Essentially stuffed

Essential Festivals Ltd - the company behind Essential Festivals - has gone bust with debts of nearly half a million pounds.

According to the Brighton Argus, the official receiver in Brighton is trying to trace the directors. The public face of Essential Festivals was Ish Ali, who had been disqualified from being a company director in 2000.

Essential staged its first festivals at Brighton's Stanmer Park in 1991, attracting 2000 fans. The event grew each year until 1997 when 50,000 attended over three days, but Essential Music Festivals Ltd (who ran the event at that time) went into voluntary liquidation with debts of £240,000.

The event was revived in 2000 when 17,000 attended a two day festival in Stamner Park with acts including James Brown and Fatboy Slim. In 2001 Essential had problems agreeing use of Stamner Park for the festival (officially put down to the Foot & Mouth epidemic, but we were aware it would not be at Stamner Park before F&M broke out), and it moved to Hackney Marshes.

This year saw an attempt to revive it as a 3 day festival, with dance, rock and roots days. An event was held at the beginning of May in Bristol, but due to poor ticket sales for the Rock Day - perhaps because the majority of the new rock fans tend to be of school age - many acts were cancelled, and two of the stages were closed.

Essential disengeniously claimed the stages were closed for safety reasons due to waterlogging - something that was obviously untrue to anyone attending - and the high profile uproar by some ticket holders after the event led to bad publicity, impacting upon the planned second festival in Hackney in August, which had trouble attracting sponsors.

The problems encountered by the Bristol festivals failure were also felt by other festival organisers, who were suddenly being asked to pay up front for services they'd normally pay for after the event.

We've been aware for several months that Essential was no more.

Although there was some dishonesty in how the festivals were run - the nickname for Essential being "dodgy fuckers" here at festival towers (something we called them to their face more than once) - we feel that Essential were one of the few event organisers prepared to go out on a limb to offer something different than the standard festival format provided by the industries bigger players. As such, the UK festival scene is much weakened by their demise.

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