"There Are Planners, Plodders And Plonkers..."

Thus spake the bloke who, in 1998, delivered defensive driving training to a bunch of Facilities staff, of whom I was one. He was talking about road sense, but I think it's a benchmark you can apply in a whole range of environments.

So, then. London's Brewing. The successor to the directly-arranged and run London Brewers' Showcase event from 2010 and 2011. Not an LBA-organised event, strictly speaking. The LBA brand underpins this festival, but the London's Brewing thing is London Fields, not the LBA. Important to note this for what comes later.

It was clear that the upstairs at Vinopolis couldn't have coped with 40 brewers, so faced with choices which, I am told, were either no fest or this one, the LBA sanctioned London Fields to organise something at their event space. PR and branding were sorted, speakers arranged, beer ordered, tickets sold. I was one of the bloggers asked by the PR lot to preview and cover the event. A couple of tickets offered as recompense. Discounts promoted and a few days before the fest Trade Day, it was a sell-out. All good.

Then we get to the trade day. A harbinger of the catastrophe to follow. Opening delayed by an hour. I go to The Cock Tavern and wait until after 2pm. Hardly any beer available until the second bar was finished, cellar services lads complaining they'd done a week's work in two days to set up Bar Two, the larger of the spaces. Bar One runs out before 3pm, so it's 20-odd beers available for around an hour before they close at 4pm. It's clear there's a lot to sort out before the big public launch on Saturday...

The weather is rubbish as I get to London Fields after midday. It's not looking good. You can read twitter (#londonsbrewing for a sample) and CAMRGB or Matt Curtis for more contemporaneous accounts and different experiences, but the doors didn't open until 1245, and the queue had hardly moved 30 minutes later. People who had been on line before midday were leaving, complaining that (again) only the smaller bar was open. Bar Two didn't open until 2.15, but by then I was one of the disgruntled camped in The Cock Tavern. Rich Burhouse from Magic Rock was there, his day wasted by accepting an invite to judge beer that the organisers couldn't identify. Brewers from London, muttering about the piss-poor organisation, ticket-holders who'd queued long enough to get money back, alarmed by the reports from inside.

I was due to go and cover that session, but there was no point. The steady stream of disaffected drinkers and brewery people told me everything I needed to know. And a bit of gentle scratching at the surface revealed a lot of disquiet, something that I'd picked up on earlier in the week.

So, to the aftermath. Fingers will get pointed. I've seen the fest described as the London Brewers Alliance fest. Not to split hairs, but they don't 'own' London's Brewing. That's a separate delivery vehicle for this fest, which I believe is owned by London Fields. However, this is not to excuse the LBA from some culpability. They don't have a process for oversight and assurance which would have tested the model for this fest. So a learning point must be to acquire or develop a planning or project model that does cover this, as well as issues like risk appetite.

Despite this, LBA can't have had any clue about what was in store on Friday lunchtime, but London Fields could have, and they should have been flagging it, seems to me. Their twitter feed refers to 'left-field issues' or 'outside issues', but is anybody clear what they are? Although they hold events at their 'space', I'm not clear if they've ever run a beer festival in there, and that's what I'd have wanted to know if I was the LBA. Reports highlight the poor door management (tickets not scanned, so who was controlling numbers?); lack of readiness of bars (what happened to the rest of the 20 beers put on sale late on Bar Two on Friday?); mislabelling of beers - unforgiveable; overcrowding - there must be a safe limit on numbers, was it observed by controlling ticket numbers for each session?

And then, the fact that the space simply wasn't big enough. Seems to be that LBA need to speak to an events organiser to see what kind of workable model can be developed. Others have observed that this could significantly up ticket prices, but it's clear that, when punters could find it on the bar and correctly labelled, the beer was the least of the problems. If I was the LBA, I'd be asking London CAMRA for advice. Like 'em or loathe 'em, they know beer festival planning and delivery back to front.

If you rotate the logo, it looks like drinkers are being flipped the bird

Who are the planners, plodders and plonkers here? I can't say there was very much planning evident, certainly none that could be defended with credibility. The plodders and plonkers? London Fields certainly don't come out of this well. A case of reach exceeding grasp? LBA need to protect their brand. We need a body which speaks for London brewing, but maybe they also need to look at themselves and work out whether, with so many members now, their own structure is robust enough. This weekend will likely leave a reputational stain on the LBA, and, I assume, a hole in London's Brewing's pocket. I could be generous and say that everybody will learn from this, but in the meantime London will get a reputation for not being able to, erm... organise a piss-up in a brewery. Must do better.

Oh, Blimey! Being Frank...

