Back from a much-needed break, away from home and away from the heat of summer. I’ve never been so glad to wake to rain and temperatures below 18ºC. Sadly came back to scorching temperatures again, with this week heading above 35ºC again. Ah well, maybe someone in power will recognise that action needs to be taken.
Moving on from the weather, I came home to an email from Nick Cave. Well, his team.
I was lucky enough to go to the recent Brighton ‘festival’ where Nick headlined with his Bad Seeds, alongside some great bands like English Teacher, and Cate Le Bon. Living with cancer means I have access needs, which we were informed would be possible if we went to a specific gate.
That gate was poorly signposted and not all that accessible. Security staff were vaping and standing around while we were forced to stand in the pitching sun for 50 minutes before we were let in. We had arrived with almost 45 minutes to spare to get in, get settled and see the first band. That didn’t happen. Okay, small issue in the bigger picture.
Except I was asked to empty my bag of my food and questioned about my meds. The man next to me was embarrassed publicly by being asked to take out his spare catheters and put them on a dirty table. I was then scanned airport-style. When it beeped I was treated like an idiot for not removing things from my pockets. I wasn’t asked to and there was nowhere to put them other than the floor. AWS Ticket staff were surly and unhelpful; they didn’t scan my wife’s bag or person. About 75 minutes after arriving at the gate we got in. No water to be found, so we went into the ‘Access’ tent. Five chairs available. The staff in there were lovely and helpful, but it wasn’t organised particularly well.
There was no shade to watch the bands. Food queues were up to an hour’s wait. The merchandise queue was at least three hours (after asking, someone from the Access tent got us ahead of the queue as there was no way I could stand in the sun for that long).
I saw about 50 minutes of music as I had to keep finding somewhere to sit down, which means a hike of at least 500m to the Access tent. In the end we left early.
I’m glad we did. National Rail at Brighton Station had not a clue about how to deal with a large influx of people. Different people told us different information and we ended up walking around in circles until I decided to move a barrier so we could get to the platform. The staff were rude, the police were helpful. Headless chickens.
So on the train to Portslade, where we’d parked, my wife wrote an email. A clear and concise email to state why our day wasn’t great and how they might want to improve things for people with access needs – and therefore improve things for everyone! The excuse on the day of ‘we weren’t prepared for that many people’ when they knew they’d sold 50,000 tickets was, quite frankly, the kind of BS I expect of a political party representative about the heatwave.
I didn’t expect to hear back. And so it was a pleasant surprise when an email arrived from Nick Cave’s team. It was really well considered, took our points and specifically addressed them, and told us what they would do different next time. It was an A* grade response. They’ve asked us to feed into their process and said that, should we wish to go next year (I assume this will now be an annual thing) someone will be in touch to facilitate that and to get our feedback on how well they’ve improved things.
National Rail? Crickets.
So, well done to the events team that organised this for Nick Cave and, I presume, Brighton Council. You went above and beyond in your response compared to just about every company I can think of. You recognised you’d got things wrong and accepted responsibility for that and then stated how you would change. While I wasn’t about to renounce my Nick Cave fandom, I will now tell everyone just how great his team were and how excited I am to go again next year, if that’s a possibility.
So, consider yourself told.
And if you run crisis comms for anyone, or just need to respond to someone’s legitimate concerns about something you’ve done, this is how you do it.