Over the course of the last four years Firefest has grown to become one of the most eagerly anticipated festivals on the UK Rock calender. The three previous shows have seen the organisers bring bands as diverse as Soul Sirkus, House Of Lords, Winger, Pink Cream 69, Million, Blue Tears, Balance Of Power & TNT & Legs Diamond and many others back onto a UK stage. Well the fourth installment of the festival is almost upon us, just over a month away in fact. With that in mind we caught up, once again, with one of the main men behind the show, Kieran Dargan and, over the course of forty five minutes, we talked about all things Firefest related and a good many other topics besides. So sit back, relax and read on - it's well worth it.

Kieran, hello. Firefest IV is soon upon us, 26th & 27th October to be exact and you've got FM as headliners, how did you manage to pull that one off?

KD -  Well I guess first of all if you look at the amount of requests that people make for particular bands, you know be it sometimes you get requests for Van Halen, Journey and you know Whitesnake and other times you get requested for Spread Eagle and every other band that didn’t sell 20 records in the UK. Out of all of them I think FM have been one of the bands, and have possibly been and I stand to be corrected, but they’ve possibly been the biggest UK AOR band that I can remember.  You know we always get quite a lot of interest in that band and it’s one of those bands that all of us come across and people are keen to see again. Steve Overland went to ground for a very, very long time and over the last couple of years surfaced with projects such as The Ladder and Shadowman and it’s obvious that Steve is still singing like an absolute angel.  Every time we would end up doing an interview through Fireworks inevitably the interview would start “So what’s the status of FM then?” and Steve would just say “Oh I don’t know, we’ve never really broken up we just kind of said we’re not going to work as FM anymore”. Over the course of a few conversations and a few interviews with Steve I think he got a little bit pissed off that we kept asking him about it but you know, being the professional that he is, he handled it very, very well and it kind of got to the stage last year where it was put to us by a third party that this third party would be able to deliver FM, if anyone indeed was able. 

There was some discussion took place primarily just with Steve, and Steve very graciously came back and said “well it’s got to be an agreement between all of us, it’s not going to be Steve Overland FM or Pete Jupp FM or Merv FM. It’s got to be all of us or it’s not really going to be on and right now it’s not a good time because all of us are really busy and you know, if we are going to consider cranking up the FM machine again, it’s going to take a hell of a long time to do it.” I think Steve said that because they’ve always been fondly remembered as a very good live band and they didn’t want to come back some twelve years later and blow that myth out of the water by being under rehearsed or unprepared. 

Once again this year, after we completed Firefest III, we started to searching around to see who was available and what bands we’d like to have and of course you know, the usual hundred requests for FM from various people all over the world and it was like ‘well maybe we could have a chat with Steve again and see if we could organise something for Firefest IV.’ Steve put us in touch with Merv and I discussed it with Merv and there was a number of phone calls between us both, trying to work out dates and availability because all these guys are busy.  Merv plays in a very, very successful cover band and Pete and Steve play in cover bands. I’m not sure what Jem does to be perfectly honest with you and Andy Barnett is a rock star, so he’s got to check his schedule obviously before he can do anything. But in saying all that, the conversations between Merv and I went really well and we proposed something to FM and Merv took it to the guys in the band and said ‘maybe it’s a good time to do it’. I mean the way I approached it, I said they’ve never had so much product available on the market. Practically every FM album has been re-issued in one form or another with bonus tracks or demos in the last eighteen months or two years so, hypothetically speaking, they probably have seven albums now that you can go out and purchase in your local store. From that point of view there is plenty of product out there and it certainly means that people are familiar with the FM name once again.  Our conversations continued over the course of a few weeks until such a time that Merv was able to confirm that everybody was available and that they were keen to do it and, needless to say, I did a little Irish dance, a little Irish jig and jumped for joy.

 
And you’ve gotta be happy with the feedback that having FM on the bill has gotten the show?
 
KD - Well it was funny I suppose in one sense because to be honest with you, Firefest it’s not just me. There's a number of people involved in this show and I would take their advice in anything they would have to say. Some of those people thought that FM may have been the wrong choice as headliner because effectively, without sounding disrespectful to the band, they were always the bridesmaid, never the bride. They seemed to be the perennial support act for every bigger act coming in and out of the UK from Meatloaf to Foreigner and they never quite graduated, even though they did headline at Hammersmith Odeon, they never graduated to the next level that would have taken them to I suppose genuine stardom.

