NeilCocker.com

It’s with a huge amount of sadness that I’ve just learned that Pete Lawrence has stepped down as head honcho of The Big Chill. Easily my favourite festival on the planet, and having provided me with some of the most spine-tinglingly brilliant experiences of my life (as performer, participant and member of the paying public), it’s a festival that Pete has steered with partner Katrina Larkin from small beginnings to something truly massive and global.

Every summer tens of thousands of people get excited about the prospect of going to Eastnor Deer Park (or previously Larmer Tree Gardens) or one of their many overseas excursions (most recently Goa, but most memorably an amazing week on the Greek island of Naxos). And yet despite the growth of the festival from the tiny 1000 capacity ones I remember in the late nineties Pete has managed to steer it so that it has retained it’s independent, smiley feel. And his influence obviously goes far, with him managing to organise for blazing sunshine to bathe the festival almost every year!

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve just wandered around a Big Chill festival on my own, a huge smile on my face, just meeting people, chatting and enjoying the sights and sounds alongside likeminded souls. From our very first performance at The Big Chill’s Enchanted Garden – hundreds of grinning loons, several peacocks, and an impromptu jam with a stilt-walking percussion group – to 2006 when we performed live with the amazing Bent vocalist Katty Heath and saw over 1000 crazy people go mad to every single tune we played (see the footage from the stage here and here), I can honestly say that I owe Pete Lawrence a huge amount. In fact, thousands of us do, whether we realise it or not. Pete’s dedication to independent, individual and life-affirming music events has had an unmeasurable effect on the landscape of music in this country and beyond. And the Big Chill events make it easy for even photo-duffers like me to take the occasional decent pic:

It’ll be really sad not to see Pete perform his traditional (quite bad!) dancing on stage, during Norman Jay’s Sunday set. Good luck in everything you do from now on, Pete!

Read Pete’s official statement here.

edit: In fact, I’ve just remembered that The Big Chill is also partly responsible for my career as a club and event promoter, as the first event I ever organised (alongside my Phantom Beats cohort Matt) was a Big Chill benefit night after we read about how they’d been the victims of horrific weather and a short-sighted local council. I seem to remember we raised a fairly paltry amount for them, and Pete slept in my bed. Not with me in it, obviously.

It’s with a huge amount of sadness that I’ve just learned that Pete Lawrence has stepped down as head honcho of The Big Chill. Easily my favourite festival on the planet, and having provided me with some of the most spine-tinglingly brilliant experiences of my life (as performer, participant and member of the paying public), it’s a festival that Pete has steered with partner Katrina Larkin from small beginnings to something truly massive and global.

Every summer tens of thousands of people get excited about the prospect of going to Eastnor Deer Park (or previously Larmer Tree Gardens) or one of their many overseas excursions (most recently Goa, but most memorably an amazing week on the Greek island of Naxos). And yet despite the growth of the festival from the tiny 1000 capacity ones I remember in the late nineties Pete has managed to steer it so that it has retained it’s independent, smiley feel. And his influence obviously goes far, with him managing to organise for blazing sunshine to bathe the festival almost every year!

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve just wandered around a Big Chill festival on my own, a huge smile on my face, just meeting people, chatting and enjoying the sights and sounds alongside likeminded souls. From our very first performance at The Big Chill’s Enchanted Garden – hundreds of grinning loons, several peacocks, and an impromptu jam with a stilt-walking percussion group – to 2006 when we performed live with the amazing Bent vocalist Katty Heath and saw over 1000 crazy people go mad to every single tune we played (see the footage from the stage here and here), I can honestly say that I owe Pete Lawrence a huge amount. In fact, thousands of us do, whether we realise it or not. Pete’s dedication to independent, individual and life-affirming music events has had an unmeasurable effect on the landscape of music in this country and beyond. And the Big Chill events make it easy for even photo-duffers like me to take the occasional decent pic:

It’ll be really sad not to see Pete perform his traditional (quite bad!) dancing on stage, during Norman Jay’s Sunday set. Good luck in everything you do from now on, Pete!

Read Pete’s official statement here.

edit: In fact, I’ve just remembered that The Big Chill is also partly responsible for my career as a club and event promoter, as the first event I ever organised (alongside my Phantom Beats cohort Matt) was a Big Chill benefit night after we read about how they’d been the victims of horrific weather and a short-sighted local council. I seem to remember we raised a fairly paltry amount for them, and Pete slept in my bed. Not with me in it, obviously.

I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks now, but thought I’d highlight a couple of nifty sites/apps that I’ve stumbled across recently.

Videoclix is a video system that allows you to click within videos and find out more about the things you’re watching. It will be fantastic to get background info on movie scenes at the touch of a button, without having to have the director’s commentary switched on. But sadly the most obvious application of this is advertising. In the example video on the site we see James Bond zooming around in a car, which we can click on to find out more about (as well as where to purchase, no doubt). We can access info on the island he’s on, the watch he’s wearing etc etc. Developments like this could bring a huge surge of product placement in films (something that the last Bond was pretty blatant about), knowing that revenue streams from the resultant clicks would easily recoup the exorbitant amount the manufacturers are no doubt charged by the film-makers.

Solovietalk is a small app that sits on your mobile and allows you to make conference calls to other mobiles. My limited understanding is that until now you would have had to route all calls through a call handler, which was expensive. This software allows you to manage the whole process yourself at a pretty reasonable minute-by-minute rate. I’ve not tried it myself, but the developers assure me it’s a smooth process. Seems pretty ideal to me, as more and more of us are out and about most of the time.

Qik allows live videocasting from a web-enabled phone, meaning that instead of having to wait for your video to be uploaded and processed (à la Youtube), your video will be streaming live to the world with just a 5 second delay. It’s worth just going to the site to see what other people are broadcasting. It’s compulsive viewing. Soon we’ll all be producing our own private Truman Shows….

News just in as I’m writing this: “Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares”. More here from the BBC…