Katrina wins the Lifetime Achievement Award at The UK Festival Awards 2009
November 20th, 2009 by sparky
On Thursday 19th November, at a glittering ceremony at London’s Indig02, our co-founder and creative director, Katrina Larkin was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Festival Awards 2009, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to both the UK and international festival market, and as a woman in the top tier of an industry largely dominated by men.
Here at BCHQ, we’d like to extend our personal congratulations to Katrina and raise a glass to the next fifteen years!
Here’s what Steve Jenner, the director of Virtual Festivals, had to say about the award…
When I first started Virtual Festivals ten years ago, festivals were generally characterised almost entirely by their line-ups. Take away the acts and there wouldn’t have been a lot left - just an empty field, some burger vans and a stage or two.Over the last decade, the most profound transformation has taken place. Across the nation, from Inverness down to the Isle Of Wight, the festival landscape has exploded with vibrancy, colour, character and diversity where simply being there with a fancy costume or just a smile on your face can make you as much a star of the show as the artists on-stage.
Beyond just a social and cultural shift, this boutique festival movement has opened up the market to hundreds of independent festival organisers who, despite lacking major festival artist budgets, have been able to draw large audiences and build sustainable festival brands through their creativity and imagination. This phenomenon has also dramatically widened the range of people able to enjoy these events and it is now typical to see folk from two years old to seventy with beaming faces among the fields and marquees.
Ten years ago, festivals were a rite of passage. Now they are a way of life.
But how did all this happen and who was responsible?
A glimpse at the multiplicity of events at the forefront of this amazing movement reveals one festival that stands above the rest as a source of inspiration in terms of its design and spirit.
I refer, of course, to The Big Chill - originally founded by Katrina Larkin and Pete Lawrence in 1994. The pair’s passion and vision to create a new kind of live music experience that would break down the divide between audience and artist quickly catapulted The Big Chill from a weekly shindig in a London church into one of the most celebrated independent multi-media music, entertainment, literature, arts and comedy festivals in the UK.
An obsessive attention to detail, insatiable appetite for the eclectic, relentless determination to find ever-more engaging ways to entertain and a steadfast refusal to compromise on creative integrity also went into the mix to produce a new festival formula of such potency as to not only establish The Big Chill as a jewel in Britain’s festival crown but to then propel the rest of the marketplace with it, refreshing the template and creating this wonderful landscape we have today.
This year’s Lifetime Achievement Award goes accordingly to the director and co-founder of The Big Chill - Katrina Larkin - in recognition of her extraordinary work as both a pioneer who continues to innovate and a prime conspirator in the great independent festival revolution of recent years. Thank you Katrina for brightening up our summers.
Steve Jenner, November 2009
