  
The second edition of the fresh Bucharest-based Romanian festival Summer Well started not so well and ended really bad.
The lineup announced included The Stone Roses, Hurts, The Vaccines, Patrick Wolf, Wolf Gang, Zulu Winter and many others, but the joy of being able to see Hurts (again in Bucharest) and The Stone Roses for the first time in Romania soon turned into a very frustrating experience.
Let's start with the beginning. The festival takes place in a superb location, 20 km outside Bucharest, near a 150 year old palace and all over the forest surrounding it (including a pond populated by swans and ducks). Sounds (and really is) dreamy, which is why the tagline of the event is "a festival like a holiday".
Last year it was great, but unfortunately this year it rained hard in Bucharest. The mud never killed anyone at a festival yet, although the event might as well have been called Summer Puddle instead of Summer Well.
The real problem was that the main stage was set in a meadow, directly on the ground, where the soil became so imbibed with water that it became unsafe to hold all that weight. So... "Due to the rains of the last days, and because of the heavy rain of last night, Summer Well is forced to cancel its second day. For safety reasons, there will be no concerts today - we will come back with more details."
This is how the second day was cancelled, and together with it all the concerts: Zulu Winter, The Big Pink, Glasvegas,The Vaccines and The Stone Roses...
Thousands of fans are complaining, most of them having bought the tickets to see The Stone Roses, asking for refunds and chastising the organizers. The organizers are keeping mum, probably not very happy with the situation either.
Leaving aside the compromised second day, day 1 was not that bad (if you ignore a few faux pas concerning again the logistics, which was a bit faulty).
We listened to Citizens! and Wolf Gang who opened the afternoon, danced our shoes off (in that mud, it wasn't that hard) with The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, then waited patiently for the headliners Patrick Wolf and Hurts, who ended the evening in a grand way. Hurts had an amazing performance, excellent lights and an impressive tri-level stage, with a string quartet and two fiery dancers.
All in all, it was a pretty good one-day festival, but we still regret the negligence that lead to cancelling the second day. It's true, this has never happened before and maybe they couldn't have known that the ground will become so soft as to endanger the scene and the public... But then again, being an event organizer should mean more than signing up the bands and cashing the money from the public, right? |
