Sunrise Summer Solstice Festie Pics + Report

With stages, sound and lights powered by solar / wind and biodiesel this was like the big green gathering turned into a proper party... (or glastonbury with the corporate crap cut out).

The festival took advantage of there being no glastonbury festie this year and ran up until the summer solstice - 21st june. Around 8000 people attended, with around 3000-3500 approx buying tickets - the rest were crew, performers etc ;)

There were lots of problems, most associated with being the first time it's ever been held. The compost loo infrastructure was an ambitious attempt at the largest deployment of such facilities - it coped pretty well for the first few days, but what with it being a full on festie they couldn't cope towards the end, and financial troubles impacted on their maintenance - that said they were still far far better than the odd few plastic portaloos dotted around site - and lots of lessons were learnt.

The campaigns field also got a bit of a raw deal being located outside of the main festie area - something to work on if it goes ahead next year (currently planned for august bank holiday 07).

But on the whole this was an amazing and inspiring event, with loads to do whether that be watching bands, singers, djs etc, circus + caberet, spiritual stuff a plenty, as well as your green craft and technology workshops, film screenings, skillshares, discussions, and more.

Lots of the usual favourites were there, fast festie fiddle music and the like and bands including tarantism, tragic roundabout, seize the day, 3 daft monkeys, gravy train, badly horsedrawn boy, hattie hatstar, mordekkers, los albertos, the wonderfuls, zetan spore, baghdaddies, incredible string band, rory mcleod, dreadzone, banco de gaia, zion train, groove weird, zen hussies... well the list just goes on and on and on - with multiple areas around the main stage including small world solar stage, the horsedrawn camp, id spiral running psy-trance / chill out 24hrs a day non-stop and other up for it types like schnews, sas, pixie pictures and more...

In the end we stayed for the actual solstice instead of going to Stonehenge (which incidently had an attendance of 17,000 this year - down again - and only around 4 arrests).

Tickets for the Sunrise festie cost £50 - a bargain for five days of full on festival. The downside of not selling enough tickets (but still reaching site capacity due to the massive numbers of crew) is that the festival is down at least £20K maybe more...

I hope they manage to claw some back - many of the bands etc ended up playing for free and a hell of a lot of the working crew didn't get paid - this country needs festivals like this - non corporate, non branded, autonomous, eco-promoting and fun...

...we need to make the alternatives work - or drown in the capitalist shite that passes for festival culture in this age of restrictive legislation and mass consumption.

peace + happy solstice
xxx

ps most pics taken early morning so not too many people in them