Inside Boomtown's Decision to Cancel This Year's Festival

Here’s a scenario: you’re playing God – or another all-seeing, all-knowing creator – and you decide to build a music festival. There are two options.

Either you cart in the same near-identical big-top tents which exist at hundreds of other festivals across the globe. Benefits include: being easy to build and quick to set-up. Or, you decide to get boutique about-it, fine-crafting your experience to be an immersive and enriching five-day bash.

The latter experience, which is often the better one, is personal. It’s less about energy drinks or Yungblud screaming “let’s goooooooo!” Think: Glastonbury, which cancelled its 2021 edition earlier this year. Think: Boomtown, which cancelled its summer festival today.

The difficulty with these events – as Boomtown Creative Director and Co-Founder Lak Mitchell explained to me – is they take time to knock together.

As a result, organisers at Boomtown and several other festivals have been lobbying the UK government for months, asking them to protect festivals and offer government-backed insurance in case they need to cancel last-minute, especially when those festivals often take months to build.

Germany, Austria and the Netherlands have said they will underwrite insurance claims – but the UK government has consistently pushed back against a similar scheme operating here. Because of this, Boomtown has announced it will not be pushing forward, as it would be gambling with the eight-figure sum associated with the cost of setting up this year’s event.

VICE: Boomtown has been going for 12 years. Compared to previous editions, what extra steps have you had to go through to try to get this year’s festival off the ground?  
Lak: Normally we’ve got a good indication on whether we’re going ahead, so having the COVID pandemic to deal with has been an entirely new realm to navigate. The operations team has been working at a really high level with other big festival organisers to try and understand how this year might be possible – but it’s been bonkers. It’s been such an up-and-down, out-of-control rollercoaster of unknowns. 

Pulling together an event in 2021 seems like a massive ball-ache, with lots of intricate moving parts to align. When did it become obvious this year’s event wouldn’t go ahead? 
It’s a few things. Boomtown is massive in terms of its creative build. It involves hundreds of different groups, who employ hundreds more staff to create the main set builds and the creativity side. There’s normally 40 of us working all year round on planning – but with no insurance and no definite guidance about whether we could go ahead, we didn’t want to bring the team back from furlough. 

What were the main issues? 
When the roadmap was announced, it gave us a bit more confidence. Mass gatherings are back on in June and we’re mid-August, so we felt confident that we could pull everything together. But when we started speaking to all the external groups – all the hundreds of different contractors and independent collectives – we realised that all the staff had gone off and got other work in the film industry and different industries.

Though we felt confident that people would come back, unless we said “100 percent, yes, this is going ahead – don’t take any more work this summer,” they couldn’t say yes. Lots of the contractors – people at sound, lighting, fencing and container companies – had sold off their kit or had it out at testing centres and things like that. We thought: ‘Even if we could put the festival on, would we have enough equipment?’ So there was that side. Then the insurance is the overriding thing. 

What’s been going on there?
We’ve been working on lobbying the government for months, saying, “If you don’t give us some sort of insurance, we won’t be able to go ahead.” At times, we thought they would put their money where their mouth is and insure [festivals], like they have in Germany. But they haven’t.

I remember one year Glastonbury couldn’t happen because all the security and toilets were hired out for the London 2012 Olympics. In some ways, it feels like that’s happening again, but on a bigger scale. 
We did a whole thing in the DCMS Select Committee and really pushed and got a lot of people onboard, but they haven’t come through. Millions and millions of people have gone into Boomtown and supported the industry across the board – whether that’s artists, booking agents, theatre, arts, infrastructure, operations, security, bars, traders. So much comes in. A festival at the size and complexity of Boomtown, there’s loads of people hoping we would hold out longer, because [having our festival take place] ripples out into lots of smaller events. 

Boomtown is one of the UK’s bigger festivals, with 66,000 attendees. But bigger festivals like Reading and Leeds are seemingly ploughing ahead. Why?
The bigger festivals are part of bigger groups, so they have financial backing. We’re completely independent. That’s amazing in some ways, because it allows us to be radical, but at the same time it means we don’t have the support network to fall back on. 

You can be independent and do the best stuff ever, but when shit hits the fan, there’s no conglomerate who can swoop in and save you. It’s a shame. From people you speak and work with in the festival industry, do you feel optimistic that we are going to see a summer of live music? 
I’m really optimistic that smaller events will be back on. The 4,000 capacity ones. Same goes for some of the bigger ones: if you’ve got a festival that you can roll in and set up within two weeks, and get it open, then you can really hold out [until the last minute]. The vaccine roll out is going well, there’s no huge problems on the NHS at the moment, so it feels like things are going in the right direction. 

Did the government say why they refuse to pay the insurance fees?
I imagine they’ve got lots of big things to tackle, but it’s a real shame they haven’t seen the huge benefits the UK festival sector brings to society. Getting people out and connecting is important – it’s why festivals are so important. They help people escape from their mundane routines at work and live a life. With Boomtown, we aim to help inspire the audience. People come away really happy, thinking they’re going to be more creative. It’s a real shame none of that has been picked up. 

Thanks, Lak. 

@ryanbassil