Ben Ray, promoter of the Slam Dunk Festival, has released an official statement regarding the situation at this year’s Slam Dunk Festival at Hertfordshire University. The statement reads as follows:
Thank you everyone for attending the Slam Dunk Festivals – North & South, their pre parties, Slam Dunk By The Sea, Slam Dunk Scotland, and Slam Dunk vs Shakedown. We’d also like to thank all the bands that played across all the stages and events, as well as all the sponsors.
All the events were great and the vast majority of the feedback has been amazing! Everything ran smoothly apart from the one incident at Slam Dunk Festival South in Hatfield.
First of all we would like to profusely apologise to anyone that experienced access issues at this event. We have spent the last 3 days reading various message boards, forums, reading emails and messages, to establish the problems that people encountered.
Up until approximately 6:30pm the traffic between the venues had been flowing freely, but at that point the rain started coming down harder so a lot of people headed indoors. At the same time a band had just finished in the main room, which started to empty out. With a large of people trying to go downstairs and a large number of people coming towards them the two met and the area that fed a number of the venues ground to a standstill.
This incident was the catalyst that started it all and which took too long to recover from. The primary concern was health and safety so that’s why the numbers to this area were limited for a period of time that was unnecessarily long. Thankfully there were no injuries and everyone was kept safe.
Slam Dunk Festival prides itself as being one of the best value festivals in the UK so we cannot stress enough that the event was not oversold as some people were claiming. Like any festival, the capacity is not worked out on any one area, and unfortunately no one can be guaranteed access to see any one particular band. We accept that during the certain times it looked like there were a lot more people trying to get into one particular stage because the queues had become joined and it became hard to separate them out to get people to where they wanted to go. This eventually did happen and the majority of the people did get into see the acts that they wanted.
We accept that there are some people that didn’t get in to see one or more bands that they were there to see, and we apologise for this again. We also know that a lot more people were inconvenienced in some way such as lengthy queues but the majority of people did have a good time and got to see many bands. It was the first time we had run the event at the venue, and although various health and safety checks and planning had been carried out, the problem of a sudden downpour was not thought of such a serious issue.
The fact that the Leeds event ran without any problems is a testament to the fact that this event can work in a similar venue, although the weather was better and all the stages were indoors.
Slam Dunk Festival has grown over the years from a little club night in Leeds up to what we did this weekend and while we know that a small number of people are going to be left very unhappy, we can only ask that they give us another chance to prove that this event can work and we will spend the next 12 months planning to ensure nothing like this can happen again.
Thankyou for your understanding
UK based film graduate with a huge passion for music, sports and video games.
