Band: Mash Attack (mashattack.co.uk)
Management: S.J. Creative (sjcreative.co.uk)
Where: ?
Hey, I'm in a band called Mash Attack and having read some of these blogs of people's horror stories it just gave me a flashback of a festival we once TRIED to play.
To set the scene, the festival itself was a slightly more intimate crowd of maybe 1,500 people in total over two stages.
The main stage was awesome. There was a hill where people could watch and dance comfortably with a bar, food, yadda yadda yadda.
The other stage though… Oh god. The other stage was in a barn, but don't judge it yet because we've played in some pretty nice barns. This one however turned out to be the barn from hell!
So after a 3 hour drive to this place it took us an additional 2 hours to find the promotor on a site that wasn't particularly hard to navigate. At this time it was getting dark and we were finally offered a place to peg our tents in the camping area. The pretty big headliner who we were supporting on said stage got the camper van offered next to us.
We were told we could only load in around 10pm or so, but had to wait for the headliners backline. An hour and a half later everyone who was involved [with running the festival] was absolutely pissed/high/incomprehensible. There was no sound engineer/promotor or anyone who could help.
After eventually taking things into our own hands we were all trying to talk sense into this guy who eventually said if we got set up he'd sort us out.
By this time they had been playing very repetitive Happy Hardcore at stupidly loud volumes with nothing but strobe lighting to walk through a crowd of pill-heads who, by the way, don't give a shit if you have heavy stuff in your hands.
...However they do stop to tell you how awesome you feel and would rather dance with you.
This goes on until about 1.30am. We're shattered and we're trying to set up an awkwardly-shaped tiny stage covered in percussion instruments, pill heads, strobe lighting, loud music and with no-one to help.
We'd had enough, and mutually between the other bands decided pull out. After a few discussions between the headliners and a staggering promotor, they left.
I tried to swoop in and ask for what [fee] was agreed.
Nothing.
Too tired, we went to sleep to try again in the morning.
The next morning we tried again, he didn't believe we were owed anything and seemed to have no recollection of any agreement.
Lesson learned; always print out the agreement beforehand just in case!
Awful experience. Stressful, tiring, unrewarding and didn't even play a note!
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