Part 1: Preparing Images

Asked to describe the year before Cream emerged, Barton's story instead
insinuates a proper entrepreneurial legend (Lines 3-20); situating Cream's
imaginary boundary in his childhood memories (3-26), and delineating a
body of enterprise discourse (3-20) that helps authorise Cream and
Creamfields today. It sets the scene for his emplotting an Aristotlean 'epic'
and 'tragedy' narrative (Hamilton 2006) that connotes a proper
storytelling genre underwhich to understand Cream's emergence, and
establishes aleitic modality; situating these memories 'before' Cream
Barton insinuates contingency, necessity, and causality (3-26), and
assembles spatial and temporal synecdoches that emphasise the history
of Cream Group Ltd., in contemporary images. Barton asserts that Cream
today is only readable in relation to this longitudinal, epic, narrative (3). It
is a double narration, by him and by Cream, and it confuses spatial
signifiers with the historically signified, telling it in turns that prepare and
redescribe spaces over time in a tactical telling.

It is Bartons childhood memories, then, that prepare a theatrical space

from which actions can unfold, (3-26) and the discourse embodied
assembles a legend of‘grass roots’ emergence leading to authentic big
business.

I: maybe we should start with what it was like before Cream. What were you doing,
say, in the year leading up to Cream?1
J: “Well, if you want the full story, really you need to go back years because sort of,
in my teenage years,. which was the mid 80's in Liverpool, I was introduced to cool
5 music by my brothers and when I say 'cool music' I was too young to be into punk
rock but then picked up on things like The Jam, The Clash, early on the sort of stuff
I was into. That then developed into..... well, first and foremost, the weird thing
about me is that live music was my first passion. So when I was a young kid, me
and one of my best mates, we used to spend most, as many nights as we could in
10 The Empire or in the Royal Court or wherever watching bands, so I've seen

1 Line numbering is used for reasons of clarity. Some reconstruction has taken place and paragraphs have
been excluded. The intention is not to present a scientific text.
 everybody and I think I have to sort of explain that in a way to try and square the
circle with Cream, because, you know, at the time, I didn't realise, but looking
back, now, my broad taste in music and my broad awareness of live music and
everything else comes from just going to see everything and anything. Liverpool in
15 the mid 80's was a tough city, politically it was a nightmare, drugs were rife,
unemployment was huge... and not a lot changes, it's like that today I suppose in a
way- But it was a completely different place. It was a very bleak place really for
somebody like me who was sort of very aware of my surroundings, really felt as
though I had a burning feeling in my stomach that my friends didn't have and at
20 that time I didn't really understand it... I had different taste in music, I had
different taste in clothes... I come from a really, really mainstream working class
Liverpool council estate”.

The story, then, unfolds from a space of memories where Barton is a child
in a big city, and the image evokes Barton being ‘right’ and necessarily
having to become an entrepreneur, as if, despite the conditions, it was
always possible (7-26).

Barton’s naming of Liverpool as a space (19-26), then, contextualises and

orients his legend. By naming himself in relation to that space (22-26), he
puts him in the ‘right’ space, establishes an interlocutory contract with
class relations (i.e. the rich), and draws a frontier- an avant garde – that
prepares the listener for actions that subsequently change the space into
something better and that will supress the polemic. Operating as spatial
synecdoches these turns on Cream today emphasise part of the story for
the whole, and Barton the necessity of having those experiences
dramatizes the trustworthiness and good nature of his story. He prepares
the epic. Contextualising 1980s Liverpool, though, also cites national
stereotypical images and operates as another spatial synecdoche that
dismisses Liverpool as a context for successful images of musical
entrepreneurship back then. It is the “bleakness” (19-25) that operates as
a conjoining bridge to the space of Liverpool and Cream today by reifying
the lacunae of opportunities and emphasising the efficacy of Barton's
intermediary actions in making things ‘better’. It establishes the city as
 being a musical no-where2. A body of discourse (17-18) (i.e.
Kirzner’s“awareness”) helps reassert aleitic modality (i.e. a necessity) to
Barton's subsequent actions and establishes Barton as an 'other':
marginal in terms of ability in a city portrayed as a marginal space (19-
26). Barton, then, first concentrates on contextualising his story,
preparing spaces, and instating necessity, contingency and causality
through his tale.

Escaping Spaces; Insinuating Them

'Grass roots' also means a form of escape for Barton:

J: “...So for me, the way out, or the hobby or the passion I had was going to
get in to see as many bands as I could, and I saw lots of cool bands and lots
25 of really shit bands as well. But I saw everybody. I was just a gig goer and
then I became a nightclub goer when I was 15 and a half, nearly 16..... and
it sort of changed for me, like most people involved in dance music, in
1988, when, I was in London, I got took to a couple of early acid house
night clubs, heard this sound, saw what was going on and fell in love with it
30 basically. Came back to Liverpool, hadn't really been in Liverpool much that
summer because I had been travelling a bit in Europe, watching bands and
selling t-shirts and stuff like that. So what happened was, I left school quite
early, I didn't have a problem with school but I knew I could make money,
so I knew I had what is now described as... entrepreneurial ability....so I was
35 a little ducker and diver, I sold sweets in the playground, I had a paper
round, I did all of these things, worked on market stalls at weekends, and
left school at 16 knowing that actually I had the knack for turning 10
pounds in 20 pounds or 50 pounds. So I just thought “There's no point me
hanging round for school for another couple of years. I know what I want to
40 do”. So I got out and I dived straight into what I wanted to do, which was
market stalls. I then discovered that I could actually go and watch as many
bands as I liked by buying tickets in advance and selling those tickets and
acting as a ticket tout, which for 3 or 4 years was my ticket, if you like, to
seeing amazing bands in amazing cities. I travelled right around Europe,...”.

2 It should be noted that during this time Liverpool was a space for successful musical entrepreneurship. BBC
HG2G asserts: “In the early-to-mid 1980s, Liverpool became, for a while, almost as important to music as it had
been in the 1960s; the likes of Yazoo, A Flock of Seagulls, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Mighty Wah all
played at The Cavern, Eric's or the Royal Court, while Probe Records, at one time the workplace of Dead or Alive
frontman Pete Burns, was the place to go to buy the latest records. It seemed that everyone in that city was in
a band, or knew someone who was”. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3769095).
 Barton then named spaces he travelled to, delineating spaces in
Liverpool, and citing figures from his early musical experiences:

45 J: “...And then I came back. Acid house hit in 1988, I had just come back
from Holland... ...stayed at a friend's house and then went to a rave event
in London- called The Trip.. Which just opened my eyes and then dance
music was it for me... ...Something new. Something that my brothers didn't
know about. And I knew it was cool. I knew it was modern and cool... ...acid
50 house and house music and techno were something that I thought 'This is
the future'.

