UK Festival Awards 2006 - The Winners!

United Kingdom | 19 October 2006

For the second year running Scotland’s T In The Park has scooped Best Major Festival, while boutique favourite Bestival has won the award for Best Medium-Large Festival. Leicester’s Summer Sundae Weekender scooped the Best Small Festival, having finished runner-up in that category last year.

More than 50,000 festival goers voted to decide the winners (that's over 1 million individual votes!), prompting Virtual Festivals to organise the first ever UK Festival Awards ceremony at Islington Academy, London.

Reading Festival may have been narrowly pipped for the Best Major crown but it was still a good night for Mean Fiddler’s Melvin Benn, who directs Reading and Leeds and was honoured with the Outstanding Contribution Award for his service to the festival industry stretching more than a quarter of a decade.

Muse won Best Headliner and Best Rock Act for their storming sets at Reading and Leeds, while Arctic Monkeys, the band that played directly before them during the Carling Weekend, won the Festival Anthem Award for ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor’.

Rewind a week from that infamous August Bank Holiday weekend and another anthem, Radiohead’s ‘Creep’, was voted the year’s Most Memorable Festival Moment when the long-lost classic closed the band’s sensational set at V Festival.

Other artists picking up awards included The Streets, The Kooks, Girls Aloud, The Prodigy and Primal Scream. (see the  full list of winners below)

Back to the festivals and the award for Best New Festival went to End Of The Road, which boasted an incredibly strong lineup for any inaugural event – somehow persuading Ryan Adams to make his UK festival debut as one of its headliners.

Guilfest picked up Best Family Festival for its facilities for kids, while Beautiful Days triumphed in a new category, Best Grass Roots Festivals, which celebrates events that have been conceived and developed independently.

Larmer Tree Festival was commended for having the Best Toilets – a very prestigious one in our opinion! The same can be said for the Shelter Award For Social Responsibility, which went to the new Sunrise Summer Solstice Celebration for its commitment to self sustainability.

Lovebox won the Party People Award for Dance Music, thanks to its eclectic lineup of  cutting edge dance artists over two days and the revived Monsters Of Rock scooped Best One Day Festival.

Isle Of Skye won the Fan Friendly Festival Awards for making punters’ lives as easy as possible, despite some torrential rain at this year’s event, while Carling won the category of Best Innovation for its Cold Beer Amnesty, where festival goers could trade warm cans for cold Carling – again a very fan friendly gesture!

The full list of winners is listed below in the order they were given out. Click here for our report on the thrills and spills of the first ever UK Festival Awards Ceremony.

Best New Festival
End Of The Road Festival

Best Breakthrough Act
The Kooks

Best Innovation
The Carling Cold Beer Amnesty

Best Dance Act
The Prodigy

Best Pop Act
Girls Aloud

Best Family Festival
Guilfest

Best One Day Festival
Monsters Of Rock

Best Toilets
Larmer Tree Festival

Party People Award For Dance Music
Lovebox

Fan-Friendly Festival
Isle of Skye Festival

Best Urban Act
The Streets

Best Rock Act
Muse

Festival Feel-Good Act
Primal Scream

Best Grass Roots Festival
Beautiful Days

Most Memorable Moment
Radiohead finishing their V Festival headline set with the long hibernated ‘Creep’

Anthem Of The Summer
Arctic Monkeys “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”

Shelter Award for Most Socially Responsible Festival
Sunrise Summer Solstice Celebration

Best Headline Act
Muse

Best Small Festival
The Summer Sundae Weekender

Best Medium-To-Large Festival
Bestival

Best Major Festival
T in the Park

Outstanding Contribution To Festivals
Melvin Benn (Mean Fiddler Director responsible for Reading, Leeds, Latitude and widely credited for saving Glastonbury)

Click here for our coverage of the ceremony.

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