#505

Love it when someone’s got a personal blind spot for a mate.

“Stuart would you play a festival where historically lots of bands didn’t get paid, they didn’t pay the venues, regularly just moved things across the country at the last minute fucking over punters and then just cancelling stuff and telling everyone to contact their bank”

“Of course not that sounds terrible, they should be in prison”

“Barry Hogan is promoting”

“Oh that’s some classic Barry, tell him we’re in and so is everyone else at the label”

25 Likes
#506

She actually owns Synergy Concerts I think.

1 Like
#507

Bit like in the thread above…

“Someone’s held all the other bands at gun-point, has robbed the punters and is demanding we double their fee”

“Well call the police”

“It’s Mark E Smith”

“What a scamp. Where’s my credit card?”

15 Likes
#508

I’m pretty sure the number of people saying that Barry Hogan is a moustache-twirling villain who fucks people over purely for the joy of it is vanishingly small. And no-one thinks he got rich off ATP either?

His good intentions weren’t the problem Stuart / Stewart, people care more about the actual shit that got dumped on them. Feel like that could be acknowledged without controversy, but I guess that Hogan charisma is a powerful thing.

4 Likes
#509

Haha. :grinning::grinning:

Love people that do this

“Boss there’s a guy backstage who clearly isn’t the guy we’ve booked and he’s asked for £15k in cash or he won’t go on, crowd are going mad”

“Right I’m calling the police who is it?”

“MF doom”

“Haha that guys got me again open the safe”

5 Likes
#510

Exactly. He wasn’t actively trying to harm people, but he was failing to learn lessons and voluntarily putting himself in positions of responsibility he couldn’t fulfil. By the end, he was being selfish by clinging on to his fantasies while leaving a trail of carnage behind him.

7 Likes
#511

Sounds like he still hasn’t learnt, either

1 Like
#512

there’s more than one way to be a dick!

1 Like
#513

actually that’s mean, he seemed nice

#514

Please don’t, I’ve been waiting too long and need this gig to much. :grimacing:

1 Like
#515

Aye. I’ll happily buy that he’s fundamentally a well meaning but flawed guy who wanted to make good on his debts and past failings, and I’ll happily buy that he was taken for a ride by booking agents who at the end of the day were doing their jobs in getting the best fees they could for their clients.

That doesn’t justify the bizarre attacks on the people who wanted to go to his events but were losing trust in his ability to make sure they went ahead or digging deeper with ever more loss making events to pay for the previous ones and the brazen lack of honesty or humility about his own mistakes shown to this day.

I get the desperation to make things work in those later days, but what Barry and those defending him fail to recognise is that ATP’s biggest asset wasn’t his booking, but it was it’s audience being willing to pay 4 times a year to go those festivals. It was Barry that broke our trust in his ability to pull off those events relatively smoothly - it wasn’t us that caused The National ATP to move 6 hours across the country or announced a festival in the Olympic Park without having booked the venue, then later cancelled the same festival a week after announcing sales were great and it was definitely going ahead.

12 Likes
#516

I do have a degree of sympathy if he got himself into a hole and thought it would take a few events to go well to dig him out of, I can see the temptation of wanting to carry on and not let down people he owed money, but if it back fires and you end up owing even more people money then you’ve got to own it, and he never has, he would obviously make the same mistakes again. Also the no sponsorship things never made any sense, it would have been bad to have overdone but no one would have cared if there were a few logos around, so weird it went under when there was that solution left unexplored

6 Likes
#517

If it had been sponsored though I’d have called everyone who attended, played or organised it sellouts, and you can’t put a price on that.

11 Likes
#518

Sponsorship can even make the festival experience better - at Bilbao they were giving out free tubes of pringles. Feel like we’d all be talking about ATP very differently if they’d done that.

2 Likes
#519

Full size tubes :exploding_head:?

#520

Free Dyson Airblades for all!

9 Likes
#521

I booked that ATP weekend without knowing who was playing it. The Jesus Lizard is one of my favourite bands, so when they got announced they were playing their first show in like 10 years. I was grinning like a lunatic.

2 Likes
#522

I can’t remember what year it was, but RoboCop was being shown in the cinema at like 1am, and it got some hilarious banter.

1 Like
#523

How big were the tubes m9

6 Likes
#524

Yeah the no sponsorship thing never really made sense to me. Obviously no-one likes it, but also ‘we live in a society’ and we see ads and branding everywhere all the time, so who really cares? I’m sure we’ve all been to great gigs at Carling Academies and O2 Academies.

I’m all for standing by your principals, but maybe the No Sponsorship one could have fallen before the No Ponzi Schemes one eh?

11 Likes