Two months since the shock implosion of Bloc festival on its opening night at the highly vaunted London Pleasure Gardens, Bloc organisers Alex Benson and George Hull speak out.
Of all this summer’s festival failures perhaps none was more surprising and spectacular than the demise of Bloc. Cancelled only a few hours into the two-day electronic music extravaganza due to “crowd safety concerns”, Bloc’s non-fulfillment appeared to stem from its overwhelming popularity rather than the distinct lack of interest which has done for so many other festivals in recent years.
Many of those present on the Friday night of Bloc postulated that the promoters had become greedy and oversold the event. But what really happened? Finally the Bloc organisers give their version of events.
At the time, and indeed in the two months since, there was precious little communication from the Bloc organisers beyond their initial statement. Instead Baselogic Productions (the parent company behind Bloc) chose to close ranks, opting for voluntary bankrupcy whilst the administrators began their postmortem.
However, this week saw the release of a lengthy written statement on the Bloc website detailing their version of events before, during and after the festival’s closure. In summary, Benson and Hull assert that Bloc’s failings were a direct result of the venue, London Pleasure Gardens (LPG), being incomplete and that crowd issues were due to the consequent infrastructural inadequacies, rather than the event having being oversold.
“We took tickets off sale two days in advance and it is accepted by all concerned that we did not oversell the event… It is no secret that there were serious delays associated with the building of the London Pleasure Gardens site, leading to non-completion of groundwork, venues and general infrastructure. There is no doubt that these delays severely compromised our efforts to deliver a successful production.”
Whilst this appears to ring true, Bloc’s eagerness to pass the buck cannot go unscrutinised.
By their own admission, Benson and Hull knew that LPG “was was clearly a long way from the ‘riverside arts and entertainment destination’ that we had hired”. So why go ahead with the event?
Their response was two-fold when speaking with RA yesterday.
“Well, and we absolutely wanted to deliver what we’d promised, we wanted to do Bloc as had been advertised… we still felt we could deliver.”
But if the quality of the event was in jeopardy did they want to risk offering a substandard experience? Did they want to risk wasting people’s time and money to attend?
“If we’d been Live Nation or AEG, we could just take a 2 million quid hit, but we were in no position to do that. We wanted to make it work and did everything we could to deliver it.”
Beyond the shortcomings of the venue itself (which had been well documented in the build up to the event), it was the unforeseen issues with ticket scanning and entry which compounded the debacle.
“We did experience problems with the management of the admission control systems. The area that was set aside for queuing before tickets were checked became overcrowded at around 21:00. This began to put potentially dangerous pressure on the searching lanes leading into the festival.”
Suspiciously there is no clarification of what these “problems” were, perhaps it wasn’t just LPG who had failed to plan properly?
“At 21:27, following a breach of these lanes, ticket scanning was suspended to ease the pressure. Comprehensive ticket scanning was not properly resumed after this time. Knowledge of the suspension of scanning combined with ticket touting enabled people to gain entry to the event without having purchased a ticket from our website. We’ll never know exactly how many people did this…”
Whilst those who were there noted that much of the site remained empty due to people congregating as close to the (limited) music on offer, it’s reasonable to assume that as news of the suspension of ticketing scanning spread, more and more people without tickets were able to gain access. Could this have exacerbated the overcrowding inside to dangerous levels? Although we’ll never know the answer, it suggests this particular trigger goes beyond the infrastructure issues of LPG and is perhaps why Benson and Hull remain cagey on the subject, with “we can’t speculate because we don’t know the facts” and “We don’t know because we don’t have any data” being the default position. Firefighting PR spiel anyone?
So what does this mean for those seeking refunds? Thankfully for customers, Bloc’s statement also contains a form which will allow customers to receive a refund via the bank that issued the credit or debit card used for purchase.
Finally, what is the future of Bloc? The organisers themselves have already stated their intentions to return to their roots “putting on some really good techno parties” with yet to be confirmed dates and venues. But is it too late for them? Will you support Bloc in the future? Can they bounce back? Join the debate below the line.
06.21 PM
Phew, I actually considered coming from the USA to attend Bloc this year… a narrow escape! Sorry for everyone who bought tickets and / or made the journey!