Quite a few people would say ‘yeah FM great live band, but I got tired of seeing them because every gig I went to they seemed to be the support act’. On the other hand you had quite a lot of people, myself included especially from a greedy point of view, that hadn’t seen the band play in whatever was it twelve years, so it was something we went into knowing that if there was anybody going to draw a crowd in terms of AOR it was going to be FM. If you talk about AOR in America you had Journey and Foreigner and in the UK you had FM. So FM were always going to be the AOR band.  From looking at all the pros and cons we decided that FM would be the way to go, only because they were very, very well known by almost everybody and chances are that if you were a Journey fan or a Foreigner fan you were also an FM fan. They appealed to the same fans. They had a great live reputation as a fantastic live band, they were a top bunch of guys and they always put on a hell of a live show. So we kind of said well you know the best thing to do was to go and see if we can get them and luck had it we actually did.
 
And then of course you managed to persuade Tyketto to do it one more time for you.
 
KD - Yeah, Tyketto, the last sunset.
 
Probably a headline act in their own right I would guess.
 
KD - I would probably think that Tyketto are more than capable of headlining at Firefest.  

The idea of the 2004 tour you know Danny has always said over the years that you know, ‘I can’t see it happening’ and Mike has always said ‘I can’t see it happening’ because obviously they’ve been band mates with the Vaughan band after Tyketto.   So the 2004 tour came together which was quite nice and we had a fantastic tour for, I don’t know what we did was it 10, 11 or 13 shows or something and we all had a great time. I got to work with one of my favourite bands and it was you know really good going all the way through.  And at the end of the tour it was like you drop everybody off at the airport and it’s like ‘okay see ya, see ya’ and its like oh wow, didn’t anyone throw a party with strippers?  Nope.

I kind of got the idea that the Tyketto thing in 2004 was great and everybody agreed that it was like no time has passed since the band has played. So I put it to the guys and of course like anybody else and like every other band these days, they’re all busy doing their own things. Trying to get these four guys together is hard. Danny lives in Europe, Mike is in Jersey and Brooke is out in Wisconsin and Jimmy is in New York, so it’s not like they are just down the road from each other. Putting these guys together is quite an effort to make sure that everybody is in the one place for at least a week to ten days worth of rehearsal  before they’ll even go anywhere.

We started our conversations with the guys way back in December 2006 and again, trying to get a slot where everybody had enough time to get together for rehearsals and to make sure that they were going to be pretty good for the shows they were doing proved to be pretty difficult.  Eventually though everybody said ‘well you know we had such a good time in 2004, let’s do it again.’ But then it's sort of, the more that we thought about it, and the more that the band thought about it, it became apparent that with everybody geographically all over the place, and everybody having their own careers, and their own jobs and stuff, it became apparent that they were never going to be in a position that they were ever going to be able to do this again.  

So it was decided that basically, by all the guys, because the UK fans have been incredibly loyal to Tyketto since they first debuted in the UK opening for White Lion in 1991. They have always said that they wanted to give the best performance possible, I think anybody who has ever seen the band live would tell you they have never seen a bad Tyketto show. So the guys said ‘ well we really do want to give it one more lash and this is gonna be it, this will be the end’.  And playing Firefest is their way of saying thanks to all the people that have supported them since the inception of the band almost 20 years ago.  So I suppose in one sense they can consider themselves you know, if they were the type of persons, they could consider themselves unlucky not to be the headliners but  the one thing about the Tyke’s is that they are great, give them some guitars, give them some electricity and they would play anywhere for you, they are a great bunch of guys.
 
And then it turned out that not only do you get Tyketto’s last tour, you get Harem Scarem’s last show as well.
 
KD - Right that was a huge surprise because I had done a little bit of work with Harry and Pete on the new Harem Scarem record you know, nothing major at all, and in all the conversations I had had with Harry everything was you know very positive that the band had taken a step away from working with traditional record companies and were now handling things themselves in a manner which they felt they were more comfortable with. It seemed that they had finally managed to leave that comfort zone and were now, they had a little bit of cutting edge and were very keen to continue and get out there and do what they were doing.

