Saturday 8th & Sunday 9th September 2012
In a new twist for this year, we are proud to present our Saturday Spectacular - The Lightning Seeds will perform an exclusive acoustic set on the lake. Ian will be playing all his hits, a fitting end to a night that will also see sets from Chris Helme (Seahorses, The Yards) and Scarborough's very own Mark Stanley & The Field Notes. When you add a proper real ale bar, brough to you by The Great Yorkshire Brewery from Cropton, you start to see why we're so excited about this.
Sunday sees all the usual unusualness we like to bring to town unfold across ten and a half hours of utterly brilliant festival happiness. We have the great pleasure of playing host to 3 Daft Monkeys, headlining the event for the second time. The last time they were here, they enjoyed the experience so much, they wrote about in a song!
There are ticket prices for this year's events - £15 for Saturday and £5 for Sunday, although under 12's will be allowed in free on the Sunday. It was a sad day in the AG cellar when we realised that we simply couldn't continue operating on donations and grants. Everyone knows about the current economic situation and, with the cut backs being made, there simply aren't any big pots of money to pay for art events at the moment. This coincided with greater licence restrictions being placed on us plus a requirement to fence and gate the park. These factors all contributed to a quadrupling of our costs on top of us receiving no funding.
We were faced with the option of not doing the event or trying to find a way through. We're really proud of Acoustic Gathering, the vibe, the ethos and the number of people who have supported and attended from the first year. It didn't seem realistic to go from a free event to a £10 or £15 ticket, so we had an espresso or ten, cogitated and conceived the idea of subsidising the Sunday event with something special on the Saturday night. This way, we could try and have our cake and eat it too!
To those of you who have enjoyed the previous free events, we really hope you understand why this is happening and how we've tried to get around the obstacles that were placed in our way. We've had a lot of great times with Acoustic Gathering, we hope you have too and we'd really appreciate your support so we can continue bringing great artists to the town and making them play on a lake after having a ride in a swan :-)