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BLOC 2012- the boat that didn’t sail. It just sank.
Other | Tuesday 10th July 2012 | Osh
BLOC 2012- the boat that didn’t sail. It just sank.
Just as you think you’ve reached the pinnacle moment in your raving career- you see the line up for the biggest Electronic festival in the country and get that funny feeling in your stomach. Ibiza has been smashing the line-ups this year and now it’s London’s turn; 2012 has been an amazing time for the electronic scene- and Bloc Festival 2012 seemed the perfect way to celebrate that. The streets of London were filled with billboards and flyers for this event. On paper BLOC looked perfect beyond anything else going on in the UK at the weekend. People flew from across the seas and took to the roads of the UK to get there in time for the acts to start. So why in reality did the event turn into the biggest festy flop of the summer?
For the organisers and the Metropolitan police, it has been easy to blame the English summer storms in a hope to hide the humiliation- of course that’s an easy way out for all kinds of reasons- if it had actually rained on the Friday! If you are a lover of crowds, being crushed against other sweaty strangers- not actually being able to get to see any acts; Bloc was set to be a winner. However, every punter who paid a decent amount of dollar to attend a rowdy crowd, staring police in the eye, facing a closed iron gate would say that Friday night was a dance disaster that should never have been allowed to happen. With the whole of London’s Pleasure Garden’s not being able to accommodate half of the crowd on the night, a riot was about to let loose. Thankfully, the crowd remained in a rather accepting mood of what was going on around them, even as the hordes of people started to surge into the tents, which only had one entrance and one exit, creating an ordeal that no one can laugh about just yet.
If artists such as Snoop Dogg, Richie Hawtin and Orbital are going to be wowing the crowds on at the event, surely the size of the venue had to accommodate for this kind of following. It seems that the organisers saw the dollar signs arrive before their organizational skills came into play, as they signed up to this social suicide in the music industry. They oversold, over envisaged and were over ambitious without the drive to achieve what BLOC could have been. An interview with the organiser of the event Alex Benson goes to show that they really should have pulled their finger out and pulled their weight to deliver to the crowds;
So, what’s a typical day in the life of Bloc’s organisers?
Ooh I don’t know, what did I do today? We kind of get up late and probably go for a stroll down by the canal in Hackney Wick, and then it’ll probably be time for some lunch, so go and have some lunch and talk about what we did at the weekend and music, that sort of thing. Answer the phone, shout at each other – we bicker a lot, probably bicker and argue about money, disagree with each other’s decisions that have been made over the weekend on email. Then it’ll probably be time for another walk, might get to the office for the first time by about 3.30pm, go on Facebook for a little bit and then fuck it off and go to the pub at about 5.30pm or something.
(Laughs) That sounds a lot of fun, I’m sure there’s a lot more hard work in it than that but yeah.
(Laughs)
I wonder if Benson is laughing now. This festival proved to be a waste of time for all involved, as the Saturday event was then cancelled for safety reasons. What a mare for the punters who queued for 5 hours after work on a Friday to not get to see one act- what a way to start your weekend.
An interview with Alex Benson, BLOC Director
http://theransomnote.co.uk/BLOC-2012-INTERVIEW-WITH-DIRECTOR-ALEX-BENSON
Frankie Salt
