An update on Paleo
We went to the Paleo festival in Switzerland for a day as part of our summer holiday.
So here are some interesting facts on Paleo -
It's quite a small festival with three primary stages (one outside, two tented) and 2-3 smaller stages.
It is more like 6 one day festivals from Tuesday to Sunday as tickets are sold on a daily basis and gates each day only open at 4.30pm.
The 250,000 figure is, I presume, taken by adding up the total attendance across all 6 days ie around 40,000 per day. Even then I'm not sure there were that many people there.
All camping (tents & motorhomes) is outside the main festival site. It's free with your ticket. So, not sure what you'd do until 4.30 every day if you're staying all week although there are some stalls and shops and a small stage in the camping area. (OK sleep and drink beer are two decent options to start.)
You can buy daily tickets or 6-day/4-day passes.
Because of the daily tickets many people come just for the day and then go home so there are not huge numbers of people camping.
It took us 2 minutes to queue up and get into the site when we arrived with our motorhome! (Oh joy of joys)
The camping is very organised in regimented lines and a nice lady steward came with her 3 metre piece of rope to ensure we had the requisite space between our vehicle and the next.
The music seems dominated by French/Swiss acts (and we know how good the French taste in music is!). However, my friend who lives nearby said the line up was quite poor this year.
We saw amongst others Motorhead, Iggy Pop and Two Door Cinema Club (played Glasto, Other stage Sat am) on the Tuesday evening.
Tickets go on sale in April and they announce the line up about a week before so you can decide which days you want to go. (We didn't have a choice because of our holiday itinerary.)
To buy the tickets you can get a customer account set-up beforehand and then you login to the website and join an online queue which usually opens around 1.5 hours before the tickets go on sale (though I only joined the queue about half an hour before and still got my tickets .... & my friend's as he lost his internet connection just when he got to the front of the queue!!)
Tickets this year did sell out quickly - within about 20 minutes. However, as long as you are in the queue (and don't lose your connection) it was all processed quite effectively and without too much pain.
Tickets are downloaded and you print them yourself.
At the festival you pay a deposit on special Paleo glasses (plastic) and refill these at the bar. They will also give you a necklace with a special holder for your glass leaving both hands free to ....... well, make sure you don't spill your beer from your necklace presumably! (At least you won't lose it.)
All in all it was quite good fun to visit another festival and it was all quite low key and relaxed with a fair amount of time between acts so not too much going on all at the same time.
If you like French music it could be fantastic!
I hope this is useful for anyone thinking of going or who, like me, initially thought this was a very different event from the initial info publicised.
By the way I didn't see those toilets. The ones I used were quite good and a definite step up from Glastonbury but not that plush.
Pete
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Sounds good though, might have to look into this for a future year. It says tickets sell out very very fast I dont know if i could cope with the stress of 2 ticket sale days!
