August

London festival cancelled

A two-day fashion and music festival in Finsbury Park has been scrapped just four days before it was set to take place - after police raised "serious safety concerns". Police claimed organisers of the first ever Africa Caribbean Asia Fashion Week would struggle to cope with up to 10,000 visitors expected to take over the park on Saturday and Sunday.

A panel of councillors, prompted by fears for public safety, refused to give the festival approval at a licensing meeting on Monday. Now critics fear the streets will be awash with revellers - many of whom have already bought tickets to the charity gig, expecting to see big-named artists like rapper Sway.

Haringey councillor Ron Aitken, who sat on the licensing committee, said: "Unfortunately, the application did not demonstrate the organiser could give a reasonable assurance of public safety, so it was turned down. So we may have several thousand people turning up on Saturday and Sunday with nothing to do."

The festival was set to take place from 2pm-7pm on both days and feature live music, dance and a catwalk modelling show to raise money for charities, including the Great Ormond Street Hospital and Christian Aid.

Sergeant Simon Willmott, of Haringey police football and events office, said: "Police had serious concerns about public safety due to the inadequacy of the event management plan presented by the organiser and the inexperience of the people that were expected to deliver and be responsible for the event.

"Police attended the licensing meeting on Monday night and made these representations to the council licensing committee, along with other organisations that also raised concerns.

"If the proposed performers were advertised, there is the possibility of numbers above 9,999 being attracted to the event."

Residents had also raised concerns over noise and revelry, claiming neighbours' peace and quiet would be destroyed. Now organiser Kate Ajike will have to cancel the event and gives refunds on tickets, the majority of which had already been sold. The 23-year-old from Enfield said before the meeting: "I think people are missing the main aspect here - it is a charity festival, we finish at 7pm both nights and we are not here to make a profit."

A council spokesman said: "It was declined because the applicant was unable to submit a clear, well thought-out, event management plan to satisfy us that she could uphold public safety objectives."

Boy injured at fairground

A 14-year-old boy who suffered serious injuries after falling from a fairground ride at a festival remains in a stable condition, a hospital said today. He was thrown from a ride at the Sonisphere Festival at Knebworth Park just before 2.30pm on Saturday.

He was rushed to the nearby Lister Hospital in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, where a spokesman today described his condition as "stable". An East of England Ambulance Service spokesman said: "The young man sustained potentially life-threatening injuries and our paramedics at the venue worked rapidly to treat and stabilise him.

"Following this, he was rushed to an awaiting trauma team at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage." The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said it was aware of the incident and was investigating.

A spokesman said: "The Health and Safety Executive is investigating the incident on Saturday afternoon which involved an Orbiter-type fairground ride. Part of the ride has been taken from the scene for inspection by Health and Safety Laboratories staff."

Organisers of the two-day rock festival said today that they could make no comment while the HSE investigation was ongoing. A spokeswoman for Hertfordshire Police said they had a 24-hour presence at the festival and worked with event security during the initial stages of the incident, before handing over to the HSE.

The spokeswoman said a statement from event organisers said: "We are taking this incident extremely seriously. The Health and Safety Executive obviously have been informed. Emergency services were on site and dealt with the situation in conjunction with event security and we are liaising with authorities."

Canadian festival stage collapse kills 1, injures 15

A thunderstorm has left one person dead and at least 15 wounded after it caused a stage to collapse at a music festival in Canada. Thousands of fans were camping at the Big Valley Jamboree in Camrose, east of Edmonton, when strong winds and heavy rain hit on Saturday.

Many screamed and ran for cover as the stage suddenly came crashing down. Camrose Police Chief Darrell Kambeitz said 15 of those injured were taken to hospitals.

"The concert at Big Valley Jamboree was delayed and the concert bowl was being cleared when a small portion of the main stage collapsed," Mr Kambeitz said. He went on that reports of dozens of people being trapped at the site were not true.

Hollywood actor Kevin Costner and his band Modern West were scheduled to take the stage when the storm hit, according to the Big Valley Jamboree website. Nashville musician Billy Currington had been performing before the structure collapsed. A member of his band was pulled from the wreckage with a badly injured and bloodied arm.

Maria Brandon and her sister, who had been watching the show from a stand near the stage, were injured as they were tumbled into the wreckage. "It was the most terrifying experience of our lives," she said.

Vancouver-based country music singer Jessie Farrell said: "It felt like bombs were going off around us in this concrete and steel building. People were missing and trying to find each other and there was a woman who was trying to tell everyone to stop panicking, and she was panicking on the speakers."

Justin Bell, a freelance writer covering the festival, said: "It was calm and eerie for about 20 seconds then people began running."

It was not clear if the event - billed as Canada's largest country music festival - was going to continue, Chief Kambeitz said.

