An obviously unsuitable venue, a clear lack of organisation and a promoter whose shows have appeared on Rip-Off Britain. Why was Hope and Glory given permission to go ahead?

Anyone who follows the arts in Liverpool will no doubt have heard all about the fiasco that was the Hope and Glory Festival over the weekend.

It felt like everybody who is in some way involved with the arts in Liverpool had reservations about the event from the off. Something didn’t feel quite right about it as soon as it was announced. But, good God, I don’t think any of us thought it would be this bad.

For starters, any old fool could see that the area seemed much too small to hold a festival of this size. I know this because I am a fool, and even I could see it. Sure, they stage Pride there, but Pride is a free event and people aren’t caged in. It is easy to get in, out and around. At Hope and Glory, they were told that the area was safe for a 9,000 (others have said 5,000) but it seems that anywhere between 12-15,000 were sold.

No biggie, though, right? I mean what’s a bit of overcrowding? It’s not like the city of Liverpool specifically has ever faced devastating consequences as a direct result of overcrowding, is it?

And then there is what exists in St. George’s Garden, the park area behind St. George’s Hall. There are memorials in there. Not just the statues, but trees that were planted in remembrance to Liverpool AIDS victims (which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why it makes a helluva lot more sense for Pride to be held in that area). From what can be gathered, no effort appeared to have been made to protect these memorials.

I had no intention of going to the festival. It was a second rate line-up full of indie landfill acts that haven’t been relevant for about a decade. They might as well have renamed the whole thing Ladfest.

I did, however, go past the site on the bus not long after doors opened. The queue went right around the block. The geniuses sold 12,000 tickets and only seemed to have one entrance point. That might be fine for a venue that only holds a few hundred, but you are aware that there is a reason that stadiums and arenas have multiple entrances, right?

People I know who were there told me that the bottleneck at the entrance made moving around close to an impossibility. There was only one bar that could be easily accessed by this point, and it took people between 45 minutes to an hour to get served, either for food or drink (incidentally, the supposed “Gin Palace” only had one kind of gin). It was so bad that some people reportedly left and returned with drinks from an off-license, which I’m pretty sure is prohibited as a security risk among other things.

The portable toilets were overflowing extremely quickly, which isn’t surprising. Some reports are suggesting that there were only 20 of them. That’s 20 portable toilets for 12,000 people. To put that into context, the Titanic had 20 lifeboats for 3,327 people and that was deemed shambolic. The guidelines state that somewhere between 150-200 portable toilets would be necessary for that many people.

This led to a total standstill. Police were called in. People who had tickets were turned away at the door. A friend of mine entered, saw the conditions inside and left after ten minutes, feeling completely unsafe.

Things didn’t seem much better for the bands. The Pigeon Detectives’ Matt Bowmen asked if anyone knew how to tie down speakers, which makes the whole place sound like a death trap.

Thank God nobody was hurt.

The day seemed to start off with delays – The Membranes were due on at 12.30pm, but didn’t take to the stage until an hour later, and then they had their set cut to just three songs. Embrace played at 6pm, but were due at 3.15pm, and even when they did make it to the stage, there was initially no sound.

But the mid-festival standstill led to yet more delays. They were running so late that Charlotte Church was thrown off the bill entirely at the last minute.

Less than half an hour before James began their set, they were told to shorten it. They were initially allotted a full 90 minute set, but ended up playing just nine songs. And this is where things really took off.

Tim Booth, James’ frontman, took to Twitter to apologise to everyone affected by the day’s events and to thank people for sticking around.

Well that was fucked up. Sorry everyone was messed around so badly. Hope you managed to find some pleasure amongst the chaos. NBL. — Tim Booth (@RealTimBooth) August 5, 2017

The response from Hope and Glory’s social media was less than professional.

And this continued. When pressed for answers for the day’s problems, they responded by blaming everything on one man, namely the production manager, and gave his email address out for everyone to contact him (we have censored the email because we’re not total cockrings).

Yeah! It’s all Richard‘s fault!

Except…erm…well, this is the promoter Lee O’Hanlon on Facebook last week…

Following this, there came another message. For the life of me, I don’t understand how anybody could possibly think that this was a good way of cancelling a day at a festival.