But you know Harem Scarem again are one of these bands that they are stuck up in the frozen wastes of Canada as they like to describe themselves and it’s not like they get the opportunity to tour every year or even a couple of shows a year. Would you believe that Harem Scarem have never actually played in the United States?   That’s the point of interest I mean that will tell you how silly it is, they're just not a band that are able to get together and tour easily. Harry is an incredibly successful producer.  He works with a lot of acts that come through the Canadian X Factor and Pete has his own band on the side with Fairground, and they’re both very successful producers and it’s like when they go to do Harem Scarem they have to drop everything else and put two, three weeks worth of rehearsal into things and then fly off to Europe and do two shows over a week type of thing and then fly back. It just doesn’t make a lot of financial sense for them to do it. 

But the reason that the guys continue to do it is because they love doing what they do, they enjoy each other’s company and they’re a damn good live band but I guess like anything else, they kind of decided that, it would be different if they were out there doing four months worth of shows every year, where it made sense for them to travel to Europe or Japan or wherever they are going but, you know I think they played one live show last year and 2005 it might have been two. So they have kind of just decided it was never going to be easy to play a show, they're not going to be offered tours on a regular basis because, geographically, Canada is not the easiest place to come and go from to believe it or not, so they just decided that as regards to the live end of things that Firefest will be it.  And yeah it was quite a shock to us as well, I think I read it on www.melodicrock.com and I made a quick phone call to Harry who just started laughing and said ‘yeah that’s pretty much it, we’re all gonna do our own thing’ and I believe right now, I could be wrong but I believe right now they are working on what will be the final Harem Scarem record.
 
Serendipity wise it couldn’t have worked out any better for Firefest,  the final show for Harem Scarem, final show from Tyketto and the first show in years for FM.  Perfect. You couldn’t have scripted it better.
 
KD - And also the first show in years for Valentine.  We’ve got two saying hello and two saying goodbye.
 
The hellos are fantastic and the goodbyes are always sad. Particularly, you know as a group of people, I think anybody who has met any of the Tyketto guys could tell you that they are a really nice bunch of guys and the Harem Scarem guys are exactly the same. It’ll be very, very sad I think for me personally and for anybody that knows the guys that you’re not gonna see Tyketto touring in two years time and you’re not gonna see Harem Scarem playing another festival in England or whatever show in two years time and you know we are never going to get to see those songs live again and it’s with great sadness that we say goodbye to them but I guess like anything else, any band that around for, jeez what is it 17, 18 years they have done really really well.   But yes definitely I think from the point of view of two of the most respected bands of the genre calling it quits at our show, which you know was nothing to do with us pre-empting anything and it certainly has raised peoples interest levels, people do want to see their last performances so you know, we are very thankful that they have chosen to say goodbye at Firefest.  
 
And from what I’ve heard ticket sales are very good so far for the show.
 
KD - Well at this present moment in time we have about 75 – 80% of the tickets sold for the Saturday performance.
 
Which I guess is way ahead of where you have been previous years?
 
KD - I actually looked earlier on would you believe and I think the equivalent period last year I think we had about 43% of tickets sold, so effectively we are almost at double.   It really does look possible that it will sell out in advance this year and hopefully it will. There’s a lot of work and energy goes into Firefest by a lot of people every year, and the biggest reward that anybody involved in the show will get is looking out and seeing a very full venue, great music and people enjoying themselves.
 
Does it get any easier, you know after three shows in the past, putting it all together or is the stress just as hard now as it was in the beginning?
 
KD - I think it’s still as stressful as it was in the beginning because you’re trying so desperately to make sure everything is right. It becomes a little easier because if you do the logistics of everything and you arrange your back line and your production, as you go along you learn a little bit more about it every year so therefore it becomes a little easier when you finally know what the a DI cable is after spending two years looking blankly at the stage people going ‘hmm a DI cable right.’ But I now actually know what one is so that’s a big improvement.  