Londoner dies at Serbian festival

A 22-year-old man from London has died after falling from a fortress wall at a music festival in northern Serbia. Anthony Fisk fell from Petrovaradin fortress in Novi Sad during the annual Exit music festival on Friday. He died in hospital on Saturday, the Foreign Office said. His family is being given consular assistance.

Acts including Lily Allen, the Arctic Monkeys, Manic Street Preachers, Moby, Korn and Madness are performing at the festival, located north of Belgrade.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman said: "We can confirm the death of a British national in Serbia following a fall at a music festival and we are providing consular assistance to the family." Up to to 190,000 people are expected to attend the four-day festival, which is due to end on Sunday.

The Exit festival began in 2000 as a spontaneous student uprising against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Organisers hoped it would persuade music fans to vote to find an "exit out of 10 years of madness".

Euro event cancelled after death

An accident at Slovakia's Pohoda festival has left one person dead and injured forty others. Tragedies at European festivals are thankfully becoming less common. After a surge during a Pearl Jam set at Roskilde left many fans dead and injured, festivals around the continent rapidly improved safety measures.

However accidents do occur, with one British fan dying outside the grounds of this year's EXIT event after falling from a wall close to the unique venue. In a new announcement the organisers of Pahoda have confirmed that one festival goer has died following an accident at the site. Extreme weather affected many parts of Europe this weekend, and appears to have caused a tragic incident at the event.

A giant tent apparently collapsed on festival goers at Pahoda following torrential rain and high winds in the Slovakian town of Trencin. One person has been killed outright, with forty more being taken to hospital. Of these, fifteen are thought to have been seriously hurt at what is Slovakia's biggest music festival. One report in Slovakian press states that the person killed was a young boy, claims the BBC.

Organisers immediately cancelled the event, which was being attended by more than 30,000 music fans. Rapidly emerging as one of the largest events in Eastern Europe, Pahoda had boasted a stellar bill for this year's instalment.

The line up for this summer's event included Australian drum 'n' bass merchants Pendulum, as well as seminal punk-poet Patti Smith. Now Meg White's mother in law, the punk icon was due to be joined by Scottish indie giants Travis on the eclectic bill. The Slovakian event wasn't the only festival affected by the extreme weather, with Kings Of Leon pulling out of Benicassim after high winds made parts of the site unsafe.

Pahoda has been cancelled.

Cancelled Belfast disco to be re-run—again

Organisers of an under-age disco that was hastily called off in Belfast earlier this year amid fears that teenagers could be injured are to re-run the controversial event. But the promoters of the Inferno disco have insisted there will be no repeat of the terrifying scenes in February when 4,000 youngsters tried to get into a venue which had a capacity of just 800.

Five months ago the PSNI and security staff at the Odyssey Pavilion had to evacuate the building as the unexpectedly huge number of children tried to gain admittance to the disco at Bar Seven. At one point police and venue managers feared teenagers, who had been crushed up against closed doors, could be seriously injured.

In the wake of the mayhem, all youth discos at the Odyssey were suspended while police and safety officials from Belfast City Council carried out investigations. Now the man behind the disco, Chris Hughes, has announced that Inferno will be back on Saturday, August 15, at the King’s Hall. “It will be a lot different from the last time. We know we have to get it right and we have learned a lot of lessons in the last few months,” said Mr Hughes.

“We have consulted with a wide range of health and safety experts. We will have a strict limit on the number of people who get in and all 3,500 of them will have to buy tickets in advance.” In February the disco promoters were criticised for not operating a ticket-only policy. Mr Hughes said he has employed a new security company to handle the disco and their staff will search everyone going in. “We have also drawn up a 30-page event safety management plan that has been approved by the police and council officials,” said Mr Hughes.

Many parents expressed reservations about letting children go back to Inferno because of safety concerns. Hundreds of youngsters were stranded as the disco was abandoned hours before parents were to collect them.

Drivers' hours come under scrutiny

A consultation on the hours many van, bus and other professional drivers can work was launched yesterday by Transport Minister Paul Clark. Drivers’ hours rules set daily driving and duty limits, and in some instances break and rest requirements, in order to improve road safety, promote good working conditions and ensure fair competition between operators.

 The consultation covers the UK domestic drivers' hours rules. As well as van and many bus drivers, these also apply to refuse collection and breakdown vehicles and a range of other professional drivers. They do not apply to lorries or buses on longer routes, which come under the scope of European Union drivers’ hours rules. 

 Paul Clark said: "The domestic drivers' hours rules affect thousands of workers across the UK so it is vital that they are effective in keeping drivers, passengers and other road users safe. 

"This is a wide ranging consultation and we want to hear from as many drivers, operators and fleet managers as possible so that we can understand how the rules are working on the ground.

