this is valencia goes to benicassim!

Jul 24

In Defence of Benicassim 2009

We ran a piece on the blog about the winds and the fire at Benicassim - these are some of the comments

ross darby said…

im here in castellon waiting to hear if kol will play tonight. last night was like a war zone. at one point i wondered if we were gonna have a few deaths. i left after the toms came on. luckily. met a few people today in castellon who have been evacuated from beni camp sites and all their gear and tents got blown away. they were pretty stressed. i felt bad for them but there are hundreds heading out to near by towns trying to get hotels. its not cool. i think i´ll have my v festival next year. also on 1st night oasis power was cut twice. and the weather was fine, so the storms caused havoc. for the biggest acts in the world to play, and even the big tv screens fell down!!! it make sme wonder if this place has the balls to put on a fest. ross.

Martin said…

Piss off back to v “festival” then Ross. The spirit in the campsite and the hard work of the organisers was enough to get this festival back on it’s feet and going again saturday night, after a freak extreme weather situation. Any festival would of been shut down by that. Beni “had the balls” to bounce back.

But you didn’t see this, hiding away in your cosy apartment.

BenH said…

The TV screens didn’t fall down. Festival structures have anemometers to detect wind speed. They’ll have been lowered safely to prevent them falling down.

I’m with Martin on this. We camped through the winds. We made friends with people we wouldn’t have met otherwise, helped people who needed a hand securing their tents, and generally got more into the festival spirit than anyone you’ll ever meet at V Festival.

Oasis have had sound problems throughout their tour. It’s a little too regular now for them to blame it on the festival, it’s clearly either the band’s gear, or them trying to gain publicity.

The wind and fire are hardly the festival’s fault. Even if they had been as prepared as some people seem to think they should have been, there is no way the bands could have gone on with the amount of dust that was flying around the crowd.

The only thing that the festival organisers did to piss us off was start rescheduling bands without communicating it properly. It wouldn’t have taken much to put big signs above the wristband check at the entrance saying “Friendly Fires will be on an hour early” etc…

Other than that, it was an amazing festival, and I can’t wait for next year already.

read the entry here http://thisisvalencia.blogspot.com/2009/07/huge-fire-and-high-winds-force-lights.html