The Daily Swarm

UPDATE: PRNEWSWIRE:

Drawing music fans from all over the world to one of its most majestic settings, Live Nation and Good Boy Production’s Pemberton Festival reached its full capacity of 40,000 music fans this past weekend, making the three day event a triumphant success in its very first year.

The festival capitalized on Live Nation’s unparalleled vertically integrated platform, with the company producing the festival, handling all of the ticketing, website, merchandise and creative services.

In a business where multi-day festivals can take years to become established, the success of Pemberton in its inaugural year is a testament to an incredible line-up of artists, led by headliners Coldplay, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nine Inch Nails, JAY-Z and The Tragically Hip. The success also speaks to the beauty of the setting where artists performed against the beautiful backdrop of Mount Currie to fans enjoying the event on the grounds of some of Canada’s richest farm country.

Rolling Stone exclaimed that “the first annual Pemberton Festival will gladly take the title of next Glastonbury.”

“We built a world-class music festival from scratch which attracted the world’s most successful and talented artists and music fans from every corner of the globe,” said Shane Bourbonnais, President of Touring and Business Development for Live Nation Canada. “The lessons we’ve learned as the global leader in festival production and the enormous support we received from the government and people of Pemberton all came together to create a one-of-a-kind event that we expect to produce for many years to come.”

UPDATE: Vancouver Sun:

Compared to the chaos and long lineups that marred many arrivals, getting home looked easy Monday morning. Only a few people were waiting for shuttles outside the gates at 9 am, although the scene had been busier early on.

The worst traffic congestion on the Highway 99 was right after Coldplay’s set Sunday night, when it took about an hour to drive the few kilometres between the festival site and Pemberton, RCMP said.

“Traffic was congested last night as we expected and likely will be throughout the day today,” Cst. Lea-Anne Dunlop said Monday.

But overall, RCMP have given the festival good reviews from a public safety perspective.

Besides the expected drug seizures and alcohol-related incidents, Dunlop said problems had been minor.

“Hats off to the concertgoers for being a really well-maintained and behaved crowd,” she said.

They were not a tidy crowd, however.

The festival grounds were littered Monday with beer cans, plastic cups, lost clothing, half-eaten dinners and camping gear.

As some of the last to leave, Melissa Fernando, Mark Zealand and Quin Sandler had their pick of the many tents, matresses and coolers left behind.

“There [is] probably on this field, about $50,000 dollars now in equipment that’s going to be left,” Sandler said. “That’s a waste, in my opinion… No matter how much money you have, you shouldn’t do that.”

Waste disposal trucks were hard at work dealing with overflowing garbage bins and filthy portable toilets.

CBC:

Complaints about ever-present dust, overflowing toilets, chaotic parking lots and lax security were as pervasive as talk about the music on Sunday, the third and final day of British Columbia’s inaugural Pemberton Festival.

From the very start, Canada’s largest outdoor summer concert in recent memory has not been without its birthing pains.

On Friday, more than 40,000 fans made the bumper-to-bumper trek up B.C.‘s Sea-to-Sky Highway for the three-day rock music extravaganza. By Friday afternoon, the highway approaching the village of Pemberton was backed up, and fans were greeted with lineups, confusion and dust kicked up by crowds in the farmer’s field that has been converted into the festival site.

“Getting here from Whistler was a nightmare,” Adelle Papp told CBC News. “Then we paid $90 for parking, and we just stumbled on it. There was no one directing traffic, nothing.”

The confusion and dust continued into Saturday and Sunday. Organizers have had their hands full directing the 20,000 people who are camping in the fields surrounding the concert site. And fans have been resorting to covering their faces with scarves so as not to inhale the dust.

Although organizers promised tight security measures that would keep alcohol, weapons and drugs out of the camping area, festival-goers said security was lax.

“Security was giving up,” Chris Betts told the Canadian Press. “There were no checks and no one seemed to know who was in charge.”

“It was kind of like going to a war zone,” Colin Horgan said. “It feels like entering a refugee camp: tents, blowing dust and bright lights.”

