🥉… and the backstory

A little background information about the Rossington Festival.

After last night’s really late home time – 2:30am – we were booked to play Rossington Festival today between 2pm and 4pm. A rather large fee had been agreed with two 45 minute sets agreed upon.

We were all there shortly after 1pm with the plan being that the previous act would finish at 1:30 and we’d have half an hour to load on and soundcheck, and our set times would then be 2-2:45 and 2:55-3:40, then we’d break down and be clear by 3:50 for the next band.

That was the theory.

Now I’ve got nothing against young musicians, we all started somewhere, but when your mum is influential in the parish council and gets you a slot on the main stage of a festival to essentially play along to other people’s tracks, then there’s something odd.

She was 8, she was a fairly acceptable drummer, but hardly worthy of the position she was taking.

Now what really got my goat was that they had turned up late, and then entitled mother had demanded her darling daughter get a decent length of set; encroaching into our performance time, and because of our contract which we had an agreed waiver on, we had to negotiate with the promoters who had paid rather a lot of money for us to basically play less music for the same money.

The band after us had to chop their set too as the festival closed at 6.

The biggest problem here is not with the drummer herself, it’s her narcissistic parent who is forcing a very average but eager drummer to play well above her station with the nepotistic influence, but also she’s then putting other bands out and creating a bad aura around her daughter which could possibly damage her future career.

Luckily we’re professional and we just chose to slice out large sections of our set and we managed to clear the stage just 20 minutes late thus giving the last band a similar length of slot.

As a result of this professionalism which was noticed by the festival organisers we have been asked to reserve the date next year for an incoming rebook.