J: “Everything was about London then. In the mid 80s, yeah Liverpool had a
good scene but I was too young to Eric's, so I missed Eric's, that was like
late 70s, so I missed that. So as it happens, Liverpool wasn't really doing a
55 lot, and also, I was travelling loads... ...I was getting access and seeing how
all these different cities did and Liverpool back then, as I said, it was a
pretty bleak place. There wasn't really a lot to stay here for. So the idea of
getting on a train and going to London for the weekend and doing a couple
of shows, making some money and going out clubbing all night was
60 perfect”.

J: “I used to say this a lot- what got me into this in the first place is me
sitting at home, frankly frustrated with what was going on around me,
seeing Tony Wilson on TV every Friday night, because he had his own TV
show, telling us how amazing Manchester was and promoting his own
65 record label and his own nightclub. But, actually, doing it really fucking
well, and sitting here thinking 'fucking mancs'”.

Connotations of finding “a way out” situate Barton back then politically

and ethically, firmly asserting he was one of the people and in a “no-
where”: Liverpool (46-59). As proper figures (61) with whom Barton had
an ambivalent relationship are then cited, Barton authorises his steps
toward musical enterprise and is able to assemble an exteriority (61-64),
both human and spatial in nature, with him sitting as Manchester is
positioned as a proper place. Situated between these proper figures and
these proper market places, Barton coordinates Liverpool as the “product
of stretched out, intersecting and articulating relations of the economy”,
thereby integrates the “social and the spatial”, and introduces “directly
into space itself...the issue of social power” (Massey 1995: 2). The city is
portrayed as a “bleak” no-where between spaces (30-34; 52-64), and a
no-when between musical boundaries (46-54), and it is then by combining
tactics, travelling to and imagining spaces outside the city that Barton's
entrepreneurial otherness is able to flourish (31-54). It is a story of
business awareness and development being oriented and given an
aesthetic by a passion for music and by being situated at the intersection
of other proper places and proper figures that in turn reify memories of
the “bleakness”. Knowing that Barton began with small/no size, a lack of
resources, and from a margin position amplify the magnitude of his
triumph and legend, and the lacunae of opportunities in Liverpool he
describes ,(18-25;53-59) a synecdoche in its own right, works by reifying
ghostly epistemic possibilities of what memory, and imagination, could
invent and reinvent there. Years before Cream emerges, Barton prepares
images of Liverpool that ghostily foretell of the change to occur. A spatial
frontier- an avant garde – is incised in his telling (18), and from the spaces
drawn emerges possibility (18-69), and a space of telling stories is
furnished.

The emergence of Cream: A Space of change

Wider research reveals Barton's practical itinerary promotion-wise

back then involved commonplace 'Do-It-Yourself' tactics, like fly postering
and giving out flyers (reference?), while an acquired interview between
Barton and Wilson reveals 'gleaning' (Hanning 2007) of barrells and other
opportunistic activities3,4. Barton and Cream operated in shared market
3 A partially indecipherable dictaphone cassette tape of a public meeting discussing local business, cultural
regeneration, and change held in Liverpool in 2004.
4 Daisy, in 1988, and then, Underground, a few years later, were Barton's first club nights. Although they
became popular, the clubs were still organised by Barton and a small group with very little proper
knowledge or resources. They were intended as small club nights that served friends and that would bring
good music to Liverpool in the hope that others shared the organisers' tastes. Barton and Darren Hughes
then started the first Cream night on Saturday, October 17, 1992, at Nation, with some financial backing
from unofficial stakeholders. Cream quickly grew to cater for and exploit the thousands of punters who
travelled from around the country but who were refused entry. By 1996, the club was XXXX capacity and it
sold shares to the then current Nation owner, Stuart Davenport, and Ingenious Ventures, who brought
£5,000,000 and who, eventually, took almost half the shares in 2001.
 spaces at this point, sometimes having to manouervre around market
'places'. Barton doesn't go into his tactics back then though. It is instead
left to the epic magnitude (beginning in a “bleak” place, Lines 18-25), and
to modal notions of him necessarily having those experiences (7-18; 7-
25), and those memories being necessary for how others read Cream
today evoked by his telling (15-17), to emplot and bridge the no-where
space of Liverpool back then with the more proper images of Liverpool
today. As syntatical actions are excluded, this asyndetic spatial
coordination provides an aesthetic explaining how reified actions should
be imagined: it was right and, hence, is a beautiful story. Working for a
major record company (65-79) is just another way Barton coordinates
neccessity in his story, as he furnishes a process of realisation with
enterprise discourse (69-79)5 and how big business strategies and
structures didn't work for him. “I had to get out” it connotes, and names a
proper place (the properness of BMG) and prepares the audience for the
finale; his and the story's destiny: the emergence of Cream so that the
legend continues. The upshot of this is that the proper place Barton
names, BMG, appears stagnant, slow, and stubborn, while Barton
differentiates his vitality and alludes to multiplie epistemic possibilities by
creating economic spatial images by situating himself amongst the
incumbent social power relations and discursive bodies of proper places.

“I worked for a major record company for 5 years...BMG. So I've seen the
inside of a record company...you're not working for yourself. I think people
like me..like the control. They like to run their things the way they want
70 to..win or lose. XXXXBig company don't like people like meXXXXX
Determination bordering on aggressionXXXXXtoo entrepreneurialXXXXX
After I managed a band, I would only do it once...because I could be the
cleverest fucker in the world but if I had 4 doughnuts in the bands they
control my destiny. I wanted my success to depend on how good I was... I
75 was fantastic at business..at doing the deals. What I found really hard was
then waiting 12 months for these fuckers to get their arse into gear to give
me a good album I could then go out and sell. I was really good at was
signing singles...the product is already made. What became a pain for me

5 And reveals a series of 'causes': feeling restricted, a desire for control, a sense of alienation, and an
aggressive entrepreneurial spirit.
 was when I started to sign albums..and then spending a year... It's like
80 being on the end of a leash, wanting to go, but someone holding you back. I
felt let down. I can deal with the disappointments, as long as they're my
own.. If the shit hits the fan, as long as it's my fan, I don't mind”.

Instead of describing tactics, then, Barton's story involves tactical

representation of action, telling it in “turns”. The space Cream then later
emerges in is one of possibility: it develops in the spaces and gaps in
meaning alluded to as Barton names proper places and other spaces he
had to leave, or had drawn frontieres and boundaries across. Always being
an “other” among the “people”, it was just “hope” that they were “aware”
enough to understand what others like them wanted back then (83-84). A
series of polemics (52; 61; 61-64; 65-79), and possible spaces (26-45; 46-
51; 51-59)- not a proper market exteriority - was established at this point:
proper market places that act as polemics and interlocutory contracts are
necessary for these spaces of possibility to emerge6.

