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Certain artists still unpaid as Guilfest declared insolvent

By | Published on Wednesday 10 September 2014

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The company behind Guildford-based festival Guilfest, which took place once again back in July in the town’s Stoke Park, has gone into insolvency. Blaming, primarily, a lack of time to organise this year’s event leading to low ticket sales, organiser Tony Scott also confirmed that certain artists on the 2014 bill, which featured headliners in The Boomtown Rats, Kool & The Gang and The Human League, are still to be paid for their time.

First established in 1992, Guilfest ran every year till 2012, when it went into administration (also thanks to disappointing ticket sales), with its parent company Scotty Events facing debts of over £300,000. Live Nation staged an event in the town in 2013, but Scott announced a keenness to resurrect the festival and, following a social media campaign, his new company Trowfest Ltd was, back in February, given the green light by Guildford Borough Council to try again this summer. Though, with hindsight, that was too late to get everything ready.

Interviewed by Get Surrey this week, Scott said despite this year’s event being “fantastic”, Trowfest Ltd had needed to sell a couple of thousand more tickets to cover its costs. He told the site: “Unfortunately we didn’t get enough ticket sales to pay all the bills we have got to pay. One of the reasons was that we were a bit short of time to do it all in. We have never done a festival in three-and-a-half months before”.

Adding that a bad weather forecast for the (actually nice and sunny, as it transpired) first day of the event possibly kept last-minute-ticket-buyers way, he said: “I feel really gutted about what’s happened. There are a lot of people who put in a lot a of work into this particular GuilFest, and GuilFest over the years. It’s a very sad thing, what’s happened”.

An insolvency meeting is set to be held by the end of this week.



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