Long-time readers of this blog will know I'm a big fan of Frank Sidebottom. The Bard of Timperley (or, correctly, his alter ego Chris Sievey) passed in 2010, but his fans haven't forgotten him. There have been exhibitions, music fests and fundraisers. Plans seem well-advanced for raising money to pay for a statue in Timperley, and former Oh! Blimey Big Band member Jon Ronson is one of the creative forces behind a new film called 'Frank', which will star Michael Fassbender, shown below as the eponymous lead.

The big news today, though, is the launch of a crowdfunding drive for a much more relevant project, Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story.

Visioned by filmmaker Steve Sullivan, it's a feature-length documentary covering the varied and fascinating career of one of Britain's most creative and overlooked artists. As well as unknown and lost footage of Frank Sidebottom, Sullivan has been able to reunite post-punk band The Freshies (remember 'I'm In Love With The Girl On the Virgin Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk'?) to talk about their work; there's interviews with his family, long-term sidekick Dave Arnold (whom I once watched as he struggled in vain to flush poster paint out of the sandstone facade of the Chelsea Art Space), and features on Sievey's work as an animator. He's been shooting footage since last autumn, interviewing fans and generally joining up a highly unusual arrangement of dots to bring a full appreciation of this body of work to a wider audience.

Having gone as far as possible, Steve is now reaching out to fans, asking them to back the project through Kickstarter. He's aiming to raise at least £20,000 by the end of May, and there are some excellent incentives to back the film, even if you aren't a fan of Sievey's work. Amazingly, the project is already halfway to the target in the first day, but the word needs to be spread which is why I'm writing this. I don't think 'genius' is too strong a word to use to describe Chris Sievey. An excellent musician, illustrator and animator, to me he wasn't just technically gifted, he expressed a peculiarly non-linear worldview through his art, as evidenced in the fully-realised Frank's World he formed around his best-known creation.

As mentioned, Steve Sullivan is offering some nice rewards to backers of Being Frank, and I'm going to sweeten the pot. That's right. The first of my readers to pledge £100 (and you'll need to prove it - email from Steve perhaps) will get some Sidey stuff from my own collection, some of it signed, all of it hard-to-find. I'm thinking a CD, postcard from the Frank's World DVD or similar. The Kickstarter page is here, and you can visit the film's website to download this poster which you can share online or print out and display.

This Is From The 'Frank' Film...

 It won't be bobbins, little frank. It'll be ace, fantastic and top. I think about the films they made about Manchester contemporaries of Sievey. It took over 20 years to get Joy Division on the silver screen. The idea of getting Chris Sievey's work out a few years after his passing doesn't make up for the loss, but the belated appreciation of a genius deserves to succeed. So help it to succeed already!

Thank you.

Fetch The Engines, Fetch The Engines...

Yep, pour on beer, though, because London's Brewing.

After a gap of over 18 months, the London Brewers Alliance have got themselves a new, bigger fest, and it's taking place at London Fields over the May Day Bank Holiday weekend of 4-5 May.

With around 40 breweries now operational within the M25, they've outgrown the upstairs space at Vinopolis, so a much bigger fest with a ramped-up bill of fare is in store for beer lovers who make their way to London Fields. As well as over 100 beers from LBA members, there'll be street food, live music, and talks hosted by Melissa Cole, birthday boy Des De Moor, and Sophie Atherton. There'll be beer and food matching, and the event is child-friendly, even if some of the attendees [hem hem] aren't.

Also new for this gathering are awards. The breadth of beer styles coming out of London breweries is astonishing, so Simply Hops is sponsoring a programme which will recognise the best beer in nine different categories. Roger Protz is advertised as being one of the judges, so I'm hoping for some heated debate between him and his judging colleagues, since he'll be sampling more than cask beer.

There's a collaborative beer available now, a 6.8% stout which was brewed last summer at The Kernel under the benign gaze of Ron Pattinson. You'll be able to sample it at the fest, though if you can't wait The Kernel had it last Saturday.

The nice people organising the event have offered me an 'exclusive' to pass on to my readers. Of course, if you widely read UK beer blogs, you'll have seen quite a bit of bloggage about the fest, and will therefore realise this offer isn't quite as exclusive as it sounds. Still, I'm able to offer you a whopping £5 off a ticket to the Sunday session, by entering the following promotional code when you book here.

Just enter sidbogg13 into the promotional code box and you'll get a fiver off. And since it's a Bank Holiday weekend, there's no need to feel guilty about drinking great beer on a Sunday.

I'll be there at some point. It's exciting to think that London brewing has more than consolidated since the first London Brewers' Showcase in 2010 - it's grown and is finding a market. I'll be hoping for the traditional pap shot of Mark Dredge, whose book is due to be published around that week - it's been a while; and wondering if Melissa Cole will remember to bring that copy of her book she promised me. That bottle of Pliny The Elder on page 112 was mine you know...

Let's Drink London Beer!