“I think entrepreneurs are like that- ..they're very aware of what's going
on around them, and what they know. This is what I used to say about
85 Cream in the early days: 'Cream was about mine and Darren Hughes'
taste in music and graphic design,' right, and we just hoped that 1000
people shared that taste, then 2,000, then 5,000, then 10,000.”

Intermediate: Between Spaces and a Proper Place

Suddenly (85), though, the image of Cream changes. Barton's story

involves a threshold at which the story reorients itself, it eventually
becoming clearer that this is a marketing story, a proper tale told by a
large firm, not the story Barton tells other scouse businessmen7. He
instead prepares and emplots history leading up to Cream in order that
Cream, looking back, will redescribe it, coordinating images of positive
contextual change and the legend of 'grass roots' emergence that market

6 Barton, though, does not present himself as a hagiographic figure. He describes the necessity of being part
of something then, as one of the people, and of having institutions like Radio 1 to join up to “the pockets”.
7 And that was revealed in a partially indecipherable tape recording of an interview between Tony Wilson and
James Barton held in Liverpool in 2004 and acquired from a secondary source.
Cream Group Ltd. today.

In the following quotations then, the trajectory leading up to Cream's

emergence shifts to reflect on contemporary images of Cream (85-138),
and the story itself then becomes the image of Cream and Barton want to
assert today. Barton describes developing more proper ways of operating
(85-110)8 as Cream grew , formal marketing messages like “tell audiences
we are a lifestyle brand” (85-90) and assembling an exteriority (Lines) by
differentiating itself from the “people” (85-90) and others (99-139). That
place established is then authorised twice over (the first authorisation
being the story itself) through Barton citing numerous big business
musical entrepreneurship figures (85-909), and contextualising his legend
through establishing and citing its history in a wider body of discourse (91-
95) and by emplotting existing, almost classic, epic tales (Hamilton 2006)
of musical entrepreneurship. Despite citing an authoritive place (85-90),
though, a deceptive paradox emerges at the point at which Cream
markets it's “people's club” image and the veil begins to faulter. But even
with the paradox, Cream tactically competed against rival clubs and
authorised itself by citing this legend and establishing a polemic contract
that made them appear as “kids”, or the poor, taking on well educated
rivals with greater resources (115-125). Such contextualisation and plot
enables Barton to perform a Robin Hood, or Jester-like role (Warren and
Anderson in Hjorth and Steyaert 2009), in which actions are authorised by
unequal power relations, Barton's awareness and 'grass roots' image, and
a sense of being 'right', 'other', and winning, despite of it all. But the
paradox remains. It is only by contextualsing Cream like this, situated
between these proper figures and places, that a forbidden form of market
deception (He admits, 136-137) is able to pass. It relies on an
interlocutory contract being made with the market at the same time as
Barton and Cream situate themselves in the weaker industrial position,
naming their space in relation to proper and competitive places with

8 Like developing PR skills that bring with them the incumbent exteriority: a 'public'.
9 Elsewhere during interview Barton revealed a “secret fascination” with figures of big business musical
entrepreneurship.
 assumed characteristics: older, richer, better educated, and more
interested in “fleecing” customers, and Cream exploits competitive pricing
to esnure this image remains today.

J: “When I used to do interviews about Cream in the early days and

people would go “So come on then, who does Cream want to be? Do you
90 want to be Virgin?” and I'd go “No, we want to be Def Jam” and they'd go
“What does that mean?”, “Well, Virgin is great, but Def Jam is a massive
life style brand in America, from music, to TV, to clothes. It does
everything. If you're black and you live in America, you're fucking into Def
Jam”.
95 []
J: I think if you want to be really analytic, you can trace back all of these big
organisations to some really fucking cool guy, who went against the grain,
who decided that what was going on was not as good as what he wanted to
do, or there was nothing going on, so he was going to invent it. And that's
100 the truth.
I: And that's what happened with you.
J: Yeah
I: It's always in relation to something else, as well....
J: You need a reference point. You need something anti- exactly. So, when
105 we launch Creamfields in the later 90s, even though we didn't mean it,
we were out there telling everybody that Glastonbury was finished, right.
We were like 'we're about one day, we're about the kids, we're about
modern music, you don't need a tent, you don't need wellies'. We
basically put a whole fucking list of things together to try and
110 differentiate ourselves from what else was going on. And it worked. It
certainly worked from the media point- we were great at PR. We were
fucking brilliant at PR. We were great at sound bites. We knew what
buttons to press. All the time. And obviously, you know, slagging off an
institution like Glastonbury- but Glastonbury was wobbly then. I wouldn't
115 go as far as to say we slagged them off, but we basically said 'we're
different, we're a new type of festival from what you have got now'. And,
then, you only have Reading and Glastonbury, and I think we came a year
after V. There was not a lot around. And then, obviously, we have
hundreds of festivals in the UK. But even then we were trying to
120 differentiate ourselves between the old and the new. So you do need a
reference point and you do need something to stand up for and to put
your flag in the ground about. And, because we were young, we said we
 were all about the kids, and I said this before, and someone said to me- I
did a conference in Ibiza, and they said 'what was the big defining point
125 for you guys?' I said 'we put ourselves on the side of the punters',
because we were punters. We said 'we're with them'. So, we were always
seen as, you know, as someone said in an interview one time, they said
'the difference between Ministry and Cream is that the Ministry is run by
some Eton educated toff and Cream is run by two kids council estates
130 living out their dream. And we just round them up with that. They hated
us for it. They actually, because, we were just like 'we're better than you,
but you've got more money and you're more educated than us'. and we
wound them up for ten years.
I: Would you go and have a dance?
135 J: All the time. Maybe not so much at Creamfields. But at Cream. I dj'ed
there for 8 years so I was massively visible in the club, and we were on
the dance floor most of the time. We had guest dj's in that not only our
audience liked but we liked. So if we had Tony Humphries on, we would
be leading the audience at the front going 'this guy is fucking amazing'
140 and they'd be going by the end of the night 'you're right'. You know,
that's what it was like. And we got away with that because we were only
22 or 21 ourselves. So set ourselves up as the people's club, so to speak.
Yeah, we make money off you, but actually, we don't fleece you. And
even today, Creamfields is the cheapest festival of it's kind. Even today.
145 And we absolutely do that on purpose. We look at what everybody else is
charging and we knock a fiver or a tenner off. We are really aware.

