Blog Entry
Snowbombing 2011 - Alpine Adventures
So the festival fever journey officially began with a short jolly up a mountain with plenty of Jaeger and very little sleep. Snowbombing is a festival that has long been talked about at fever towers, and finally making it there was a top priority for us, particularly as it comes right at the start of the season. The website was pretty much finished so it was a good opportunity for us to go and get the name out there a bit.
Upon my arrival at Liverpool Street for the luxurious Stansted Express, I was greeting by Kendo aka Big Bird and a pile of promotional material that was to be used in the coming days. Unfortunately, missing from this material were the 700 laminated cards that we had planned to distribute to drunken boarders to slip into their pockets only to wake up and find amongst the post drinking shrapnel. Kendo, who had painstakingly laminated and cut out each and every one of them, had left them in his living room, one day I shall make him pay for that! We got to Standsted and instantly realised that Ryanair had tightened their chuff even further with their weight restrictions in luggage meaning that I had to don my snowboarding boots for the flight, not a cool look, but at least I wasn’t wearing shorts!
Memmingen is one of Ryanairs’ pretend airports, in that it pretends to be in Munich when in reality it is nearly in France, not put off by this we set off in the festival wagon that was to be our transportation, hotel, restaurant and sanctuary for the following days.
Arriving in Mayrhofen after a 2-3 hour journey was a massive relief, granted there wasn’t even a hint of snow, but putting that aside, the sight of the early evening revellers on their way to the Metro Royal Wedding Street Party in all manner of fancy dress definitely whetted the appetite. First stop was a quick trip to the press office to pick up our accreditation, now this was our first festival to cover so it was also our first experience of being press, the surprise to how seriously we were treated as press memebers was massive, we half expected them to say “we thought you were joking, of course you aren’t allowed press passes!” but we were welcomed with open arms and given our wristbands and press packs with all sorts of little freebies, a massive thanks to Eva and Emily at gone fishing PR for that.
So straight down to the street party where it was clear that we had some catching up to do. There was a heaving mass of people, all colourfully dressed as every character you can name from years gone by all either lost in the music of Reverend Sound System or queuing at the bar ready to get lost in a minute or two. It was a proper street party atmosphere and unlike the street parties that will actually happen on Royal Wedding day, there wasn’t a cucumber sandwich in sight.
Later on that night we headed to the racket club where the headliners were playing that night. DJ Yoda and 2ManyDJs played memorable sets and the crowd were going nuts. Wearing our beardheads we were quite possibly the hottest people on the planet that night. But, as we discovered, beardheads are good ice breakers, so when you go to the press bar and a pretty inebriated Rick Edwards off the tele is sat at the bar, they give a pretty easy introduction.
During the course of the night we obviously had to get to work on promoting the site, this meant heading back to the wagon to get into character ourselves, time for Cookie Monster and Big Bird to strut their stuff on the high street! We spent a good three or four hours walking the streets talking to people about the festival, talking about this site and generally making friends, now they may have been attracted by the bright costumes, maybe the cookies that the cookie monster was handing out or maybe it was the rumour of a fantastic new festival based website that drew them in, no matter what it was, when they were stood with us they were treated to a delicious opportunity – participation in the inaugural Festival Fever Duck V Swan race. People were chomping at the bit to sign up and pledge their allegiance, the question was, would they remember the following day what they had drunkenly signed up for the previous night????
In a word, no. The race never took place, there were a few reasons for this however. Firstly after a good hour and a half of us inflating the 6 foot swan, and the 4 foot duck, as well as a bonus sea turtle, the swan went and pulled a hamstring on a training run. I say pulled a hamstring, what I mean of course is that I burst him when riding over a jump in the board park, not before I had taken out a harmless spectator though. That meant we were left with only the duck and the sea turtle. Both were to play their part in the coming moments however. The second reason I would assume is that a high proportion of the people who signed up were heavily drunk when we talked to them and I would imagine that the conversation faded into one of those drunken dreams that you are not quite sure about the following day as to whether it happened or not, “inflatable duck, racing an inflatable swan you say? No, no, no you scallywag, I’m not falling for that one! Back to sleep for me.”
At the same time that we were messing around blowing up inflatable’s, the gathered masses were watching a pro-am snowboarding display in the main part of the board park. This involved pro boarders and snowbombers that fancied it, a chance to ride down and hit a kicker simultaneously, pulling off the best tricks they could in order to win prizes and money. There was also a water hazard to the left, a small swimming pool filled with icy water that boarders were skimming like a stone over the top of. So, inflatable sea turtle, icy water, crowd, bloke in a cookie monster outfit looking to promote a website, other bloke angry at cookie monster for destroying elegant swan inflatable…….doesn’t take too many guesses does it?
As I sat about 50 yards up the mountain from the icy pool of death atop my loyal and trusty sea turtle I saw in my mind the possibilities that lay before me, Festival Fever about to be gloriously introduced to the snowbombing public, huge cheers as I hit the water, a crowd of people congratulating me and slapping me on the back when I resurfaced from the chilly depths, “a festival website you say? Well I will sign up as a member now and put all my photos on it, in fact here is £500 as a donation to help you with running costs!” I was about to go down in history. “Cookie Monster, now is your time!” yelled the compare for the day, so I readied myself, sea turtle had in previous trial runs been pretty rapid so I was quietly confident that I could make it all the way across the pond with the speed I would carry, my only fear was careering out of control into the crowd. I shouldn’t have worried, I made it about 40 yards before I came to a complete stop, I couldn’t hear any boos if there were any, I was too deep in my own shame, but needless to say it hadn’t been the glorious ride into town I had hoped for. In the end I had to settle for jumping onto a stationary sea turtle placed in the water, which would have been memorable had they not then utilised our Festival Fever Duck to escort a topless girl into the water to a much bigger cheer, you can’t win them all.
Now if there is anyone who can lift your mood after a fall from grace then it is Mr Motivator, the clue is in his title right? So we headed down to take part in his daily warm down session. The sight of Big Bird taking part in this is one that I will cherish for many a year to come. The crowd were truly loving it. Not as much as I was loving having my photo taken with the man himself as well as getting him to sign a Festival Fever T-Shirt, keep your eyes peeled for that coming up as a prize at some point!
To finish off the day we decided we would take in the delights of the Altitude comedy festival where we were privileged to catch Rufus Hound, truly awesome stuff from him. We then headed back down to the racket club in order to catch Sub Focus, Example and Chase and Status. Proper rave up, all three of them ripped it up and the videos that we have should give you a bit of an insight as to what it was like in there.
Our first assignment on behalf of festival fever was full of fun and definitely an eye opener, we are hoping that there will be plenty more where that came from and hopefully some of the material we have gained on that trip will help the site get off the ground in these early times.
