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Liverpool HUB 2005: Festival of the Future
Liverpool’s third HUB Festival – a vibrant urban mix of art, music and extreme sports staged at the Pier Head – expanded and featured several new elements this year.
This boosted participation and brought in HUB’s largest audience figures to date, with over 10,000 - a 10% increase on 2004 - through Liverpool’s famous Pier Head site over the two days.
A resounding all-round success, the high energy festival celebrated the best of urbanly orientated creative and sporting talents including skateboarding, BMX riding, in-line skating, break dancing, body-popping, graffiti art and several music genres including rap, break beat, hop hop and speed metal.
The event is the brainchild of the Council’s Liverpool Culture Company.
LCC’s innovative cultural events programme has always sought to include all sectors of the community. Head of events Lee Forde comments: “Listening to what young people want, event wise, has helped HUB develop rapidly and very successfully.”
HUB 2005 was also expanded in terms physical space, featuring a larger skate park and over 250 metres of graffiti hoardings created by 54 street art crews from across the UK, Europe and America.
Totally new elements this year included an additional DJ tent for rappers and B-Boys and Girls to bring their own unique performance into the equation.
Another popular new feature for 2005 was the Liverpool HUB Open competition, with £3000 cash prize money for the most skilled skaters and BMX riders.
This element alone attracted over 250 entrants, all of whom demonstrated some breathtaking acrobatics and industrial strength nerves to ride street, competing for the Highest Air (on the vert ramp) and the Best Tricks categories.
The 230 x 50 metre Skate Park was also double the size of last year, and designed by Neil Danns a local and former World Skate Champion. It featured 14 pieces of skate furniture – catering for all abilities from novice to exhibition standard. This was packed both days with skaters, boarders and BMXers of all ages and levels of experience … every one on a mission to get good air and do the best trix in the area.
Team Extreme were on hand to give gravity defying demonstrations of their own riding and skating skills on their vert ramp throughout the event.
Fifty-four local and international graffiti artists converged on Liverpool for the duration - each allotted a space and a specific amount of materials to use for their works. They included Liverpool’s legendary Stok, and together they created a multi-coloured collage of images, scenes stories and statements surrounding the site.
A new look main stage was utilised this year. The tent was a single king pole purple membrane structure supplied by Wangos and chosen for its aesthetics, explains event manager Kirstie Blakeman. “With the event being held at Liverpool’s unique waterfront World Heritage Site we wanted something unique and different looking, something really special and dynamic for the music zone this year – not just another standard stage or marquee.”
The same was true for the DJ tent, compared by the ephemeral Spykatcha - which saw break dancing demos by the Rock Steady Crew and a stream of DJs. This structure was supplied by The Dome Company from Suffolk. It was semi-spherical in shape with a wooden ‘honeycombe’ frame. The DJ tent was rammed all weekend, and Blakeman comments that it really paid off to separate the two music genres into different zones. They also ran – purely for fun - an MC battle for the kids in the DJ tent. “Being the first year we’d split this element we weren’t sure how well this would work; but it was an unbelievable success. We’ll definitely be expanding this area next year,” says Blakeman.
Main stage performers included some of the best local band talents including Barfinkle, Celsius, Charm Offensive, Multi Purpose Chemical and Linear alongside international guests The Afterglow from Milan.
Audio for both Main Stage and the DJ tent was a rich and bass-tastic Funktion One Resolution system supplied by Audile from Manchester, a regular LCC supplier.
For the Main stage FOH mixing position, and also to supply audio for the Skate Park, production manager Stu Stalker of Event Design Logistics came up with the neat idea of stacking three steel containers on top of each other. Not only did these give the requisite industrial feel, the bottom layer accommodated the Main Stage FOH mixer, and the top an open curtain-sider container supplied the speaker stacks for the Skate Park which faced opposite. Careful focusing of the speaker stacks ensured minimal noise interference between the different areas. The DJ tent featured another Function One system and a full DJ set up.
A minimal lighting system installed for both tents was also supplied by Audile, consisting of a basic cross stage PAR wash. Although it was a daylight event, this ensured a basic level of brightness for all performers and looked great on camera.
LCC’s HUB 05 team included event manager Kirstie Blakeman, production manager Stu Stalker and site manager John Prince from Event Design Logistics, stage manager Phil Murphy and operations manager Ally Stott. Crew Catering – that rarely credited but all important haven – was by L’s Kitchen, and site power and distribution was supplied by Pyramid.
Kirstie Blakeman has few doubts about how she feels HUB should develop and plans are already afoot to develop next year’s event. “I want HUB to expand and become the ‘must see’ event in the UK’s festival calendar,” says Blakeman. They will be extending the street course adding a bowl and an even larger vert ramp and utilising these elements to advance the HUB Open into a major competition on the extreme sports circuit.
“There’s room to expand the DJ tent,” she adds, saying that they are thinking of housing it in a membrane tent structure similar to this year’s main stage, and would also like to develop a national B-Boy competition. “We’re also looking at adding a third stage to feature international performers, and already have artists lined up from Iceland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and more… the list is endless!”
Only in its third year, HUB has already outgrown the beautiful Pier Head setting and so Blakeman and her team are looking for a new home for HUB 2006. “There’s a real buzz about the event both within the city and in the North West. Generation X has really adopted HUB, which makes us extremely proud in gaining their seal of approval. Organising an event which they all enjoy so much is very rewarding!” she sums up.
25th July 2005
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