Part 2: Changing Spaces

Confirming the market value of images of spatial change today, the

properness of Cream's official podcast names 3 distinct image spaces that
Cream transformed: Line 143 involves a city of heritage (i.e. a before); a
“bleak” city (i.e. the no-where Barton grew up in); and then a city of
reasserted cultural heritage (i.e. that Cream was the intermediary
between). Along with making those changes, it names (145-146) Cream as
the eventual icon of the dance music phenomenon, (i.e. a proper place)
and miniaturises other places and figures that Cream's “people's club”
image depends on (i.e. Ministry of Sound), and suggests how Cream
should be judged aesthetically: as “sophisticated cool” and able to bring
 about positive spatial change (143-147).

“Reasserting Liverpool’s dominance as the home of many a musical genre,

Cream burst onto the 90's Northern clubbing scene with a swagger of
150 sophisticated cool, making house music history and cementing the highly
coveted swirl [the cream logo] as figure head of the chosen clubbing
phenomenon of a generation” (Official Cream Podcast).

[]
[Nobody] “imagined that [18] years on” from starting that “alternative to
155 what was happening down the M62” and elsewhere that Cream “would be
a multi-million pound music and media company with a huge impact on
global club and youth culture. Cream's is a story which has touched
millions...it has helped shape the thoughts of the media, police, and
government10”. “Over the last [18] years, the company has built its
160 reputation on delivering innovative, creative and popular appeal to youth
audiences” (Cream Official Podcast).

The Podcast, then, represents Barton's story in proper form. It amplifies

the synecdoche to such an extent that the other figures and places that
operate as joining syntax are out of place, and accentuates the magnitude
by delineating an 'impossible space' that became a reality (e.g. 149-152:
““[Nobody] imagined” that from such a bad place...). As Barton had to, it
prepeares the storytelling space for subsequent spatial changes to unfurl
over, and highlights that Cream emerged in an alternative space between
proper places (149-150). It names other spatial images too: the emergent
space of “global club and youth culture” (151-152), and a contested space
(52-53) that again assembles power relations and a polemic contract. The
“multi million pound” Cream of today, then, still appears radical, and
somehow related to “the people”. But far from the 'other' space in reality,
Cream is positioned at the centre of an image of dance music
entrepreneurship (143-152) and, today, exploits images that miniaturise a
proper market exteriority (85-125; 149-155) at the same time as it,
implicitly, assembles one (i.e. through podcasting, PR, etc). It has become
a proper place that requires history to authorise it's appearance today. But

10 Legal battle over injunction between Cream and The Echo.

 the story is a tautology (the story is the story): the story is that Cream
“touched millions” and that is an image surreptitiously cited (152) from
the market (and then made proper), before being exploited as a market
image. It confuses the proper market exteriority assembled, and operates
as a tactic, the notion of being a “story” (152) fabricated from facts and
the cited “reputation” (154) helping to socialise Cream's own image so
market perceptions of firm size and memories of it's trajectory can be
manipulated and the citation is able to pass.

The next paragraph now prepares the story space for how Cream operates
today, and insinuates other spaces and boundaries necessary for how
Creamfields, Cream's flagship project, is understood.
J: “For ten years, Cream was the centre, or one of a couple of companies or
organisations who just seemed to be pulling all the strings musically. The
165 other was Ministry of Sound. We had a lot of other people, but they weren't
serious players... I think there is a lot to be said for being the first or one of
the first and, even though there was people before us, a lot of people now
20 years down the road view Cream as being the first, which is not true,
but the other companies have now disappeared” (Interview 1)
170 []
“...then you hit the first period where maybe the business is going through
its traumatic stage. Suddenly, things weren't as easy as they had been
throughout the 90s. I think 2000 was when the bubble was punctured and
by 2002 it had deflated. There was a lot of big companies in this earlier,
175 like us, with huge levels of staff, big business plans, big ideas and then,
suddenly, things started to drop off a cliff. The marketplace changed. There
was definitely a period of about 2 or 3 years when dance music was on life
support. And that's why now when you survey the landscape, you only see
a handful of organisations that still exist. So then the challenges came.
180 What came from that I think was that, suddenly, the competition between
the organisations and the pettiness that used to exist suddenly stopped. A
realisation kicked in that we had to, first of all, look at our own business
inside. We all had to change budgets, we all had to suddenly get serious
about trying to run it as a proper business. We were fortunate because we
185 had just raised quite a lot of money. We'd just took quite a lot of
investment through, so that sort of kept us afloat, kept us in cash. But we
had 2 years where our combined losses were £1.5m. So we'd gone from
 making great money to losing, bom, bom, bom. It's a huge amount of
money for a company of our size to lose. That was pure loss. We had to
190 reorganise and we had to find a way of rebuilding from there. We were
lucky because we had an international business. Others weren't so lucky.
We had cash to survive... I think what we did very cleverly after the
millennium downturn [was] we focused in on the products. We put the
brand to one side and we said “Lets get back to the product because, if we
195 don't improve the product, the brand will die”. Whereas, maybe, we got to
the point where we thought it would last forever. We got to the point where
we thought “We can stick this logo on anything at it will work”. But,
actually, when you start putting your names to products that are shit, you
start putting your name on poor shows and inferior things, the first people
200 to spot it are the audiences. The same happened with DJ's. They weren't
giving value for money. And what happened was the audience walked
away”

