The Bloc festival was supposed to bring together the most inventive electronic musicians from around the world for a weekend of AV performances but, due to a massive overcrowding problem, was shut down by its organisers on the first night. By 12am police had flooded the site, slicing it in two with a kettle line. Everyone was told to go home and stay home. Before the event, it had never occurred to this writer that festivals were organised by actual people and could therefore fail. Was there any redemption or was Bloc truly the worst festival ever?
The Fantasy Becomes Real
I didn’t attend Bloc when it was staged in Butlins Minehead but I had seen the event advertised. The tacky resort I visited with my family as a young kid in the eighties had always struck me as a bizarre place to hold a festival of experimental electronic music. I remember seeing an advert for the festival and imagining the event. I thought of Aphex Twin orchestrating a difficult buzz-saw symphony onstage, but the stage was not in the traditional setting of a field or nightclub; it was erected on a courtyard between neon signs for Burger King and Jumpin’ Jacks. This juxtoposition seemed severe and inappropriate, but I would guess that it is just this kind of contradiction that gave Bloc Minehead its charm. There is something comical about the avant-garde and the mainstream sitting so close together; something pleasing about a venue normally devoted to sterile family fun and stag night booze-guzzling being temporarily transformed into a celebration of the cutting edge.
The proposal to stage Bloc at London Pleasure Gardens in 2012 offered a different promise. Its appeal would not be heightened by the kitsch contradiction between venue and event, but by a perfect marriage between the two. In the wastes of East London’s docklands, the pulverising beats of Squarepusher, Orbital and Clark would find their natural home. The music would echo into the night, ricocheting through the vast interiors of abandoned warehouses and off the imposing faces of disused gas drums. The organisers of Bloc seemed aware of the promising fit between its lineup and its new venue. This was one of the main selling points on the festival’s website. A promotional video celebrated the grime of the docklands via tracking shots through a deserted warehouse and the depiction of light projections on crumbling brickwork and broken glass. Bloc 2012 promised to transport revellers into a derelict hallucination, in which the music and architecture would merge. As a party theme, dereliction wants attendees to feel as though they are witnessing an alternative dystopian reality; it wants them to contemplate the griminess of a disintegrating landscape. The buildings are collapsing around the party but the music will go on. The essential appeal of dereliction as a theme (as opposed to actual dereliction) is that it is a fantasy. Bloc promised us a dystopian simulation, enjoyable because it would play out in the safe, controlled and administered environment of an organised event. But what happens when the fantasy becomes reality? And how do people respond when a promising festival dissolves into chaos?
Blocked at Bloc
It became apparent from the moment that my friends and I stepped off the DLR that something was wrong at Bloc. A huge queue had formed outside the festival entrance, looping down a pathway and back along the outside lane of an A-road. Dangerous. Young girls, full of booze and with nowhere to go, were pissing in the hedges and the piss was running out on to the road. One desperate man pissed into a Diet Coke bottle. (Kudos to this man for his aim! But I don’t know why he pissed in the bottle, because he then upended it and let the piss spill all over the floor. Maybe he didn’t like the warm feeling of the fresh piss through the plastic). We joined the queue and found that all the pissing was creating a nice feeling of conviviality, especially when the security staff tried to put a stop to it. After that point, each pisser was applauded as a dissenter and a hero. (I needed a piss too, but not even the promise of martyrdom could tempt me to unload in front of such a crowd). Like everyone, we were making the best of a bad situation by joking around. The kind of resigned optimism we chose to adopt in the queue would in fact be our most crucial resource for the night ahead.
Another hour went by in the queue and spirits were waning. We are big fans of Steve Reich and had by this point missed the entirety of his performance. Still, I knew that once I was inside, the music would give me the lift I needed. When we finally made it inside, however, my fears were confirmed. There was something very wrong with Bloc. The first thing that struck me was the failure of the venue to deliver on the implicit promises of its promotional material. In place of the stylish derelicte setting I had been imagining... was a patch of dirt. The dirt patch had all the atmosphere of a tacky local fair, complete with flashing disco lights and burger van stink. The next thing I noticed was that there were MORE QUEUES. Queues for the bar (obviously), queues for the bogs (ok), queues for £6 curly fries (probably to be expected)... but queues for the music venues? One of the joys of going to a festival is the sense of autonomy one feels when wandering around the site, drifting from tent to tent with a beer in hand. At Bloc, access to each tent was being limited to a small gap in the rear. Gaining access to a stage was like being forced through a smelly sphincter. Amon Tobin was about to begin on the main stage and the people queueing outside looked fed up. They looked even more fed up when we pushed in. (I justified pushing in by thinking about the £100 I’d spent on my ticket. £100 is not a trivial amount for me at the moment. This was stupid reasoning, obviously, because everyone else had also paid the same. I was dimly aware of this at the time, but chose to ignore it. Don’t judge me. Desperate times etc. And everyone was doing it anyway).
