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UK Festival Award winners

By | Published on Friday 20 November 2009

So, it was the UK Festival Awards last night, the annual bash celebrating the great and the good of the British music festival community.

In what many have seen as another challenging year for the festival sector – after years of growth prior to 2008 – among the winners last night were two festivals who have had a particularly challenging 2009, though for different reasons.

Student-targeted festival Beach Break Live won two awards – Best Small Festival and Promoter Of The Year – the latter possibly awarded in recognition of the monumental achievement of the Beach Break team in shifting their festival half way across the country from Cornwall to Kent in just seven days, when stupid councillors in the St Agnes area of Cornwall ignored their own officials’ advice and stopped the event from happening at its original site at the last minute. Worthy award winners indeed.

The other winners coming out of a tricky year are Team Big Chill, whose leader was, as expected, presented with the Lifetime Achievement gong. In her acceptance speech, Katrina Larkin noted what a difficult year 2009 had been. As previously reported, the company behind the festival went under recently, shortly after a deal with Festival Republic designed to keep the Big Chill festival brand alive was signed.

Some Big Chill purists weren’t thrilled that one of the most proudly independent festivals had become part of the biggest festival group, which is in turn half owned by live music conglom Live Nation. But, speaking to The Guardian this week, Larkin tried to convince her festival’s loyal following that the new ownership will not result in a dilution of what the event stands for.

She told the paper: “Festival Republic manage to own a strong portfolio of festivals, but they are all unique, they all have their own personalities. What they admired about us was what we love about the Big Chill: our willingness to tear up the rulebook, the way that anything goes”.

Last night, having thanked her own team, and the wider festival community for supporting her through a tricky three months, she also thanked Festival Republic and its chief Melvin Benn who have helped ensure a Big Chill future.

Elsewhere at the awards, the Best New Festival went to Sonisphere, the new Europe-wide touring rock festival which launched this year. Although the new festival on the block, the guys behind Sonisphere are, of course, live music veterans, and they used their award to pay tribute to another festival veteran, the late Maurice Jones, who, as previously reported, died last week.

Jones, whose funeral took place yesterday, was founder of the Monsters Of Rock events at Donington, on which modern day metal fests like Download and Sonisphere are, in many ways, based. Accepting their award, the Sonisphere team said that without Jones’ work in the eighties their festival would never have existed in 2009.

The complete list of 2009 winners is as follows:

The Greener Festival Award: Croissant Neuf Summer Party
Critics Choice: La Casa Azul
Best Brand Activation: The Schuh Welly Exchange
Best Toilets: T In The Park
Festival Fitty: Damon Albarn (boys), Lily Allen (girls)

Anthem Of The Summer: Kings Of Leon – Sex On Fire
Best Breakthrough Act: Florence & The Machine
Best Headline Performance: Blur at Glastonbury
Best Line-up: Lounge On The Farm

Promoter Of The Year: Beach Break Live

Best Overseas Festival: Oxegen, Ireland
Best Dance Event: Creamfields
Best Family Festival: Camp Bestival
Best Metropolitan Festival: Camden Crawl
Best New Festival: Sonisphere
Best Grass Roots Festival: Leefest

Best Small Festival: Beach Break Live
Best Medium Festival: Bestival
Best Major Festival: Glastonbury

Lifetime Achievement Award: Katrina Larkin, Big Chill

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