As the podcast did, Barton's first revelation here is the social value of the
primary synecdoche in play (157-163), before he connotes (lines) an
image space (Lines 159-163: i.e. a “reputation”) that stretches back along
a trajectory of successful musical entrepreneurship. An untrustworthy
citation (161) is established, and figures positioned as polemics (158-163)
in the past appear as ghosts to accentuate the righteousness of Cream's
modest victory. Preparing the story space, Barton, then, names different
intersecting spatial images. The first of these is defined temporally and in
terms of ways of operating: the '90s, like a bubble of immature “big”
business (165-167). This spatial image Barton coordinates as being
disrupted by the emergence of a shared space of environmental change
(167-170) – the “traumatic stage” - between 2000 and 2002 to which
Barton attributes causal value, characterising it as a disruptive space in
time ('a turning point', a 'critical moment' (Cope 2001), or a 'biographical
disruption' (Bury 1982)), that involved what Barton names as a market
“deflation” period and a “life support” period. He suggests the emergence
of this shared space altered the normative characteristics of all business
images (172-177). From then on (173), a new image of Cream emerges in
a space of “proper business”, defined by less explicit and wreckless
competition, new market conditions, new possibilities and challenges, and
across which boundaries are marked (174) by actions involving a less
“petty” aesthetic. This spatial-temporal image's causal nature is affirmed
as the paragraph concludes and Barton marks a boundary (187:
“...maybe, we got to the point”), past which Cream began focusing less on
deceiving customers with surreptitiously tactical and aesthetically
deceptive products (188-191: branded, but low quality). Emplotting the
spaces, Barton then describes a general itineray: from “realisation” (175),
budget change, (176) and taking stocks of resources (175; 177), through
to reorganisation (182), and a new focus on products and audiences (184-
192). As a different kind of space of possibility then emerged, the
disruptive “traumatic stage” bridges the improperness of before and the
“proper business” of Cream today; temporality being used to emplot
change occuring to spatial images over time. Different resources (i.e. 178-
179: Barton cites “investment”, and 182-183: “international business”)
are other bridges that Barton emplots as being necessary to Cream
enduring the space of environmental change and managing to then
imagine possible market space, and these resources and knowledge also
differentiate boundaries between firms in this shared environmental space
(182-184). At this point11, a properly delineated exteriority and intent is
developed: a proper market place and proper interest (174-186). At the
same time, the increased immutability of the image, necessarily causal or
not, also suggests proper epistemic certainty characterising this space,
and Barton's childhood “awareness” emerges to play a ghostly role in
subsequent actions12, and, again, differentiates Cream from other firms in
the shared spatial image. Because the spaces are also positioned so as to
construct their necessity in Cream's trajectory, though, they play a double
role by attributing an aesthetic that suggests judging Cream's actions as
beautiful, good and right, and that, despite Cream's size and visibility
back then, it should still be situated in a weak position, though only
supressed by a business environment devoid of competition.

11 The transcript includes a series of spatial signifiers that assemble an exteriority: “survey” (160-161);
“inside” (163-164); “proper business” (165-166); ““investment” (167); “reorganise” (171); “international”
(173); “audience” (179-181)
12 The most visible 'ghost' in this transcript must be “size”.
 Part 2: Using Images

The following transcript marks a boundary in the telling of Barton's

story. In contrast to Part 1, then, some of which was a trajectory
“bursting” with Cream's emergence Part 2, which focuses on Creamfields,
coordinates how Cream Group Ltd. develops and markets these historical
images and uses them to authorise a more static firm with an established
place of power and market exteriority. Barton outlines an itinerary (193-
218) that begins (193) with questioning the value of Creamfields, and
answering (194), by properly naming Creamfields as “...the original,
biggest, and best festival for electronic music”, and presenting the legend
as a truth installing citation (firstly as Cream's public image 193), and
then as a generic image for all “good” festivals embedded in the social
(198)). It authorises Creamfields' place of power today by operating as a
synecdoche that emphasises history to construct a legitimate aesthetic to
the service. This isn't Cream “bursting” onto the scene anymore, though,
and, instead, Barton establishes a set of trusted itinerary strategies that
are repeatedly enacted (205-210)13. With greater (proper) epistemic
certainty (i.e. they have established a valuable market image), these
strategies are then justified by panoptics (195-197) that also affirm the
proper business intent today, and which are measured quantitively in
terms of profit and ticket sales, not their weight in an epic plot. The most
visible face of Cream, today, as such, resembles the proper places it
positioned itself in relation to before. It is the story, his-story, Barton and
Cream narrate that repeatedly authorises the establishment of this place.

J: “...we always ask ourselves, 'What are we famous for?' The answer is the
original, biggest and best festival for electronic music. That begins by
205 securing a killer lineup – that's where our main focus and investment goes –
and I think that ticket sales this year, plus the response we've had from
fans, show people agree that this year is on of the best... But it's also about
introducing new music, so we've also put money into [that]. That's what a
good festival is all about; it sounds cheesy, but a tapestry or jigsaw of
210 different things” (Barton interviewed by Virtual Festivals.

13 Marketing, PR, etc.

 Virtualfestivals.com...creamfields boss....)

I: What about the iconic nature...in the marketing literature you talk about
this iconic nature of Creamfields...or of Cream as a brand and how does
Creamfields express this iconic nature...how do you try to build this and
215 develop it?
J: “Well..I mean..look, it's..I think Creamfields' iconic14 status has developed
over the twelve years of being in existence, and I suppose the iconic status
pulls on the heritage, the quality of the festival. Anything which has been
doing what we been doing, as well for so long, becomes an icon. It's like a
220 famous actor. I mean, you know, it's marketing speak, so I don't want to
get ahead of myself here...you wont hear the word 'icon' coming out of my
mouth...because that's what I suppose PR's and marketing people- they
use big expansive words like that. But... I feel it's because we deliver the
best product of it's kind and we have done that on a regular basis for 12
225 years,... it's a monster of dance festivals, really...it's very well known, and
very popular” (Interview 2)

A Proper way of Operating

Today15, then, Barton can highlight an itinerary (lines 217-265) of

distinct practices taking up large spaces of time that have specified,
proper, business intent and which can operate in the proper business
space he earlier delineated. A proper business exteriority is in place now
too, over which exchanges are monitored by 2 panoptic strategies (222:
“marketing and monitoring of ticket sales”), that also include sub-
strategies acted more or less tacticly, like radio advertisements, and
Facebook. The narrative then flits between ordering spaces of time (i.e.
lines 220-239) and the practical itineraries which mark boundaries over
those spaces, and, spoken in proper business language, it assembles more
a business plan than an epic plot. It also expresses the 'monstrous' size of

