The Great Escape

I was enlisted to give a talk at this year's Great Escape festival, which I've just returned from.

The panel I was on were charged with talking about the woes of the music industry, which is something that could easily have lasted a lot longer than the 45-minutes we were given. I'm not sure we managed to say a great deal of note, but the level of ignorance or perhaps denial of the problems that labels and retailers are experiencing was staggering.

The Great Escape itself was a piss poorly organised event. It's all very well having a crawl around different venues but when the capacities of the venues aren't big enough to support anyone besides wanky delegates (like me), you've got a problem. On Thursday, the Concord II was one-in-one-out well over an hour before CSS were due on. Meanwhile those with delegate passes were able to come and go as they pleased.

I say this as a delegate, it's an absolute nonsense to treat the paying customer as this kind of second-class citizen. Hey! We're failing to sell records and living solely on live income at the moment, so why don't we fuck the paying customer off from that too?

A nonsense.

Kissaway Trail and Besnard Lakes were good though.