Best T In 16 Years

The Scottish festival sold out its 85,000 capacity – and will have already sold about 40,000 tickets for next year. Add to that the fine weather and the broadest lineup he’s ever booked and Geoff Ellis says it was the best of the 16 T In The Parks his company has produced.

Apart from the expected festival headliners such as Blur, The Killers, and Kings Of Leon, this year’s gathering at Balado, Scotland, also had acts not regularly seen at outdoors including Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, The Specials and The Pet Shop Boys.

Blur only managed to make its headline slot July 12, the festival’s final night, courtesy of a police escort.

“Graham Coxon had been taken ill with what sounded like food poisoning, but after he’d had some hospital treatment the band had a meeting and decided they could do the show,” Ellis explained, full of praise for the police and the local authority for allowing the event to go beyond curfew so Blur could play a full set.

Ellis was also pleased with how many of the acts playing early sets in King Tut’s Wah Wah Tent, which had an increased capacity of 11,000, still managed to fill it.

About half of the tickets for this year’s T In The Park were sold at an earlybird rate –effectively a £10 discount – within a week of the 2008 festival. The rest went within a day of being put on sale.

Ellis expects to have shifted about 40,000 earlybird tickets, which can be bought for 2009 prices, by the time the offer ends July 19. Ellis and DF Concerts promote the festival with co-owner Denis Desmond.

The only shadow hanging over this year’s T In The Park was the death of a 17-year-old male from Perthshire. Tayside Police appealed for witnesses after Lachlan Gillies was killed in a road accident at one of the entrances to the festival site.

The other acts on the T In The Park bill July 10-12, many of them shared with Desmond’s Oxegen Festival in Ireland that took place the same weekend, included Snow Patrol, Elbow, Franz Ferdinand, Razorlight, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Nine Inch Nails and The Gaslight Anthem.