14 At time of narrating, it was not clear where the word 'iconic' arose from. It is believed marketing literature
(e.g. flyers for Creamfields 2010) included the term and it was appropriated for the aide memoire, the
literature source then disappearing over time, or that Cream have altered their Facebook 'Info' page post
the phone-interview.
15 Cream is a large multimillion pound global firm, with a strong “heritage”, and has developed responsibilities
like the care of employees, and contractual agreements with financiers (i.e. Ingenious Ventures, and
Ingenious Ventures' Venture Capital Trust that poured in £1.7?? million into the group in 2001?), and that it
has large archives of research, established market places and expectations, and habitual modes and
routines of operation that partially determine in what ways it can operate and which ghostily pervade
images of Cream.
Cream in terms of time and energy consumed, and establishes boundaries
marking proper market 'places', geographical and demographical in
nature16, across a global, shared, space (i.e. lines 228-236). The function
here is formal and commonplace: these aren't makeshift practices
enacted by a firm on the run, or in a weak social position, but are proper
strategies enacted by a large firm. They resemble practices defined by
Certeau (1984: 36) as characteristic of management strategy: an unfurling
itinerary through which Cream capitalises on advantages gained (i.e. a
place of power, a reputable image developed over time to cite, power
relations, and proper knowledge bases developed over time and through
panoptics) and pursues panoptic research that divides geographical space
into distinct market 'places' that can be “read”, named, measured,
analysed, and tactically redressed (226-228; 228-238; 240-244). Though
regular meetings do then enable some flexibility in operations, the proper
itinerary itself is decontextualised “in respect to the variability of
circumstances” (de Certeau 1984: 36), and Barton formalises the proper
itinerary to such an extent that it can be laid over time and space each
year (217-239). Time and space, then, are divided, analysed, and put into
formal, proper, order so they can be controlled, and panoptics enable
market places to be delineated ever more accurately. The point is that
these are actions undertaken by a place of power with greater control
over it's environment established in a place with greater epistemic
certainty (i.e. no need for “hope” and properly named market place
opportunities). It is a place constituted by proper knowledge, power, and
vision over space, and time, and Cream can predict, justify, and respond
to market news (230-244) while at the same time being able to plan
possible routes of diversification, or, as they did, withdraw finance in some
areas, because, today, they know their proper interest: making money.
Today, then, Cream knows it's 'other': it isn't institutional figures
positioned so as to establish class or power relations that matter, but the
market exteriority that acts as the polemic Cream engages with. Some
memories, though, do persist. Barton's childhood awareness, for instance,

16 Elsewhere, Barton clarifies characteristics of the market 'place' as being young (18-30) demographically, on
top of being delineated geographically.
ghostily foreshadows this proper business awareness Creamfields enacts
today (line 245-249), and Barton makes an evaluative turn on the “proper
business” images he describes, alluding to notions of immediacy and
change- notions more characteristic of Cream of old – still being embodied
in how Cream Group Ltd. wields and responds to panoptic operations by
his revealing numerous itinearies in which the properness of business
strategy panoptics enable Cream to retain a distinct place of power and
exploit or respond positively to intra-market 'place' change. The
“document” might change quickly, but the market 'places' it insinuates
itself in do not. Probably more importantly, though, Barton delineates a
space because a resource enables him to. He names (249) a shared space
of time Creamfields now operates within as being “the age of Facebook”, 17
and describes how it impacts temporal experience and the sequencing of
activities (lines 249-260)18. Facebook is used to broadcast and educate
market places as to who Creamfields is, and what it offers 19. More
importantly, though, it also involves the “people” in the construction of
'subjectivities' (Cote & Pybus 2007), the result of their 'immaterial labour'
(Lazzarato 1996) being that Cream develops identity profiles of audiences,
as well as understanding spatial variations in audience activity (249-264).
It involves the “people” in producing the “cultural content of the
commodity [i.e. Creamfields]” – that is, “activities involved in defining and
fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms,
and more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato 1996). Audiences, then,
become an “audience commodity” (Smythe 1981:263), being an
“aggregation of people linked to a particular market”, which then,
reproblematizes the distinction between “audience and author” (Cote and
Pybus 2007:89), as Barton had in the past with the notion of a “people's
17 The proper function of which is social networking, and which Cream Group Ltd. tactically appropriates and
transforms into a resource of big business strategy.
18 It should be noted that Creamfields enacts various commonplace strategies during it's marketing itinerary,
including bill board advertising, magazine adverts (exclaiming “It's what Bank Holidays are for!”), radio play,
other traditional marketing strategies like postering and flyers, and that Facebook is just the most visible of
an array of other online vehicles through which Creamfields is marketed.
19 Creamfields Facebook 'Info' page asserts “Creamfields is the world's leading dance music festival. The
original dance music festival set out to provide the clubbing world with a bespoke large scale outdoor event
and has gone on to become the most popular and renowned open air electronic music festival in the world.
It's famous for many things not least it's heritage but it's consistent delivery of a world class line up and
unbeatable atmosphere! The line up mixes together genre breaking pioneers from across the DJ and live
music spectrum staged across a Live Outdoor stage and 8-10 arenas. The strength of the festival brand
globally is proven, having spanned over 17 countries over the last 12 years.”
 club”. Here (249-264), Barbrook's (2007) Maussian gift economy
reestablishes social relations rather than disintegrating them (and
returning them to a “people's club” economy without exteriority). The
intersection between Creamfields, market places, and other festivals, is
perhaps appropriately named as a battlespace that bridges to a space of
possibility (255), and, past Cream's exterior, both customers and
competition are positioned as polemics (255-264). Facebook, more than
anything, transforms Cream's epistemic relationship with the these
relations (257-264), and means that, today, big business panoptic
strategies can be enacted in a more tactical manner able to respond
quickly to market news. It's use follows a reverse order of evolution, being
a tactical way of operating developed into a big business strategy, as,
Cream, having appropriated and acted on a technological medium
originally intended for people's everyday activities, and more associated
more with Do-It-Yourself images of musical entrepreneurship, then
“incentivized” it for panoptic purposes. It means Creamfields reimagines
some of its “people's club” history, hidden behind Facebook's everyday
aesthetic, and as notions of “interaction” (255-257) that operate as turns
help authorise proper big business strategies enacting Cream Group Ltd's
mostly commercial interests. Strategic, the image remains deceptive (i.e.
tactical) through it's aesthetic and the way in which it gestures to market
places, implicitly positioning itself alongside customers, in their bedrooms,
as a surreptitious, or 'soft', marketing tool.

