Over 6,000 revellers turned up for the debut Connected Festival, which ran for 12 hours, from 6pm last Saturday through the night to 6am Sunday morning at Lydd Airport on Romney Marsh.
The celebration of drum and bass music saw over 100 artists performing between five sound stages, four in big top style tents and the fifth inside the new airport hanger. Fans travelled from across the country to enjoy the sounds of IC3, Skibadee, So Solid Crew, MC Det, and Problem Central among many others, at what one all-night party goer exclaimed was “The best event of the year!”.
Reviewing the festival after the weekend, an exhausted festival director, Rohan Mulvaney, said “In terms of customer satisfaction it’s been a fantastic event. There’s been no negative feedback, no violence, no real queues for bars or toilets, just a great atmosphere. A real vibe. The traffic flow in and out was excellent, and with no complaints about noise from the local community, I have to say, for a first event it was a major success”.
A very obvious security presence throughout the festival played its part in producing a safe event, a major factor effecting any decisions on future plans. “Security was great” said Mr. Mulvaney. “We’ve learnt a lot of lessons from this first event and although we’ve taken a loss I’m generally very happy. We’ve established the Connected brand and future customers will now know what to expect. We’ll have the airport back to normal by the end of this week then sit down and draw breath. It really couldn’t have gone any better and we will definitely be looking at plans for another festival”.