Stress levels will always be there because it is no mean feat having 12, 13 bands whatever it is, most of which are arriving from overseas, getting in to the UK on time, getting to the venue, getting them in the hotel, getting them onstage and getting them back home and it’s all done in the space of effectively 48 – 72 hours. So, it's still stressful in as much as you want the show itself on the main day to run without any hitches and of course when you are running a festival, irrespective of how well prepared you are there are always technical issues that arise and thankfully we’ve got a very good production crew and stage manager who usually makes sure that things go pretty damn well and that we’re never that much behind.  But you know last year we did run into a problem that we ran over with one or two of the bands prior to the headline act and it resulted in people saying that the headliner act was deliberately cut short which was not the case. The headliner was actually booked and billed to play for 1 hour and 10 minutes and they ended up playing 1 hour and 20 minutes, but even something as small as that can upset the balance and we work twice as hard if we notice that something hasn't been as good as it should be or hasn't been perfect to try and put it right for the next show. So all in all, yes it’s still as stressful in as much as you sweat on ticket sales, you sweat to make sure all the flights get in on time, nobody is delayed, but as regards to the logistics side of things, the hotels, the transport and the travel we’ve gotten a little better at that and it’s a little less stressful.
 
We get quite a few emails about Firefest over the course of the year and one of the little niggles that people seem to have is about the venue itself, the fact that the minute the show is over you get kicked out of the main venue and also the fact there is no where really to chill out on the day.
 
KD - Well you see unfortunately if you are going to try and run a festival, in an indoor situation you have to find a venue that is a) willing to have you b) affordable and c) which is suitable. It’s not easy to find venues around the UK which are in a suitable town, I mean Nottingham has proved to be pretty much sensible for everybody you know, it’s not too far north, it’s not too far south, everybody seems to be happy to go to Nottingham to a show.  There are other venues that we have approached which we felt were as good if not better, however financially they are way out of the ballpark as far as anything we could possibly hope to afford. I mean lets not forget, we run this show every year with minimal sponsorship, you know thanks to yourself and www.ARfm.co.uk, the Guitar Store,  Melodicrock, Rock It magazine, we have some great coverage. But you know the lack of a major beer sponsor or cigarette company or whatever it is, makes it very very difficult every year to be able to put on a show of this magnitude. 

Firefest this year is going to cost probably in the region of £75K you know and people don’t see the expense associated, But when you start to flying six bands, seven bands in from overseas you know Canada, two, three or is it four bands from the United States, you are looking at £10K in airfares before you’ve even effectively decided to pay the band or pay for the hotels.  It becomes incredibly expensive to do that and the whole thing about it is most venues in the UK, or a lot of venues in the UK, are used for dual purpose. In other words they are used for live music up to half past ten, eleven o’clock at night and more or less immediately they're turned around and turned into nightclubs and that’s something that a lot of venues in the UK do. Not just Rock City. I've seen it happen in three or four venues that I have been to. There's nothing much that we can do about that because I suppose, in one sense, you have the venue who are trying to remain loyal to their normal Saturday night clientele, not to mention they are probably taking quite a deal of money from door fees, people going into the nightclubs etc etc, and they stand to make quite a few pounds from the bar.  So the situation with regards to curfew, I would say it’s not ideal but we have it and we have to try and work with it as best we can.  As I said Rock City is not the only venue that suffers the same. It’s different with outdoors, it would make life obviously a lot easier for us, but the fact is that it is indoor for the moment and until we can find a suitable venue, in a suitable city, at a suitable price that is really not too bothered in relation to curfews, then you know we have to work with what we have and that’s it.

And If Anyone Wants To See Kieran When He's Not Working - A Typical Night In Dudley JB's

Just Don't Ask About The Other Chap

I guess that is the thing with a lot of festivals in the UK you have to put up with, there has been some obviously bad publicity around festivals in the last year or so, do you think it’s effected you at all?
 
KD - Well I’m not sure if we rank up there with the rest of the festivals, I mean let's not forget we are pretty much a niche or underground festival so you know I don’t think that the bad publicity that the bigger festivals have gotten is really going to reflect all that much on us. But in saying that , if there are lessons to be learned from other festivals we will certainly take it on board and we will do our best to ensure that we don’t have a repeats of the same episodes with our festival.
 
Moving on to Friday night.  You’ve changed it from being a pre-show party to more of a proper gig.  Day 1 I think you are calling it this year.
 
KD - Day 1, Hour 1 of 24.
 
You’ve been listening to too many Scorpion albums.
 
KD - Yeah, Humanity,  Hour 1.   Well the thing about the pre-show was that effectively we were running the show on a Saturday and  it's usually a pretty early start like noon or whatever. So quite a few people were travelling in to the city on Friday and didn’t really have a whole pile of stuff to do the Friday night so we just said let's ask a couple of bands if they wanna play for fun.   And yeah, we used to charge a pound or two pounds or whatever the hell it was and then everybody got together, the bands played and everybody had a great time, then the main day was the day after.  

But, you know like anything else you always look to try and improve on what you are offering to the people and not to mention the biggest point, that we probably would be contacted by anything up to 50 bands in a year looking to get in on the festival. So, with that in mind we said ‘maybe we’ll try and grow just a little bit and try and get some bands in and do a full kind of show on the Friday night’. It started off that we were going to do three bands and then of course it’s ended up with five. But in saying that we have moved to a different venue which is a bigger, more spacious venue . It's a 900 capacity and so far I think that we have been well proved considering that over 50% of the tickets are actually gone for the Friday night.  We have a very good line up, there are some bands out there that people will be familiar with. Again a lot of the bands appearing will appeal to the hard core melodic or hard rock fans and we’re hoping that you know maybe the people that are familiar with Tyketto and who are familiar with FM may take a chance on the Friday night and say ‘you know what, let’s go check out these bands I am not familiar with’, Soul Doctor or Stormzone or whatever and of course on the Friday night we also have the original, one of the original, new wave of British heavy metal Demons saying it's UK farewell - so it’s another farewell at Firefest.

Do you see one of the jobs of the Friday night as being to introduce new bands to the UK market?
 
KD - It’s always a difficult thing to do because if you take a new band that you consider to be a fantastic band for whatever reason, there are probably 100 or 200 people out there that are aware of who the band are. But Mr. Average Def Leppard fan probably doesn’t know who the band are and, with all due respect, I am not just picking on Def Leopard, they probably don’t care. In the old days you had so many tours going around at any one time and you had all these newer bands who were capable of jumping on one tour and hopping off and joining another one and they were opening for bands at venues like you Bristol Colston Hall or Hammersmith Odeon and that’s how the word spread.  It has become harder every year for younger bands to get out there and play to any type of a decent crowd. 

You know, we have had Pride in the UK, who were probably the finest of melodic hard rock band here in the last 10 years, and they've decided to call it quits because you know no matter how much they tried to get out and play, it was always to the converted. The fence sitters weren’t really all that bothered.  So we would love to give the opportunity to some of the younger bands to come along and play, but we also have to be mindful that if we don’t have some better known bands playing on the Friday night we are effectively going to end up in the same situation were we are going to have a very poor turnout and that’s not going to be encouraging to either a) the festival or b) the bands that are playing.  So as much as we would love to be able to put all this new talent on display for everybody, it’s not quite possible strictly from a financial point of view you have to be careful.
 
First and foremost, you are a business you’re not a charity.
 
KD - Well as much as I would hate to describe it as a business, yes it is.  I would like to call ourselves a non profit organisation.  You know if we can get the shows on, as long as we don’t lose money we don’t care.  Effectively we are not all that bothered about making a huge profit, it would be very nice because that would put money in the kitty to start the show the next year.   But in saying that, I suppose that we could pick six great young UK bands and put them all on Firefest on Day 1 and with all due respects, we probably wouldn’t draw 200 people bar the converted. So what we are trying to do is trying to bring in some of the more established acts on the Friday night and hopefully rely on their fan base to bring in extra people to be able to see younger bands.  There’s a number of younger bands in the UK at this present moment in time that really deserve some attention but unfortunately given the current state for live bands and touring and what I’m saying about that is I mean home grown talent you know, it’s obviously not a problem for your Tesla's and your Ratt's,  but for home-grown talent it’s usually play down the local pub or play with another similar band up the country for one night and that’s about it.

It's quite difficult to try and get the newer bands on, that’s what festivals such as the Z Rock Festival and The Gods were very, very good at doing because most of the bands they featured were bands that were signed to their label and it was used as a showcase for their label. Firefest isn't a showcase for any one label though, so in as much that we do try and help the younger bands along as I said we also have to be mindful that you do need to pull a certain amount of people to the show to be able to make it pay in order to be able to do it again the following year.
 
Your mentioned the likes of Tesla and Ratt, there seems to be an awful lot of bands touring round, do you think that the market is oversaturated to an extent at the minute?
 
KD - I think it’s bloody ridiculous. I would suggest that all these promoters, whoever they are, go and have a chat with each other because it’s completely silly to expect people to go to ten shows in a month.  If you look at the month of November and even late October into November you’ve got Ratt, Tesla, you’ve got the Demolition Ball, and Hard Rock Hell or whatever it is? You’ve got Firefest at the end of October, you've got Motorhead with Alice Cooper is it? Then there's LA Guns and Vixen, with Hanoi Rocks as well and there is talks of Firehouse and Warrant and Gotthard in the UK as well in November. 

It’s ridiculous because it’s not 1990 anymore. The thing about it is that you’re not playing to effectively a bunch of 18 and 19 year old kids who are going to blow all their money on concert tickets and beer, you’re talking about playing to a predominately older audience that you know all have, well the vast majority of whom, have responsibilities you know. They’ve got mortgages, they’ve got kids, they’ve got cars to run  and regular weekly expenses for any person and to expect somebody to be able to pay an average of anything between £15 and £50 for a concert ticket.  You also have Heaven and Hell out there as well in November.  That’s seven or eight shows that I wouldn’t mind personally seeing but do you think I can afford to pay £300 on tickets?  No and I’m sure that everybody else is in the same boat so I think it has become a case of eenie meenie miney mo which one do I desperately want to see or which two can I afford to go and see.
 
And I guess in the long run the concentration of acts will harm attendances and potentially the any future shows as well
 
KD - Well I mean that’s pretty much what’s going to happen.  You know if the bands were able to stagger their appearances and, for argument sake, if you had two bands in November or three bands in November. I mean obviously the bigger bands like Heaven and Hell you’re talking a completely different ball park and to a degree I suppose Tesla and maybe Ratt, but you know Tesla and Ratt effectively will attract a lot of the same people, so can people afford to pay for two concert tickets?  The same people are probably into Gotthard - you know there’s another question. That’s three concert tickets and of course you will always have those people who are into LA Guns and Vixen and Hanoi Rocks  and you know, I definitely think that it is over saturated and to be honest with you, I think the people that are booking the shows are booking too many shows within too short a time period and what’ll happen is instead of pulling 400-500 people to a show they will end up pulling 200 which mean promoters will either lose money or cancel shows, or there will be poor turnout which again as you have already pointed out, will lead to a reluctance to do any further shows the following year or two years time.
 
The thing is, it seems to be the same every Autumn time, the same last year as well. I mean from a Firefest perspective you’ve almost got to get in their first?
 
KD - Well I think we've solidified our weekend as always the last weekend of October so if people are really keen on going to Firefest they will have a good idea that it’s going to be on that last weekend of October. But again going back five, six years there was hardly a show to go to. I can remember talking with Phil Ashcroft, one of the people involved with Fireworks, we went down to Spain to see Harem Scarem play and of course we have always talked every time we have gone out and got bladdered or you know been to a show that good job there’s no scene left - huh? But the simple facts of the matter are there are a lot of bands out there now who are turning their attention to the UK, it’s been 1990 I think since Ratt have been to the UK and Tesla have obviously played in London this summer, but prior to that I think it was 1992 I think that they were last here. 
 
So, so now bands are starting to take their blinkers off and look outside of the United States to other markets where they may have once been popular and you know, ‘well there’s gotta be some fans left, lets go on tour’. It just seems that they all seem to tour between October and March because they don’t wanna be out of the loop in the States for the summer festivals and the state fair circuit and who could blame them  because it’s a lucrative situation to be in but I really, honestly think that trying to put so many shows by different bands in such a short time frame is going to prove detrimental to pretty much everything and as I said if money is lost by promoters and bands suffer poor turnout, they are going to be reluctant to come back again.  So therefore I can’t understand why some of the bands haven’t waited until January, February to come over and that way hopefully maximise the turnouts at all the gigs.
 
I guess with all of these bands doing their own tours as well it’s harder for you to draw bands to Firefest?
 
KD - It is to a degree, I mean yes Ratt and Tesla would have certainly been on our radar but again we are smaller concern by  comparison with the larger promoters and if you are going to be bringing a band such as the stature of Tesla or Ratt, then you’re talking about five band members plus five crew guys all coming from the States. They’ve all gotta be paid, got to be put up in hotels.  It proves to be a very very expensive package for a small festival like us to be able to justify.  Not so much justify but to be able to afford I guess.

If a band the size of Tesla or Ratt decides to do their own UK tour you can’t blame them if they’re flying half way round the world, they are obviously going to want to maximise their time in any one country and you know the likes of playing for Firefest it’s like well  we play one show to 1,500 people it’s like wow wee who cares we can play one show in the States to 6,000 people.   But unfortunately a lot of the American bands don’t actually realise the current state of the rock scene in the UK which is nothing like as healthy as it once was. 

It becomes more difficult for us because the very first Firefest we had Soul Sirkus as the headliners, which of course was Neal Schon from Journey and Jeff Scott Soto, and we were assured by their management at that particular time when we booked the show and signed the contract that Firefest would be the only UK show and there was and I quote ‘the possibility of a show in London some three weeks after Firefest primarily for music industry people’ which we didn’t have a problem with. The next thing we knew there were three other shows booked in the UK all around the Firefest show which proved detrimental to us because people you know who were into Neal Schon and wanted to see Neal Schon play didn’t come to Firefest because the ticket price was more expensive and they went to see them at Sheffield or London or wherever else they played.  

It does prove that in order to make a Firefest successful we must have an attraction, we must have a draw, a band that people want to see and are keen to see but also the bands must also realise that playing to an audience like a Firefest audience you are effectively playing to people that are still actively into melodic hard rock music and who are still actively purchasing CD’s so therefore I would probably say, because I am biased, that playing Firefest is a pretty good idea  But every time you see a bad coming in from overseas to play their own tour, it does actually remove a potential band from the list or from the headline list of Firefest because if they can play five or six shows on their own then why would they want to play just one.
 
Where do you see Firefest down the line?
 
KD - 60 million dollar question that one.  I don’t know and I have spoken to Bruce about it and I have spoken to the people involved in the show because you know we all sit down and have conversations.  So where to go, I don’t know, do we continue to grow the Firefest festival. I think we’ve proved that it’s difficult enough to fill Rock City, which is not the biggest of venues and I also think if we had the backing of some major sponsorship for any type of reasonable financial level we would be able to attract bigger names and we would be able to possibly do things more on our own terms rather than having to bend and fit to suit the constraints that are put on us.   I think we’re probably of the idea that next year may well be the last one only because there is no where for us to go.
 
That was my next question, will there be a Firefest V?
 
KD - Well, we would love to continue doing the shows because they are great. I mean anybody who have been to one, it’s an excuse to meet up with old friends you haven’t seen, there are quite a lot of international people coming in and that people you know all over the years and have met at different gigs all over the place. 

It’s a good excuse to have a good time, to discuss music and the music world, watch a few great bands and have some fun but we cannot continue to do Firefest operating the way we do and that’s not through any lack of effort, it’s more so through a lack of I suppose acknowledgement from I guess from more established people and more established bands in the music industry.  It’s very very difficult to persuade a band to come and play a small festival.  It’s a lot easier to persuade a band to play a bigger festival.  The only way that you can make your festival bigger is if you attract bigger bands which in turn will attract more fans. And until we have sponsorship to the level that will give us the opportunity to go and chase some of the really big, or bigger bands, of the genre then it proves really very difficult  to do anything with the festival other than recycle through the bands that we have had appearing.  