“The process for Creamfields starts pretty much as soon as the last show
230 has finished..so we could be looking at 13 to 14 months, before each show.
I suppose the main focus has been the marketing and monitoring of ticket
sales for Creamfields here. Obviously, the delivering of Creamfields takes
up a huge, huge amount of time: two meetings per week regarding
different aspects of the festival. One is an operations meeting and the
235 other is a marketing meeting. There will be a marketing plan, and a
marketing budget attached to that activity, so once we've established the
marketing plan, we establish the announcement date and the on sale
activity for that particular event. Post the announcement, there is regular
meetings, regular discussions, and also a lot of monitoring of the activity.
240 So, if we've got say a week of radio planned for Liverpool or Manchester,
we will analyse ticket sales from that location during that period. So the
meeting is basically to..to...to implement the marketing plan, but also build
in the ticket sales into our thinking- “Right, OK, so we're not selling any
tickets in Newcastle, or we're down”- because obviously we're able to
245 compare ticket sales in each city, in each region, right across the country,
year on year - so we're sitting there looking at that data from 2009, 2008,
and that data tells us we're down in a particular city, [and] we can make a
decision about whether we want to react to that, whether we want to go in
and spend money to get that, to get that market back to where we need it
250 to go, or we can make a decision to say “Well it's not selling there, we
don't think it's going to sell there, so lets pull any planned marketing out of
there and put the money into the places where we actually are selling
tickets”. So it's an ongoing, living, breathing sort of document, that
changes every week really. We were in a really fortunate position this year,
255 where we were seeing very strong sales from launch, so we were able to
have some flexibility in our marketing plan, that meant that pretty much
we didn't market the festival in the last 8 weeks because we knew it was
going to sell out, so we were able to reduce our marketing budget on that
basis and save quite a considerable amount of money. I don't really like
260 anything set in stone; I'm not that analytic, but I do like to analyse each
individual days ticket sales, and we get daily update sales here, so we like
to have the information in our hands so we can make decisions pretty
quickly. I want to be able to turn around a decision in 24 hours. So if I'm
sitting there looking at something on a Wednesday morning, I can do
265 something on a Thursday morning to react to that. And, obviously, in the
age of Facebook and online networking and the internet, I can make a
decision at 9am on a Tuesday morning and I can have that publicised by
lunchtime- we don't need to sort of wait for deadlines from newspapers or
from radio or anything, we can just get to work with that straight
270 away..feeding that change or that bit of information into our Facebook,
which is now over a 100,000 people have signed up to Creamfields
Facebook, which is huge. That's the battleground, sort of, in a way, as we
move forward.. Whilst we've got the vast majority of our audience as
members of our Facebook, interacting with us on a daily basis, to news that
275 we release, it's an amazing marketing tool really...it's also a really strong
researching tool as well, where we can, at any time, pump some
information into..we can pick 5000 of those people, or 2000 of those
people, and incentivize those people to give some research back, so we
can also, sort of, find out pretty quickly, why people have bought tickets,
280 where they have bought the tickets from, but also what drove them to buy
the tickets, whether it was a poster on the wall, an add in Mixmag, an ad in
a magazine, a radio clip on a radio station, or whether it's internet, social
networking, or word of mouth.

Part 3: “Sensitive” Attention to Images

Part 3 continues the focus on how Barton attends to and develops

the image of Creamfields as he unfurls a decision making itinerary (277-
236) that challenged his attitude to ethics in business and the role of
sponsorship in musical entrepreneurship. By then repeatedly establishing
and naming properly known and well-delineated market places, figures,
and discursive bodies, Barton creates an authoritative space for the
decision making process to unfold over (277-295). One of these temporal-
spatial images Barton names is a period of reduced sensitivity to the role
of sponsorship in people's everyday lives (272-273)20. This image then
intersects with another (277-278) that outlines an economic space of
time: the current economic situation. This economic time-space forms a
boundary across the initial space Barton marks and changes it's
normative characteristics by multiplying the visibility of market gestures.
The third spatial image Barton then scores constitutes the pragmatics of
people's encounters with the loans company stall during Creamfields
(285-292; 306-316), and enables Barton to test his hypothesis and
repeatedly foretell market responses to the gesture (280; 304; 309-314;
323-328; 331-335). Whilst still preparing the decision making space,
Barton also establishes interlocutory contracts with figures constituting
proper market places that determine whether the gesture passes. These
are named geographically, and as a list of interlocutory ethical and
discursive contracts held between different figures (289-292; 306-309;
312-315; 320; 326-331; 331-335)21, some of which Barton can relate to:
underpriveliged Mancs and Scousers who save up their money to attend
Creamfields. These figures at least establish a bridge between Barton's
20 Barton had established in the first interview that he believed since the emergence of dance music and the
onset of the '90s that society is less sensitive to the role of sponsorship and big business in everyday life.
21 Barton cites a contract with customers, and alludes to ones with cultural traditions, the interviewer, and to
Barton himself, notions of good and bad business; the press; and imaginary figures.
childhood and ethical business practices today and allow the epic legend
narrative to continue. Faced with the threat of high interest loans, citing
potentially vulnerable figures with little economic capital (289-292; 306-
309) though, helps establish power and class relations amongst the
interlocutory contracts that explain why the gesture would pass the
ethical threshold Barton establishes through the intersection of the earlier
spaces. Other figures (326-331) highlight a body of discourse that
historically pervades sponsorship deals (being most concentrated around
issues of authenticity in musical entrepreneurship), and that are excluded
from any proper market place Barton names today but whose critical
attacks are still established as polemics that sponsorship deals must
attend to. The result of this process of spatial, figurative, and discursive
ordering is that Barton is then able to properly name the gesture as
“profiteering” (293) and authoritively assert that, within these spaces and
amongst these figures, and dependent upon the large size of Creamfields
today and the discursive body of musical entrepreneurship, it would be a
highly visible, and forbidden, big business strategy. Figures noted would
pick up on it, the gesture would not pass, and it would attribute an
unwanted aesthetic to gesture: “a neg” (324)- the result of acting
improperly amongst those places delineated and the figures outlined.
Ethical interlocutory contracts Barton holds with himself, though, are just
as important as social value. He underscores (295-299; 307-309 331-335),
for instance, that, behind these spaces he coordinates, are also personal
motivations and memories. Some of these (295-299; 307-309) reestablish
links between the no-whereness of 1980s Liverpool and the
somewhereness of where Barton is today and, without attending to these,
Barton and Cream's double narrated epic tragedy of authentic,
“sophisticated cool”, “aware”, 'grass roots', “people's club” musical
entrepreneurship would be disrupted. This conflation of spaces, times and
figures, moreover, also reifies another enduring childhood memory and a
body of enterprise discourse whose necessity Barton has insinuated
repeatedly: his “awareness”. This mute character bridges Barton's
childhood with his sensitive attention to the role of sponsorship and
ethical business today, and provides an aesthetic that endures between
the two: “sophisticated cool”, 'grass roots' musical entrepreneurship.
Barton's attentiveness to the social nature of value endures, but this is a
proper kind of awareness, and an exteriority is in place today, as Barton is
able to exploit the proper knowledge Cream has obtained by being able to
delineate occasions (i.e. different market places, the space of time they
exist in, and the type of customers involved) that test his hypothesis22 and
foretell market responses to the gesture, for instance, by imagining the
result of transcending the ethical boundary he established at the
intersection of the spaces and figures he names as being a disgruntled
mother from whom he receives an angry email (322-336). Throughout the
transcript like this, Barton positions spaces and figures that suggest a
clearer process of imagination, presenting proper business images (i.e.
market places and proper market occasions), that exploit the proper
knowledge developed over time and the panoptic potential of research to
divide and predict market characteristics and responses. He is able to
accurately identify who Creamfields serves, despite the “variability of
conditions (Certeau 1984:XXXX)”, and foretell likely business ramifications
to the gesture in ways that, in Part 1, when the business images
presented were epistemically more uncertain and were defined more by
“hope” and imagined possibility rather than justified, proper, intent, would
have been impossible. Barton denotes throughout the transcript (276-279;
286-289; 289-295; 295-300; 310-315; 315; 328; 277- 236), the proper
business intent in play here is authorised by the places, figures and
discursive bodies he highlights. His awareness and intentions, as such,
establish two overlapping and mutually dependent relationships (or levels
of “awareness”) held with audiences23 that, depending on which is
emphasised, assemble or disassemble the proper market exteriority that
at different times has played a rhetorical role in how and why Cream
Group Ltd. services have become socially valuable. The personal touches
and different spaces delineated emplot and authorise this proper intent,
22 He says elsewhere that his mode of management had been transformed from an improper “seat of your
pants” style to a proper means tested and “worse case scenario” style of operations.
23 One being a relationship amongst Cream Group Ltd. and audiences; the other being a relationship between
Cream Group Ltd. and audiences.
 and operate as rhetorical turns that obscure, temper, and miniaturise an
almost purely economic and strategic predisposition. Because he attends
to historical market places, though, the narrative's temporal orientation
also shifts. The temporal orientation in Part 1 was very much forward
looking, as Barton coordinates and emplots the emergence of Cream and
evokes the kind of possible spaces he and Cream “hoped” to create.
Today, though, with Barton's role of Managing Director, and the
established normative characteristics of the Creamfields image
(aesthetics, power relations, size, high visibility, as well as established
“social” services), this orientation shifts and, looking forwards in time to
come, it is extant (i.e. historical) market places that determine the social
implications of the sponsorship gesture. He works at developing the
historical image and the historically formed proper market places
Creamfields exploits, being a game of management, not the “seat of your
pants” emergent entrepreneurship that characterised images populating
the first part of the narrative. It is the actions of a proper place enacting
big business strategy able to develop panoptic devices that 'read' space,
exploit acquired knowledge, and foretell the result of actions taken.

I: In our last interview, you talked about this 'sensitivity' to who you got
285 sponsorship by and who you chose...what kind of things were you thinking
about this year when you chose the sponsors and how it all came out...
J: Well, it was all pretty easy because one of the main sponsors...one of the
main new sponsors was a sponsor that I've worked with in the past who
returned back to the festival after being away for about three years...
290 I: Who was that?
J: That was Strongbow. So that was an easy conversation. I think in today's
age, the era of festivals and music events...the sensitivities around
sponsorship is less so. I mean, we did get approached last by a sponsor that
wanted to provide short term loans to people on the show, with ridiculous
295 interest rates, which we turned down. Which funny enough, that company
now is sponsoring a premiership football team, which made me laugh really.
But I thought it was..you know..in the economic climate that we've got, I
didn't think we wanted to be encouraging our customers to sign up to
aggressive loans with 200 % fucking interest and shit like that. So, that
300 just..and they offered us good money, and I'm glad we turned it down,
 actually, because the more I think about it, the more it just felt like the
wrong thing for us to be doing...
I: It sort of questions what Cream stands for, in a way...
J: Yeah. I've no problem with alcohol, or people who have got some
305 relevance to a social piece of activity- so if it's a food company, or a youth
brand who wants to sell their clothing, or something like that- I actually
don't have any problems with that. But on this particular occasion, I just
thought my customers are going to be...you know...drunk for a lot of the
weekend, and they might run out of cash and to get instant loans from this
310 company...after they've signed up for, you know, really, really aggressive
interest rates...they were only loans of up to 200 or up to 400 pound, but
even so, we've got students and quite a lot of young people..and also we
got people from Liverpool and Manchester...you know..frankly not...there's a
lot of kids there that are not that well off and they've probably saved all
315 year.. or certainly found the money to buy a ticket for Creamfields and I just
thought it was just, it just smacked of..sort of..you know...profiteering,
really, by taking this company's sponsorship money so they could fleece
our customers on a shit load of interest on a loan... The other thing is, there
is a personal aspect there as well- because I'm really, really lone- I'm really
320 not a person who is into the whole idea of being in debt- so, you know, I've
seen what debt can do to people and it's just as bad as gambling, as
alcohol music and drug abuse, you know, debt is a really nasty thing. And
so I just thought 'we don't need that', so we turned it down.
I: So you care a lot about your customers- the people who go don't you..you
325 relate to them...
J: Yeah, you know... We, we relate to them on two levels- we relate to them
as human beings but then we also relate to them as our customers- we
want them to keep coming back and spending their money. We're not new
age hippies here thinking...we're here very much thinking about customer
330 service and it's about keeping them customers. And I think we're very
aware of the age group and the demography in which we operate in. It's a
very young demographic, and we remember when we were 19 and 20 and
what it was like to find 200 or 300 pound to go to a festival then. So, no-
maybe if it was an older festival and the age group was over 30 we might
335 have said 'OK, so let's take that piece of business because these people
might be able to decide whether, judge whether they want to sign up to
this'. But we just thought 'no, you know, people do crazy shit anyway when
they're drunk anyway, so putting a document in front of them which would
sign away their life' was not a good idea at all. It's not the right
340 environment as well. It's just not the right environment to be signing a
 piece of paper that says 'yeah I'm going to borrow £400 off you', and, also,
what was interesting about it was it was a short term loan, so you had to
repay it in 30 days, and the interest was something like double, but
then...no I think the interest was high in 30 days- like 100 or odd % or
345 whatever, but then after 30 days the penalties got really severe, and I sat
down and had a really good look at it, because we use an agency who find
us sponsors, and they were like 'Other people are going to take this, why
wont you take it? It's good money'. So they asked me to review it and look
at it again and I looked at it again and I went on their website and I just
350 decided it wasn't for us.... it's the type of thing that would cause a
negative...we always use the word 'neg' here..so we're like 'let's not put a
neg on the festival', so, you know, it's the one thing that...cos look, you
know what- there's a lot of people out there who like to criticise even when
the sun is shining, you know, so we thought 'you know what- this would the
355 one thing that a couple of people would go 'urgghh, that's just too much
guys, you know?' Cos, you know, this was, is the same audience that 20
years ago was criticising promoters for dealing with the likes of Coca Cola
and Pepsi, so we need to be aware of that... And look, as I said, it was a
personal thing- I'd hate to get a letter from a mother 6 months or 8 months
360 down the line going 'Thank you very much, my 19 year old, or my 18 year
old son signed up for a £200 loan and now he owes £3000 pound'. That's
just blatantly horrible, so I just thought 'That's not worth the aggravation'.