Big Chill 2008, Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire

1st – 3rd August 2008

It is Big Chill 2007. I am lying on my back in the grass arena of the main stage, listening to the heavenly sounds of two orchestras, Bombay Dub and Cinematic, and watching the clouds above that look like they’ve just slid off a pre-Raphaelite painting. It feels like paradise… I lazily lift my head up to happily observe the hundreds of other equally blissful bodies lying in the grass, and see a random couple I got chatting to last night on a walk round the beautiful enchanted grounds of the festival – I wave, and they grin and wave back. I let my head sink back down into the grass and stretch…

Words: Steph Robinson
Pics: Will PooleIt is Big Chill 2008. I am in the middle of a heaving, shoving crowd that is attempting to masquerade as an orderly queue, just outside the Rizla stage, being pushed against the 10-foot fence that surrounds this small, pumping stage in the middle of the festival grounds. There are security guards at the entrance to the stage, whose job seems to consist of pushing the crowd back and arbitrarily picking people who are allowed through to the actual stage and music. It is only when one of the security guards pushes me in the chaos and crush and I yell ‘OW!’ much louder and more pointedly than I need to, that they allow me through, apologising and embarrassed. I emerge on the coveted ‘other side’ to be greeted by gigantic posters emblazoned with the RIZLA slogan and fake palm trees…

Seeing as these are the only two Big Chill festivals I have been to, perhaps I am not really qualified to say that Big Chill ain’t what it used to be. But there was an unmistakable difference between 2007 and 2008. That having been said, I don’t wish to give the impression that 2008’s Big Chill was all bad – there were some truly spectacular moments like the Burning Man-esque towering windmill which was set on fire against a backdrop myriad of fireworks; being reduced to standing silent and spellbound under the stars during Trentemøller’s brilliant, fiercely atmospheric set; having a good old stomp to Roots Manuva; and of course the addition of Sunrise Celebration, where our gang would frequently find ourselves, seeking solace in IDSpiral away from the heaving crowds and corporate crap that sadly seemed to have infiltrated the rest of the festival.

Big Chill 2007 was my first real festival (I don’t really count the muddy, cold night I had spent wandering around Sanctuary Festival a month earlier, stumbling between two awful happy hardcore tents in the rain) and I had heard only wonderful things about it – and what’s even better, it actually exceeded all my expectations. It was a beautiful, relaxed, ‘hippy’ festival experience, and looking back now, it was the size of the crowds at the 2008 one that ruined it for me. It had just gotten too damn big, and it felt like things hadn’t been adjusted or developed sufficiently to maintain the great vibe within a bigger setting. And for a supposedly eco-friendly, child-friendly hippy festival, having an exclusive stage sponsored by a tobacco rolling paper company, complete with power-tripping security and advertising – well that just wasn’t very Chilled now, was it guys? And the really annoying thing was that the music on this Rizla stage wasn’t even really worth the wait, the jostling crowd, or the obnoxious security. If you’re going to do something like that, please don’t try so hard to place yourselves within the sphere of alternative, ethical festivals, because it just won’t stick.

It was this atmosphere that meant I didn’t enjoy 2008’s Big Chill anywhere near as much as I’d hoped – the atmosphere that felt like the festival was struggling to attain a quality that had been lost from the previous year. In fact, before I’d even gotten into the actual festival, things had already gone wrong. As some of you poor sods will know, many of us who arrived on the Thursday night were told upon arrival that we had arrived too late to be granted entry that night (despite no mention of this on their website) so we would have to wait until morning and camp in the car park, or sleep in the car.

Seriously? What about those who hadn’t arrived by car, and who didn’t have a tent because the mates they were sharing it with were waiting inside the festival for them? Despite acknowledging that this wasn’t the punters’ fault because there had been no prior stipulation of an arrival time, the organisers insisted that there was nothing they could do until morning when someone arrived to manage the box office, and refused to let us through, even as we waved our valid tickets in their faces. Could we not enter now with our tickets, and go back to the box office in the morning to collect our wristbands? No we could not, apparently, though no one could legitimately explain why. As it turns out, we could do this and we did - after the crowd got fed up and walked through the security blocking the entrance en masse, we all simply returned to the box office the following morning to collect our wristbands. Now, did it really need to be so difficult and maddeningly bureaucratic? It was an experience that I think would be unheard of at another ‘ethical’ festival.

I was so put off by last year’s experience that I’m not More details
6-9 August 2009
Website: www.bigchill.net/festival going to Big Chill again this year. Believe me, I will be sorry to be missing Orbital headlining at a festival but I bought tickets to see them at a gig in September instead, as a consolation prize. I truly hope that friends who do go to Big Chill 2009 will come back and tell me it’s back to its brilliant self, so that I will want to go back and lie in the grass once more. Yet this isn’t meant to be a simple bitching session – organisers of Big Chill, consider this a plea to find your way back to what I thought your festival was all about. It’s all in the name; next time, make it more Chilled, but just not too Big…