LOADED: Aiken respond to your Electric Picnic complaints
Friday September 14 2007
Thought ELECTRIC Picnic felt like a distant memory? Not for me. My inbox has been clogged up with disgruntled punters furious about the toilet facilities and lack of water taps in the campsite.
The following was typical: "Can the media please use their powers to get an explanation for the revolting conditions at the Electric Picnic campsites. We paid a small fortune for on-site accommodation in one of the tents. There were no special toilet or water facilities despite paying more money than we would have at a four star hotel. How on earth could organisers even begin to think facilities were adequate on any basic level. It just beggars belief how bad the toilet situation was... DISGUSTING EXPERIENCE!!!!!"
This, and numerous other mails and online posts of the same variety were put to Lindsey Holmes, PR for the festival and she responds as follows: "There was double the recommended amounts of toilets per attendee. The recommended units are one per hundred. At the picnic there were over 750 public toilets between the arena and campsite. Which means there were double the recommended amount -- enough for 70,000.
"The toilets were serviced constantly night and day. The difficulty is that people didn't flush after themselves and unfortunately there is nothing the organisers can do to enforce this. It is impossible to clean the toilet after each use. There were over 44 waterpoints between the campsite and arena again, more than enough for the attending crowd," she pointed out.
Meanwhile, MCD, always keen to steal the thunder from their rivals in Aiken Promotions and POD Concerts have issued a release to notify the great and the good that Oxegen was selected as the third most enjoyable festival in "these islands" behind the Carling shindig in Reading and Leeds and Glastonbury.
* WARNER MUSIC have been holding the new James Blunt album, which is released today, behind lock and key. You will notice that there's no review by us -- we refused to go along to their boardroom to listen to it.
Frankly, Blunt's music is dire enough without having to sit like a school boy in an office making notes.
* SO APPLE have done the business again and delivered a sexy new batch of iPods. Sadly for Hot Press, they used photos of the old Nano on the front cover the day after the new ones appeared.
Naturally the magazine had gone to the printers a couple of days before Apple's announcement.
Unforgivable however is the question they pose on the cover: Hard-Fi: The New Clash? Er, no -- although it does make the outraged reader want to read inside to see what on earth justified such hyperbole.
- John Meagher