In retrospect, I guess Bloc’s decision to restrict access to the stages was a last-minute symptom of an overcrowding problem rather than a conscious choice in site design. But how did the overcrowding happen in the first place? Bloc tickets had been radically oversold and this was causing huge problems on the night. I have no idea how this happened and, as I write this a week later, it appears that the festival organisers still have no idea either. The cynic in me immediately wants to attribute the over-selling to the reckless greed of businessmen, but it seems just as likely that the fault could have been caused by a genuine over-estimation of the venue capacity. Presuming we will ever get an honest answer about how the over-ticketing occured, only time will tell.
Muddling Through
So here is our dilemma: we have paid £100 and queued for two hours to gain access to a dirt patch. On the dirt patch are supposed to appear some of the coolest names in modern electronic music, but we cannot get in to see any of them. We watch some of Amon Tobin doing his cubes. The show is mind-boggling, but we are not redeemed because we are halfway back and the sound quality in the tent is really quite bad. In an attempt to keep spirits up, we are pissing away even more money on £4.50 cans of Becks. (After a few of these, we also give in and buy the £6 curly fries). The biggest problem, however, is that none of us want to be the stick in the festival mud, and we are all keeping our disappointment to ourselves. But I can’t take it any more and I tentatively venture a comment: “It’s not very good here is it”. This brings waves of relief over the group. It finally gives everyone permission to moan. Pretending that nothing was wrong was becoming emotionally exhausting and once everyone gets into the spirit of complaining, we have a much better time.
At first the complaining is cathartic, but it soon becomes hilarious. I don’t know what Britishness is, or if there is such a thing, but what happened next did indeed strike me as distinctively British. Groups of strangers began joining together to pool their complaints. Bloc appeared to have turned into a massive and absurd contest over who could say the most fantastically negative thing about the whole debacle. One guy told me earnestly that Bloc was ‘the worst thing that’s ever happened to him’, and we both pissed ourselves laughing. Another guy told me he asked a security guard to tell him honestly, ‘is the whole thing fucked?’. ‘Yes’, the security guard admitted, ‘the whole thing is fucking fucked’. So even the staff were getting in on the Bloc-dissing. A man at the designated information point admitted to us that he had ‘no information on anything’! The whole event had become a glorious farce, and once the taboo of complaining had been breached people seemed to be enjoying themselves again, even if the prospect of seeing any actual music was a distant dream.
Twitter, too, had turned into a virtual version of the contest to see who could make the most negative comment. A few people suggested they had been ‘Cock-Bloced’ (not very funny really – plus the word Bloced looks like it’s pronounced Blosed – Cock-Blosed?), but more creative critics were using photographs. One man staged a public burning of his wristband. My favourite Tweet depicted a shredded wristband on a coffee table, next to a cup of tea and a packet of Hob Nobs – ‘a night in with Bloc’, it said. The humour, creativity and good-naturedness with which people broadcasted their misery was inspiring. The prevailing attitude at Bloc was not one of anger, as one may have reasonably expected, but of genuine and humble disappointment.
The simple enjoyments captured in the picture of the Hob Nobs and tea - of the defeated partygoer trying to make the best of it at home - were perhaps emblematic of the sheer determination of everyone to have a good time that night, regardless of the circumstances. There is a special art to making one’s own fun – an art that I pessimistically believed had been lost in this era of facebook addiction and mobile video games. Yet the revellers at Bloc were not about to let the lack of entertainment prevent them from being entertained. The cancellation of the festival was met with several hours of wild spontaneous redemption (or WSR). Impromptu mini music stages were set up using tiny walkman speakers. Bins and industrial shipping containers became gigantic steel percussion instruments. Hundreds of people were dancing and grinning and cheering, banging along to a collective rhythm with their hands or bits of old stick. This trash-bashing has been described by uploaders and commentators on YouTube as violent rioting, but this ungenerous interpretation of the events that serenaded Bloc’s failure couldn’t be further off the mark. What is riotous about making your own fun? It was a joy to behold.
But I am looking on the bright side of course. With a zestful attitude to life, I believe that any experience that doesn’t cause significant harm can be interesting, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. But I don’t want to trivialise the experiences of those who had a bad night. I don’t doubt that much of what I experienced was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I hear things got particularly ugly in the main queue after we had made it through. Like many people, I had a lot of hope invested in seeing some of my favourite artists perform. I am also appropriately enraged about having heard no news on refunds yet. If there is even the tiniest resistance on the part of Bloc’s organisers to provide refunds, it would be disingenuous to call the event anything less than a mass-mugging. A recent glance at their website suggests that hopeful refund-seekers should be prepared to drown in legal jargon before getting any proper answers. And let’s get one more thing straight – the collapse of Bloc was not caused by anything other than a massive over-selling of tickets. (It is hard to see this article on problems caused by the rain – of which there wasn’t any – as anything other than a cynical cover-up).
But if Bloc has taught us one positive thing, it’s that it takes a lot to crush the festival spirit. What I’m saying is, in spite of its shittiness, I had an interesting Friday night.
