Gold Rush at Hop Farm
We weren’t to know it at the time, but the Hop Farm Festival in 2014 would be the last UK performance for a very special act. While there were many standout moments to that night, the part that will always stay with us as organisers of the event, is the call we got from their artist liaison team, only hours before the show was due to start. Could we make sure there was a gold throne in the artist’s dressing room for after the show?
Anyone who has been to Hop Farm knows the rural nature of this event means dressing rooms are few and far between - they are basically Portacabins. We had a spare one we could clear out, but a gold throne? In the middle of the Kent countryside? On a Saturday afternoon in August? This was pushing our resourcefulness to new limits.
Not to be defeated, we put our heads together and came up with a plan. As everyone knows there’s only one place to go when you need emergency gold: Poundland. We hot-footed it to Sevenoaks and bought up all the gold tinsel and spray paint Poundland could proffer.
Meanwhile, a member of our crew had learnt that a local lap-dancing club owned a golden throne (naturally) and we could borrow it, for a fee. It wasn’t our first choice of furniture shop, but MFI were all out of thrones and we didn’t have many other options at this stage. And so it was, that we found ourselves humping a big shiny armchair out the back door of Legs-Akimbo in Sevenoaks, trying as best we could not to think about what had happened on that seat.
With only minutes to spare we filled that Portacabin with candles and fairy lights, draped it with fabrics and made the golden throne the centrepiece. Somehow we managed to make it look amazing. The show was a success, the talent was happy, and thankfully no-one ever found out where the throne had come from.
