As someone once said “This is one hell of a tale.
It may make you wonder why any event organiser might still find it worth while, putting on a gig .....”
An extraordinary saga surrounded this year's Big Chill Gala. The story started back in January when I visited Norfolk market town Diss at the invitation of a Mr Selwyn Burr, to see some land a mile or so outside the town. Burr was extremely sympathetic to the idea of a Big Chill, having staged a halloween event several years before, and an agreement was soon struck up to put on the Gala in the first week of August.
Mr Burr visited the local police and South Norfolk Council who stated that it could go ahead as a private event if it wasn't advertised locally. As 95's Gala had been such a success, word-of-mouth soon spread when we announced the new date.
On June 8th, with tickets already selling well, the NME picked up on a press release from Propaganda PR, who had been promoting my 'Eyelid Movies' mix CD and ran a news story. This story had been researched and written by news assistant Jody Thompson, freshly arrived at the NME newsdesk from the Eastern Daily Press - a paper that was to play a significant part in developments over the summer. It mistakenly described the upcoming Big Chill as "one of the year's biggest dance music festivals" - we were neither big nor dance - but went on to quote East Anglian Police spokesman PC Mel Lacey (who Jody told me was a personal friend and contact from her recent days on the East Anglian paper) who had not heard anything about the festival, as Diss Police had obviously not deemed it big enough to be over-concerned about. I called Jody immediately, fearful that the story would lead precisely to the sort of local publicity that would cause the whole thing to flare up. She passed me on to news editor Tommy Udo, who accused me of being "petty."
Unsurprisingly, Malcolm Perkins, co-incidentally from the EDP, picked up on Jody's story five days later and telephoned to ask me about our planned "rave." He then ran a piece in the paper again using NME's description "Mystery surrounds a three-day Norfolk event which has been billed as one of the summer's biggest dance festivals." It was this story that alerted both the police and council. On Tuesday June 11th, South Norfolk Council called us and informed us that the event could not go ahead as a private event and that we would have to apply for a full Public Entertainments License. We attended a meeting with most of the influential members of the Council as well as Police and Fire officers in Long Stratton on June 18th and were told in no uncertain terms that "no stone would be left unturned in uncovering our past." They seemed fairly hostile, to put it mildly.
A week later, we appeared to have been given a clean bill of health. The licence application had gone in, tickets were selling well, there had been a site inspection and everyone appeared to be happy, except a handful of local residents.
It soon became apparent that all was not well with the immediate neighbour Barbara Forrer. She lived in Wolsey Bridge Farm, adjacent to the site. The large farmhouse had previously belonged to Selwyn Burr who had apparently sold it to Mr and Mrs Forrer to raise cash, with an option to buy back before it was offered to a third party. It also appeared obvious to us that there was no love lost between the Burr and Forrer camps, for whatever reason, and we soon started receiving concerned phone calls from the other immediate neighbours. Worse still, the weekly local paper The Diss Express picked up the EDP story and on July 5th splashed a ridiculous tabloid style banner headline over the front page IS THIS FESTIVAL RAVE? when I had already explained to them in some detail that it was not.
The effect of this less than accurate piece of reporting was quickly felt. Before we could even explain our story to the people of Diss, public meetings were being organised, petitions were being presented in pubs to keep the 'rave' out. The upshot was that the immediate neighbours put so much pressure on Bennie Gaze, a wealthy landowner who was set to provide us with a car parking field and a supplementary camping field, that he reversed his decision to let us use his land and we were subsequently forced to withdraw our license application, which we agreed to do at a horrendous meeting with the residents at Mrs Forrer's house on July 10th. Not, as NME subsequently reported, because we feared that we wouldn't be granted our license, but purely because technically, some of the land we had applied for licensing permission for, had fallen through, rendering our application null and void by law. The worst aspect of the whole NME debacle was the attitude of the news editor Tommy Udo. After we'd been forced to postpone, we issued a press release, initially on the internet, stating the sequence of events. This is what it said:
