CLUAS has been covering Irish music festivals since 2000 when we reviewed the first Witnness festival (which morphed into Oxegen). 2008 however saw CLUAS step up dramatically in terms of our coverage of the music festival season. For the first time CLUAS has provided comprehensive reviews of all the major festivals that took place this year in Ireland. Oxegen? Electric Picnic? Cois Fharraige? HWCH? CLUAS covered them all in 2008. And comprehensively so - we published a review of each day of the Oxegen, Electric Picnic and Cois Fharraige festivals, not to mention a whopping 9 reviews and 3 diaries of HWCH (delivered by the team of 4 CLUAS writers who were covering HWCH).
Within literally minutes of their publication all these articles appeared in Google News which helped ensure they were read by thousands of visitors. For example the Oxegen reviews were read by over 3000 people within a week of their publication - setting a new readership record for a CLUAS feature (the previous record having been set by Michael O'Hara's now-legendary review of REM in the Olympia which was linked to from the official REM website). The Electric Picnic and Cois Farraige reviews were read by just over 2000 and 1000 people respectively in their first week. As for the HWCH reviews, they have already been read by 974 readers and the festival ended only 3 days ago, I expect this figure will rise to 1500 by the end of the week.
A big thank goes to the CLUAS writers who covered the festivals - Christine Cooke for Cois Fharraige, Jan Ni Flanahagain at Electric Picnic, Steven O'Rourke who covered Oxegen and HWCH (where he was joined by Anna Murray, Niamh Madden and Ian Wright).
Steven O'Rourke deserves very special praise for securing the passes for all the festivals and badgering the writers to publish their reviews within 12 hours of leaving the venue! He was instrumental in ensuring this blanket coverage of the main festivals happened.
For those of you who missed some of our 2008 festival coverage first time around, links to all the various reviews are provided below:
Oxegen:
Electric Picnic:
Cois Fharraige:
HWCH Day 1:
HWCH Day 2:
HWCH Day 3:
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2003 - Witnness 2003, a comprehensive review by Brian Kelly of the 2 days of what transpired to be the last ever Witnness festival (in 2004 it was rebranded as Oxegen when Heineken stepped into the sponsor shoes).