On July 4th to 6th, 10,000 plus music and art lovers will descend on Ballymully Cottage Farm, Limavady for the 14th edition of Stendhal Festival.
Since 2011, the Roe Valley has played host to the independent event which has seen its numbers steadily grow from 700 patrons in its inaugural year to the large-scale event it is today, which will see total attendance over its lifespan hit 100,000 people.
It has welcomed a plethora of household name acts such as The Divine Comedy, The Undertones, Basement Jaxx, Ash, The Wailers, Sister Sledge and this year will add The Zutons, Hot Chip (DJ set) and Heather Small to that list.
There have been a host of challenges, trials and tribulations for the organisers behind the scenes but for Director Ross Parkhill, the challenges are worth the reward, however he believes that the current climate facing independent events is perhaps the most difficult era in the events 14-year history.
“Starting from absolutely nothing to becoming currently the largest independent, weekend camping music and arts festival in Ireland, certainly hasn’t been easy,” he said.
“We’ve had issues arising from day one, council objections, funding difficulties, people writing us off as mad, not being taken seriously in some quarters, it has been a fight to get people to understand what we do, why we do it and why it should be supported.”
Ross continued: “Then we had Covid and the cost-of-living crisis and things in our industry steadily became more difficult to circumnavigate. Since Covid, 170 plus independent festivals in the UK and Ireland have closed their doors for good. 40 more have already gone in 2024 and our reality is that we are now the largest independent festival in the island of Ireland, partly due to the fact that we run a good and well-loved event, but if we are honest with ourselves, it is also partly by default because we managed to keep our heads above water when unfortunately, others couldn’t.”
He added: “I would describe our current position going into 2024 as positive but precarious. We seem to have bucked the trend so far but until the final bit of bean counting is done post event, there are never any guarantees year on year that we will be in a position to run the following year.”
There have been many factors that overlap and feed into one and other which has resulted in the current very concerning landscape for independent events and festival and Ross and the team at Stendhal say that they are all too aware of all of them.
“As far as I can see there are quite a few reasons that so many events are getting cancelled,” Ross mused.
“There are the ever-present issues of entertainment overload in the summer, there are only so many pounds people can spend on entertainment and with more and more events popping up all over the place run by promoters who have ties with Live Nation, along with general entertainment available, it is sometimes difficult to attain advance sales. Advance sales being the second issue everyone faces.”
He continued: “Of course the cost-of-living crisis adds into that, funding for the arts is a huge issue that filters into that, but I’ll come back to that and then a huge thing that nobody seems to be discussing is the disgusting ticket prices for tier one acts at the moment and the even more disgusting practice of resale ticket prices and dynamic pricing now offered by Ticketmaster and other ticket providers. The idea that some acts are charging anywhere between £200 and £500, sometimes more, for a two-hour show blows my mind.”
“If someone spends that on a gig then chances are that is their live gig budget gone for a couple of months, so there will be no tenners here and there to go check out an emerging act at a bar or smaller venue, effecting both emerging acts and grass roots venues.”
“Rising costs are a huge issue across the board, as is the legislation that passed last year deeming that any site machinery we use on the farm must be fuelled by clear diesel.”
Ross added: “Vat is another huge issue, what people maybe don’t understand is that if you spend £100 on a ticket to Stendhal, the tax man gets £20 of that. We greatly support the current call to reduce Vat on events down to 5% as opposed to the current 20%. That was the case during covid times and if it wasn’t for that, we might not be here today.”
“Funding is another bug bear, particularly in Northern Ireland where our government spend far less per head on the arts than any of our neighbours, in a post conflict society – is somewhat dumbfounding. Luckily our team and others continue to rise to the challenges year on year in bringing some colour and joy within the country – we will keep fighting for the value of arts and culture and the respect it warrants – who doesn’t need more colour, sound and joy in their life?”
“On one hand we get great support from The Causeway Coast and Glens Brough Council, our largest funder and we have finally been welcomed into the Arts Council NI Annual Funding Programme, having knocked on that door for a decade. Then on the other hand, the only other source of funding we can apply for is through Tourism NI, which over the past couple of years has been quite frankly, a joke.”
“Last year they pulled the National Even Tourism Fund, in which we were one of the strongest applicants and had hoped for assistance from, five weeks before the event and this year we applied for the National tourism fund, which we now clearly meet all the criteria for and were rejected, from what we can see, for very subjective reasons made by people who cannot possibly have any firsthand knowledge of the reasons they are citing for not funding us.”
“We were then told that we could appeal to an independent panel, but found out that the independent panel of four had two TNI staff on it, hardly independent, and then ultimately we were told that in fact we could not appeal that decision.”
“Last year when we got a lot of media attention off the back of TNI pulling the National Event Tourism fund we said that the decision to pull it would put independent events like ours at risk and lo and behold a year later, we are the last medium to large scale independent arts and music festival left in the country.”
Despite the very challenging climate, Ross says that the Stendhal event taking place this weekend is on course to set another attendance record of over 10,000 people and he thanked those patrons for their continued support for the event.
“We have been blessed with a phenomenal crowd” he said, “We are so, so lucky that not only do we never have any bother with the community we have grown at the festival, its family friendly, safe and welcoming, but importantly for us, they come back year on year and continue to support us.”
“Massive thanks to everyone who has bought a ticket to the festival this year and in fact any year, when currently the world seems to be willing to let events like ours go the wall, our guests have pulled us through some very tough times indeed.”
Ross concluded: “For now, we, (like everyone else joining us), will leave our worries at the gate into, Ballymully Cottage Farm. Our focus now is on doing what we do best – bringing life, colour, sounds and joy to the natural landscape and all who visit Limavady this weekend.”
“It really is set to be our best one yet, and we can’t wait for everyone to enjoy what we have worked so incredibly hard to produce. The wealth of talent on show and the huge efforts of our mighty team are making for an unforgettable weekend,”