"The consultation, which will run until October 13 2009, is part of a comprehensive review of the domestic rules and the responses will be used to inform future policy decisions."

U2 tour nearly delayed by pissed off Dubliners

Locals near Dublin's Croke Park nearly stopped U2 from going to Sweden, though not at the insistence of the Swedes, as you might assume.

Residents near the Dublin stadium were rather pissed off about the U2 shows that took place there last weekend. Though it wasn't so much the band's loud musical playing that bothered the locals, nor Bono's tedious and often flawed 'save the poor' ramblings, but the fact the band's crew dismantled the shows' rather ambitious stage set up overnight. Rather loudly.

So pissed off were the Dubliners, in fact, they formed a picket line outside the gates through which the band's trucks needed to get in order to pick up all the '360 Degree Tour' set to take it to Sweden ready for shows planned for there next weekend.

For a time it looked like the picket line might seriously delay U2's tour crew and jeopardise the Swedish dates, though someone seemingly managed to placate the locals enough to get them out of the trucks' way. Perhaps they told them Bono had said the overnight staff clanking would save some African children from poverty and disease.

Controversy over festival cancellation

Police set up road blocks around a festival site to keep thousands of environmental campaigners away from long running festival. Up to 20,000 people had begun to gather for the Big Green Gathering in the Mendip Hills, Somerset but organisers were forced to cancel it on legal advice.

Festival directors today accused the police of taking a politically motivated decision to shut down the festival on the grounds that it attracts environmental activists and would have raised money for a major climate change demonstration, Climate Camp, to be held next month.

"It was a premeditated political decision made at least a week previously. There were going to be people from the Climate Camp here as well as Plane Stupid. It could be seen by police as gathering ground of radicals," said festival chairman Brig Oubridge. Climate Camp demonstrated in London during the G20 meeting and at Kingsnorth last year, while Plane Stupid have taken direct action at Stansted and Aberdeen airports.

"What the police have done is put more and more pressure on us over all our arrangements. It was a deliberate attempt to make it impossible to go ahead. We got in exactly the same paperwork as in other years. We know the officers were under pressure to close us down. This is a step backwards to the days of Margaret Thatcher," he said.

A spokesman for Avon and Somerset police said: "The event was not cancelled by the police or Mendip District Council. The organisers voluntarily surrendered their licence yesterday; therefore it was their decision to cancel, not ours. The fact that they voluntarily surrendered their licence suggests they did not feel they could satisfy the safety concerns. Police and council staff have been involved in negotiations with organisers for many weeks to try to address the concerns."

Oubridge said they had been negotiating with the police and the council until the last minute and that all concerns were being met. "We genuinely believed that things were progressing and we were continuing to spend money on infrastructure, wages and security. If they knew they were going to cancel the event, we can only conclude that this appears to be a deliberate attempt to bankrupt the Big Green Gathering."

Stagesafe understand that the festival organisers had not obtained a road closure order from the local highways authority in time nor had they secured the services of a traffic management company to provide signage and traffic management, West Country Ambulance a security company and a lack of assurance that they had a fire safety consultant, proper Fire Safety Management, Fire Safety Risk Assessments and the relevant certification in relation to fire safety equipment for the event.

Stagesafe have also been led to believe that many of the problems have occurred due to a cash flow problem with the event organisers, money required to pay key suppliers such as the security and traffic management company was being held by the ticket agency until after the event (as is normal) and key suppliers would not confirm they had been booked until they received the required deposits and payments from the organisers.

It is understood the organisers were not familiar with working with a professional ticket agency and were unaware that money would not be released by the ticket agent until after the event took place in case it was required to make refunds.

A spokesman for the Mendip District Council's legal team said: "The implications of the issues raised meant that the council and police had significant concerns about the safety of the public attending the event as well as those living, working and visiting the local area."

Some observers believe the closure of the festival is part of a larger plan to crack down on all environmental protest. Many of the people expected at the festival would have gone on to the Climate Camp, to be held in a few weeks' time. Kent police's blanket use of stop-and-search powers on thousands of activists at the Kingsnorth demonstration last year was recently found to be "disproportionate and counterproductive", according to an official review.

The Big Green Gathering spun out of the Glastonbury festivals and has been running in its present form since 1994 without complaints about public safety or crime. It features debates and practical green living demonstrations with a small amount of music.

Concert cancelled over extraordinary blunders

A major charity concert and fun day has been axed at the last minute – after a remarkable series of errors by the event organiser. The Bagrock in the Valley event was due to have been held in Castlebank Park, Lanark, on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday’s Children’s Fun Fair was to have been followed on Sunday by a concert headlined by the Red Hot Chilli Pipers and supported by a number of well-known Lanarkshire bands.

