zoothousand8 Statement ‘We Apologise’
Below is the statement released by the zoothousand team hopefully explaining what happened and why it did, feel free to read and leave a comment on this site so we can find out what you really think about the whole situation.
We hope that we can explain why certain things did not run smoothly at ZOO8.
Queuing: For health and safety reasons we had to open 2 hours late. We encountered problems with the scanners for the E-tickets and found that the clampers for the wristbands slowed the whole process down. We fixed this problem by separating normal ticket and E-ticket holders on Saturday and moving the location of the wristband exchange to the box office location.
Water: We had placed 20 water bowsers with taps around the campsite and the arena which were filled and re-filled with drinking water.
Camping: We tried everything we could to extend the campsite by opening other areas, but were unable to move into another field because the infrastructure to support it was unavailable to us at the time.
Toilets: There were more campers than we had originally planned for, however, facilities were not stretched inside the festival walls and overall we had enough toilets to deal with this amount of people we had based on The Event Safety Guide. Extra contractors were brought in to help clean and maintain the portaloos around the clock.
The line up changes: A 2 hour delay on Friday meant we were shuffling acts from the start. Also, during the Gallows set on Friday night the main king pin pole of the Tap ‘n’ Tin tent moved, making the whole structure unsafe. Because of this we had to move as many acts as we could onto other stages including into the VIP tent, but inevitably we would have to cancel some acts. In the case of Wiley, he was on site and was paid in full, but his tour manager wasn’t prepared to let him play in any of the smaller arenas.
With regards to Dizzee Rascal; we had agreed a payment structure with his agency and made all the correct payments on time. On Friday we had contacted his agency and were told he was coming but no one could get hold of him. We continued chasing this up to no avail and so had to make the decision to move Lethal Bizzle into his slot. Like a lot of you we were all personally very disappointed that Dizzee Rascal didn’t show.
Roni Size/ Reprazent were paid in full and even began setting up their kit on stage. No one from their agency is available to comment at present, however, this does require further investigation.
Regrettably, we had to cancel Athlete.
Also, some of the artist agencies look after more than one act, so, when we were required to cancel an act playing in the Tap n Tin Arena (which was closed for repairs) that in turn meant losing acts playing elsewhere at the festival.
Regarding other acts we’ve heard people query: Pendulum, Ash, Skinnyman, Stanton Warriors, Mitchell Brothers, Dogs and Chas ‘n’ Dave were all present and all performed, however, some in different arenas than were advertised originally.
If you want to get in contact with us then please e-mail us on info@zoothousand.com and we will reply to you as soon as we can.
Just for the record, no one from the Zoo8 camp got arrested or escorted off the site by the police.
The organisers would like to apologise to anyone who did not enjoy the festival as much as they had hoped but rest assured any lessons to be learned from this year will be learned and will make next year a better event.
Tags: press release, statement, zoo8, zoothousand