Vancouver Sun:

The Pemberton Festival’s medical team have been treating about a thousand people a day during the dusty, hot and raucous first days of the party. Some were routed to hospitals in the Vancouver area.

Dr. Samuel Gutman, the festival’s medical director, said the 14-bed main medical tent has seen about 250 cases a day, while the first aid posts and roving response teams have taken care of about 600 to 800 people every day.

“To give you a persective, at Lion’s Gate, which is a main trauma recieving hospital, we’d see 120 a day,” Gutman said Sunday afternoon.

“Friday we did over a hundred IVs. We actually completely exceeded our stock,” he said. “That’s because we had a hot day.”

He said the ubiquitous dust and hay have been particularly agravating for some people.
“With the dust, we’ve seen lots of respiratory illnesses, and lots of hay fever, which makes sense, given the floor is spread with hay,” he said.

Ambulances have transported “a handful” of people to Vancouver-area hospitals, some suffering from substance abuse. But Gutman said they’ve all had positive outcomes.

CBC:

Locals also had mixed feelings about the festival, which organizers had predicted would bring an estimated $9 million to the surrounding community over the three-day event.

CBCNews.ca blogger Laura Thompson reported that sales at nearby hardware and grocery stores were up 50 per cent, but others were not so fortunate.

“We have a bar setup and dining room, so we hoped for an evening scene,” said Mike Richmond, owner of the Pony Espresso. “We thought [with] 40,000 to 50,000 people in town, we figured some people would be coming into town [from the festival grounds] in the evening.

“I think a lot of people had bad experiences getting to their campsites and to the festival in the first place, so they’re turned off the shuttles,” Richmond said.

“And then they’re not turning around and saying, ‘Honey, let’s get outta here for a couple of hours’ because they may not get back for six hours and they don’t want to chance missing the bands.”

Neal Harrison, owner/chef at Fat Duck Cuisine, was also disappointed in the weekend take.

“For us, it’s tough. We’re not seeing the numbers we thought we would,” Harrison said. “I wouldn’t say it’s going to be an economic boom.”

The Province:

Despite the problems, Pemberton Festival organizers are already planning to do it again next year.

“In our inaugural year, there are obviously kinks and we have identified those issues and we have been taking notes and figuring out how we can improve,” festival producer Shane Bourbonnais of Live Nation said yesterday.

“We have already started looking at ways of fixing them, working toward a much smoother festival for next year.”

Organizers are poring over what went wrong—the chaos festival-goers experienced when they began to arrive Thursday, the toilets filled to capacity, and the long lineups to get into the nightclub tent, beer gardens and even the showers—to make sure next year’s event runs more smoothly.

Rolling Stone:

If Rothbury is set to be the next Bonnaroo, then the first annual Pemberton Festival will gladly take the title of next Glastonbury. Similarly isolated, sprawling and boasting acts as far flung as Tom Petty and Jay-Z, Pemberton’s organizers clearly had its British brethren in mind when concocting this fest. After some typical first-day mayhem involving 3-hour traffic lines and the realization that 40,000 people wandering a former farm field kicks up a lot of dust, Pemberton got kicked off proper with some music.

Against a mountainous backdrop, Interpol emerged, business-like, in black button up suits (save Carlos D, who chose a white alternative). Playing towards the setting sun, the band at first resisted and then reveled in the contrast between their slick, cloak-of-night songs and the sunny, hippie-filled crowd. This loosening effect was most evident in Paul Banks, whose typically stone face melted to a near-tickled smile as his band backed him on tracks largely taken from last year’s Our Love to Admire (”Pioneer to the Falls,” the Pixies-like “Rest My Chemistry”). He even undid a few buttons on his shirt for good measure during “Heinrich Maneuver.” For his part, Carlos D stayed buttoned, didn’t smile and double-fisted Red Bull and white wine. “There are lots of beautiful people here today,” Banks said, eyeing a gaggle of hot girls on shoulders down front before ending on Turn on the Bright Lights‘ “Roland.” “Thank you, Pemberton!”