As much as we would love it to continue, it’s proving more and more difficult and more and more expensive to do so every year so I suppose the answer to your question is I don’t know what the future holds. There will be a Firefest V yes, and we are already looking, we have already discussed things with some bands potentially, we are discussing with other bands in relation to the possibility of having them come and play. We are also looking at the venue situation you know, can we move to a different venue, should we move to a different venue. So there will be a Firefest 5 and we would like to do something nice for the fifth anniversary.  You know make it a full two day show.   Whether or not that will prove to be financially viable or you know logistically viable remains to be seen but we would like to make it a full two day show and you know maybe have six or seven bands each day and run it from midday until you know whatever time at night.  After that it is very hard to see where we can go.  

The term preaching to the converted is often used and I think to a large degree we are, but the nice thing about it is that we are capturing quite a lot of lost souls each year, you know people that maybe haven’t been actively going to gigs but who were big fans of the music back in the 90s or for some reason or another, due to family commitments or expenses they have stopped buying CDs.  We are still attracting quite a few of those and the nice thing is the amount of younger people showing up is bloody frightening.  You know there must have been 60 kids turn up last year, when I say 60 kids I mean 17, 18 year olds who you know realistically this is not the particular genre of music that you would expect to see such an amount of kids at.  So I suppose the signs on one hand are very encouraging that we’re getting quite a lot of people back to watch live rock music but on the downside it's the lack of financial input and the lack of sponsorship which is hampering us to a large extent in being able to chase after the larger bands and the bigger venues and to grow the festival.  

You know the one thing that’s been said is that we had an email from one of the organisers of Sweden Rock who told us that our festival is very, very well referenced by all the bands that he had had the pleasure of dealing with over the years and that was quite nice to hear back. So we do have, without sounding in any way big headed, we do have a nice reputation as being honest and as being a good festival to play at, it would be far nicer if we could take those attributes and move it into a bigger area. Whether we can or not, only time will tell.
 
So if anyone has a spare million pounds, contact Kieran Dargan?
 
KD - Well I’d settle for a tenner!
 
Ha ha, you’ll settle for 46 quid for another ticket off somebody?
 
KD - Well absolutely. The one thing Steve I want to be sure of is, I don’t want to come across as if I am harping on about money all the time.  It’s not the case.   The simple facts of the matter are that if you go to the Wacken website or the Sweden Rock website or you know any of the other festivals throughout Europe, you will see their sponsors page and sponsored by whoever they will be, pick your sponsor, they’re all up there. The beer companies, the cigarette companies, the music gear companies, the guitar companies, the strings companies, the amplifier companies you name it they are all there.  We don’t, for whatever reason attract those type of sponsors and it’s not for the want of trying. It’s unfortunate that they probably look at our festival and say straight out that it’s too small to be involved with and that’s their decision, but I’m sure that Sweden Rock didn’t start off playing to 30,000 to 40,000 people every year either.
 
I do want to make a point that we are not harping on about the money and we don’t expect people to send in PayPal donations just for the sake of it because we’re not looking for that type of donation. But to the people out there, if you are involved with a company that it is involved in the music business or drinks company or whoever it is. Whether it's because we’re an older group of people by comparison to your average person who goes to Download or whether it’s the fact that our festival is so small in comparison to those throughout Europe.  I don’t know what it is but there has gotta be somebody out there with a product that is aimed at the age group of people that we are catering for, which is you know we do have a lot of teenagers coming with parents but I guess we are catering from 18 up to 50 or maybe a little older.   There’s always people that have products that can be aimed at that particular age group of people and if we can attract in some of those sponsors then fingers crossed, touch wood we can go on and do 10 Firefests, 20 Firefests who knows.
 
And it may be small but everyone who has been to one will attest it’s damn good.
 
KD - Well It’s probably pretty small and we like to think it’s damn good. But I think the one thing that people will realise is that all the people involved in Firefest, running around doing various jobs and in between doing all that we’re trying to get to the front of the stage to jump up and down and enjoy our favourite bands so I’d like to see it continue along those lines, which is a very informal kind of thing and you know hopefully that the people that come enjoy it as much as we do.

Cheers Kieran, look forward to seeing you at Rock City next month

KD - Alright, cheers mate, see you there....

For more information on Firefest and to buy tickets then visit the shows official website @ www.thefirefest.com