But Stagesafe can reveal that, bizarrely, experienced event organiser Jim Masters appears to have been solely responsible for the cancellation following a number of major errors and omissions. It appears that, despite starting the organisation more than six months ago Mr Masters, a well-known Lanark man, never asked South Lanarkshire Council for permission to use the park.

At one point even he told officials he did not know the council owned the park. It’s understood he also:

• Only paid about a quarter of the £1400 licensing fee.
• Failed to produce insurance cover.
• Did not produce essential documentation covering the fairground.
• Consistently failed to meet council deadlines for production of vital documents and safeguards.
• Failed to respond to recorded delivery letters, phone calls and emails from the council.
• Failed to turn up for a pre-arranged meeting with officials.
• Went ahead and organised a street collection last Saturday without a licence.

News of the concert’s cancellation has been met with shock and anger in the Lanark area. Would-be concert goers, some of whom bought tickets at the weekend from a special open day organised by Mr Masters, his son Thomas and friend Arthur Grainger, were yesterday (Wednesday) demanding to know when, or if, they would get their money back.

Organisations and businesses who had offered to become involved with the much publicised event say they are out of pocket. Stagesafe understands the council only discovered about the proposed weekend when people living near the park started asking questions of local councillors following concert publicity in a local paper. A licensing application was finally submitted, in Mr Master’s name, on July 3, unusually late for such a major event.

Stagesafe also understands that he only paid a small percentage of the licensing fee, about £300, rather than the £1400 required. Council insiders say that had Mr Masters come to them right at the start and outlined his proposals, as most new event organisers would do, they would have told him that the park was not suitable, and would have tried to work with him to find an alternative venue, or tailor a show to fit the park.

The plug was reluctantly pulled on the event by a concerned South Lanarkshire Council just before lunchtime on Tuesday. Their decision, taken, it is understood, “at the highest level”, came after a meeting earlier in the day with event organiser Jim Masters. Council bosses had hoped that after weeks of bending over backwards and giving him opportunity after opportunity to meet licensing requirements he again failed to produce the required documentation.

It is understood that South Lanarkshire officials decided they had no option but to refuse to allow the weekend to go ahead on safety grounds. Stagesafe has learned that the idea of a charity gig involving the Pipers originally came late last year from another group in the town. They proposed to use the gig to raise cash for injured horse jockeys and had identified a suitable location elsewhere in Clydesdale.

Mr Masters was initially a member of that committee but left when they decided they did not have sufficient expertise to run such a major event at this time. Mr Masters then approached the venue in February and said he’d booked the Pipers himself and wanted to hold it there. The venue owners said this week that they quickly rejected his idea after reading his business plan and learning more about his plans. They felt it was doomed even then.

For several years, Mr Masters has been a member of the Lanark Lanimer Committee’s Executive, and been in charge of running the annual Lanimer afternoon event in Castlebank Park. The fact that he already had the experience of running events in the park, and knew what he had to do to gain council and licensing approval, on top of his involvement with Lanimers, meant many willingly agreed to help with this venture, in which he was assisted by son Thomas and friend Arthur Grainger.

The council statement said they had been forced to refuse approval for the proposed concert and associated event because event organiser Mr Jim Masters had neither sought permission to use the park nor taken action to provide the necessary public safety licences and certificates.

“It is regrettable that we have had to take this action,” said a council spokesperson. “Mr Masters was given frequent opportunities to take action to meet the essential requirements for a large-scale public event. He did not do so. We, therefore, had no option but to refuse permission for use of the park. In any large-scale public event, safety is paramount. Despite making numerous promises that “information will be with [the council] within the next few days,” no such information was provided by Mr Masters.”

And the Chillis, on their website, apologised to fans and distanced themselves from the organisers. It said: “The Chillis were desperately unhappy to hear today that the ‘Bagrock in the Valley’ event in Lanark had been cancelled. We just want to assure our loyal fans that this it totally beyond our control. We were booked by the promoters to perform at the show and had no involvement whatsoever in any of the other arrangements. Mr Masters, the promoter, has no connection whatsoever with The Red Hot Chilli Pipers or The Red Hot Chilli Pipers’ Management, The Red Hot Chilli Pipers’ Agency Team or Record Label.“

Arthur Grainger told the Advertiser yesterday afternoon that the organisers had “evidence to the contrary” to counter the council allegations. He pointed out that they had received a legal letter from the authority and they were now involved in discussions with solicitors.

“There’s not a lot I can say about these accusations, but we have evidence to the contrary,” he commented. And he said that 11th-hour discussions were taking place to see if an alternative, private, venue could be used to allow the event to go ahead. “I don’t know if we require a licence for that. We hope to find that out in the next few hours,” added Mr Grainger.