Glade Interview - Ans

United Kingdom | by Tom Fair | 11 July 2006

Now in its third year the Glade festival is fast becoming an important date on the festival calendar. With its roots in the Glade "stage"  at Glastonbury its has retained the vibe of this quintessentially English festival but reinvented it for the 21st century. Virtual Festivals caught up with one of the organisers and DJs, Ans, to find out more.

VF: So with less than two weeks til blastoff how is the atmosphere at Glade HQ?
Ans: "The atmosphere at Glade HQ is pretty good because there is no Glastonbury so everyone seems much more relaxed now than the last couple of years because normally the crew come straight over from Glastonbury to us. It’s fucking hot. But in a good way."

VF: You’ve apparently changed venue, how come? Do you think this will affect the magic of the party or is that one of the reasons behind the decision? In other words is the venue as beautiful as the last one?
A: "It’s a fear of fence jumpers, because of lessons learnt at Glastonbury, because of them having to, essentially, wall off the whole thing but the venue has changed but is as beautiful as it has been in the past."

VF: Who do you see as kindred spirits in the world of the UK festival scene?
A: "That’s quite a difficult one. The Secret Garden guys have got a lot of common denominators, we’re really good mates with the Secret Garden. A lot of their guys work with us and vice versa and I think the people who do the events create a lot of the atmosphere that you get.  But I think we are quite unique in a lot of ways. Because of the psychedelic side there isn’t anything else that does it [in the UK] but obviously at Glastonbury there are a lot of tie-ins because of the fact that we came to them. There are other festivals around the world that have similarities to us, Origin [in South Africa] of course, because that’s us, but I do think we’re quite unique."

VF: Any clues or teasers as to any of your headliners? A riddle will do…and are you playing or is that a given being that it’s your baby?
A: "I can tell you that I am playing...hee hee hee... Basically come to the event, but if you haven’t got a ticket you’re fucked. We’re not telling a soul until they arrive at the event."

VF: Now you’re in your third year of business…is it safe to say the Glade is here to stay? Do you plan to gradually increase capacity over the years or are you going to keep it as small and intimate as possible?
A: "Well, we are here to stay, but it’s difficult because we sold out the event without any advertising or marketing or PR and without announcing the line-up and without telling anyone where it is and we’ve still managed to sell 25 to 30 per cent more tickets this year than last year, so there’s a momentum going behind it. It means we have to release the number of tickets for demand otherwise you’re going to get lots of trouble with people trying to get in without tickets. So, inevitably it’s going to grow but we’re very keen to keep it intimate in the grass rooty kind of way that we started it from. We’re licensed to 12,500 tickets this year, last year was 9,500 and originally it was 8,500."

VF: My best memory of Glade was playing the most devastatingly theatrical air guitar solo to Jon Bon Jovi’s “Living On a Prayer” in the Pussy Parlure… and yours?
A: "When I played the first year. For us guys it was really enjoyable but not in a puntery way. The first year to be playing in England to a massive crowd at a party that you’d created was amazing. And actually being able to take the radio off your head and enjoy it from an experience point of view rather than an organisational point of view was a joy."

VF: And the low point?
A: "Playing last year. The council wanted to turn everything down, close the festival down for the night as I started playing. It was a total nightmare and what happened was that in director mode I should have been turning it down and in DJ mode I should have been turning it up, so I had the council behind me saying: “Turn it down!” and I had four and a half thousand people in front of me telling me to “Turn it up!” It was the most uncomfortable situation to be in really."

VF: Do you remember the naked purple guy at Glade last year? Are naked purple people an integral part of the Glade?
A: "I do indeed. I hope so. I’m sure he’ll come back but he might not be purple."

VF: Glade obviously take pride in getting by without sponsors. Is it easy to survive without commercial sponsorship. Have you been approached at all by companies wishing to sponsor you? If so, who was the oddest and most inappropriate?
A: "It is far, far, far easier if you use sponsors because all the ticket money goes into the cost of the festival. Our profit comes from the bars and the concessions. If we were to get sponsorship on board it would obviously be money in our pockets. Our budget is constantly a big battle to keep it in shape, so it is a lot harder but it’s much nicer. We’ve put it very firmly out that we don’t want sponsors but we’ve had a few interests here and there. We just haven’t even entertained it. I don’t want to mention any names."

VF: If you could book one act or artist, dead or alive, split up, insane, locked up, who are no longer with us to play at the Glade who would it be?
A: "I reckon Underworld from about 10 years ago, that would be just awesome."

VF: If you could take the Glade on the road where would be the oddest place you’d like to put it on? Intergalactic, artic, up a mountain, fictional…
A: "Middle Earth. Slightly more realistically we’d like to do it in Japan. It would be fun because the Japanese are bang into their electronic music but I don’t think we can afford to do it as most of our artists are UK based and having to fly them all over to Japan would obviously increase the bill hugely, because of that it would probably have to involve having to go to a sponsor or making it really huge."

VF: Is it true that artists can only play at Glade in any given year before having a year off before playing again? If so does this not make problems in maintaining a consistent quality at the Glade?
A: "We do try and keep it different, I mean this year has been quite difficult because there are a lot of people who played in both year one and year two who aren’t playing this year. There are quite a lot of people who did play in the first year and not last year and can’t play this year. The line up is very different this year, it’s going to be much easier to do it next year because it’ll be a best of the first three years if you know what I mean. If someone has a new album coming out, or something like that, and we feel there is no real problem with them coming back then it’s not exclusively a no-no. But the general rule is: Yes. I maybe made a bit of a mistake last year in booking the psy-trance in that I booked the things that I liked, which is another reason why my set was a nightmare because I didn’t have anything left that I could play, but, as a result, the style of the music was fairly similar. So this year we’ve been much more diverse with styles, I’ve taken advice on board as much as booking the stuff that I want to book.

Glade 2006 takes place this weekend (14-16 July) at a secret location known only to ticket holders.