where to go! There wasn't space to park, then some attendant turned up saying we couldn't stay where we were as it was a fire lane, we explained we'd been sent down there by other attendants and he just shrugged and said well sorry you can't park down here, so we squeezed into the only place we could, and the cars behind just stayed in the said fire lane, which was then non existent.  Normally been directed well in past years, it wasn't a major issue, but it seems they didn't have a clue what they were doing.

Emperor's is too big now in my opinion, some folk don't want to walk right down to the farthest spaces so they cram themselves in so they don't have far to walk to the arena.  I can completely understand why they do it, but it's not worth the extra money to be camped in top of and agree the facilities are not as good as they were over recent years.  This is no fault of the festival, but someone took a shit in the showers!!, maybe a reflection of the type of crowd that are increasing each year.

The weather, I know it's out of their hands but what a hard slog that is turning into, maybe (probably!) I'm getting too old.  I just couldn't be arsed trying to get around and ended up seeing a lot less than I normally would (fully prepared clothes n wellies wise by the way)

I thought the woodlands were lacking the usual special feel in terms of art, lighting effects etc. 

Market Stalls - was it just me or were they lesser this year, seems to be a lot more food places.  I love a good mooch!

Overall we did have some good experiences, what I did see band wise I enjoyed, love the strongbow yard and the fireworks were fanrastic.  I see tickets for next year go on sale Friday and they're "taking it up a level", I'll be holding out and seeing how I feel at a later date, as I fear that will take yet more away from the good vibe special festival it used to be.

I was sick to death of listening to parents camped around us ranting and cursing at their kids too, if folk can't cope with the demands of kids at a festival then they shouldn't bring them (touchy subject so please don't jump on me, my opinion and maybe we were just unlucky neighbour wise). I take my kids to festivals but we leave them with grandparents for KC. Is it just me or did the kids area just seem to shut down once the rain hit the last few yeats, not sure on that one.

I'll echo what others have said too, bearded theory is the winner for me at the moment, been going since 2013 and will defo be back there next year, also bought tickets for stone valley north, but for now KC has a huge question mark over it.

 

[psamba35]

Definitely feels like they are penny pinching year on year.  Been every year since 2014 and the first couple had security walking the perimeter of the Emporers field and dealing with any over the top behaviour, now there seems to be one for each field.  The shops and phone charger have gone completely yet the price is higher.  There was bark chippings everywhere that first year too, now its just the stage areas.  Less and less compost toilets each year and the stench of the chem toilets was overwhelming and limiting kids cup exchange to 10 per person per day on Friday while pushing 'save the planet' message was quite hypocritical.  Last year in Great Plains parked right next to the field, this year that field has pre-pitched tents and car park was a right hike and the flat parts of the field were for more of the deer lodge leaving plenty of campers on a right old slope.  Maybe they could put the teens in a field thats a hike away and they might not spend all day getting hammered just outside the arena and sway the minutes walk to the arena.  And where the chuff do security go on the Monday morning?  

[Comfy Bean]

21 hours ago, SloopJohnB said:

I decided to leave after the headliners in Sunday. When I got to the Emperor field car park is was pitch black and could find the car let alone navigate across the bog!

i got writhing a few feet of the road and my car inevitably sank. I spoke to security who arranged for a tractor which charged me £20 to get towed off....piss take!

dont get me wrong, I’ve done plenty of festivals and can handle mud, but the total lack of any attempt to maintain vehicle road, either with steel roadways ar at least chipping, the allow tractors to charge £20 to get you off is a joke!

That’s shit but sounds like a chancer taking advantage of you when you had no choice but to pay them in those horrendous circumstances. As has been said, I’d email the festival as hopefully they won’t be happy with how things ended for your weekend.

Appreciate it doesn’t help you mate but I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw loads of different scenes with random punters, stewards and security helping push cars out.....often ending with them being covered in mud.

The festival staff also closed off a couple of gates down the bottom of general parking when it got bad and opened new gates way down the bottom and were taking lots of cars out along higher, drier ground to get folk moving.

Opening the fence and letting folk walk along an actual road to get out of family without having to exit out the main entrance was also a shrewd move that saved loads of folk a lot of hassle.

[Northern_Lights]

Swerved KC this year and looks like I made the right call. As soon as I heard The Courteeners were headlining I knew a load of idiot fans would show up having witnessed their thugish antics at their own gigs.