No apology. No explanation. Just three words; “No festival today”. Christ, technically, they didn’t even specify which festival. Given that they spoke to the Liverpool Echo not long before this, declaring that Sunday would go ahead, they could reasonably have been talking about V Festival. I mean, there was no V Festival yesterday, was there? Granted, it wasn’t scheduled to be taking place, but there wasn’t any context to make that clear.

There was then an appalling display on social media through the festival’s official account, where understandably frustrated fans were mocked, patronised and treated like garbage.

It almost feels like people are being laughed at. And then people did start laughing, thanks to the @HopeNGloryhole gag account.

Suck us off, there’s your public statement #HopeandGloryFestival https://t.co/eLb4epudHi — Hope & Glory Hole (@HopeNGloryhole) August 6, 2017

To add insult to injury (almost literally), they previously announced that profits would be going to One Love Manchester. Following the cancellation, it turned out that only Sunday’s profits were going to charity. You know, the cancelled day.

Not that I suspect it matters. If you haven’t got a refund yet, I urge you to. Contact your ticket agents posthaste.

But then maybe this should be expected. The company behind this fiasco are called (after this, that might be “were called“) tinyCOW. A man named Lee O’ Hanlon runs it. He was involved in a Tom Jones gig on the Isle of Man which was so disastrous that it ended up on the BBC’s Rip Off Britain, and have also has had issues spring up with a gigs they promoted for The Jacksons.

In regards to the issues surrounding both gigs, O’Hanlon admitted there were problems, but claimed these were the fault of a company rather ironically called Loose Cannon and Villa-Gaiety, whose general manager Dawn Maddrell was put on precautionary suspension when O’Hanlon made a series of allegations about the staging of the shows.

And then there’s this, which is consistent with the reaction we saw from Hope and Glory’s Twitter.

This account is zero to do with Lee O’Hanlon. I had to get it as he was sending nutty tweets to my bosses. pic.twitter.com/vt1ycGnVHE — Tiny Cow Creative (@TinyCowCreative) September 4, 2015

His initial response to complaints about Saturday on Facebook was; “Bandwagon. People love to talk shit. Screw ’em“.

Whoever from Liverpool City Council gave permission for the festival to go ahead should have done the tiniest bit of research on who was asking for this permission. As soon as Rip-Off Britain shows up in a quick ten minute Google search, alarm bells should be ringing. At the very least, it appears as though the people running the event were out of their depth.

Somebody needs to be held accountable. This show should not have happened. Liverpool has one of the healthiest festival and events calendars of any major city in Europe. This reputation has taken a long time to build, and we don’t want one screw up that has nothing to do with us to ruin it. But that is what is in all the news reports; “Liverpool’s Hope and Glory Festival”.

To anyone outside the city – this company has nothing to do with the Liverpool arts community. We have so much incredible stuff going on here; the total gorgeousness of Africa Oye, the sheer diversity of LIMF, the grass roots family feel of Threshold, niche events like Psych Fest, Liverpool Disco Festival, Positive Vibration. All of them wonderful in their own way, all of them well organised and coming from the heart.

Through all of this, Hope and Glory thought they could come here and shit on our doorstep with a half-arsed bill, poor planning, unprofessional actions and terrible conditions. How dare they?

Give everybody a refund. Pay every single band you booked. And on behalf of the Liverpool arts community – fuck you.

And it was the Liverpool arts community who was left to clear up their mess.

When Charlotte Church’s set was cancelled, she appealed on Twitter for a guerrilla gig. Liquidation took her up on the offer, and within 90 minutes the gig was prepared in EBGB’s, free for anybody with festival wristbands.

The Magnet attempted to house some of the bands for an impromptu replacement gig, but were unable to make it happen due to logistics. That said, Zanzibar were able to stage a gig with Clean Cut Kid and The Lightning Seeds at very short notice, again free for festival wristband holders. Other venues, such as Studio 2 and Berry and Rhye, took people in, or gave them drinks offers.

That is the spirit of the Liverpool arts community. Not the gang of tossers behind Hope and Glory.

At the very least, we can leave you with something a bit prophetic.

Update: Full statement from Hope & Glory.