TOUTS SELL BELLA TICKETS AT
NEARLY DOUBLE FACE VALUE
Within minutes of announcing sell-out for its fifth year running, tickets to the Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival (2nd and 3rd August, Beauly, Inverness-shire) were on sale at almost double their face value on eBay. A scalp offered six of the £95 face value tickets at £175 each and others were on offer on other sites.
The UK’s northern-most major festival, and Scotland’s main family festival, Bella, as it is known to its fans, has sold out its 15,800 capacity in advance in record time, over six weeks before the event.
“There are many disappointed Bella fans clamouring on the social networks, telephone and email who didn’t get their tickets in time. It is very disappointing to see touts buying up tickets to profit in this way at the expense of genuine music and festival-lovers,” said promoter Joe Gibbs.
Touts trying to make a turn on bella tickets are breaking the terms and conditions of the printed tickets which state that they can only be exchanged at face value via the Ticket Trust, an ethical ticketing exchange set up by Radiohead and others; this site ensures that buyers actually receive genuine tickets to the event and that they are bought and sold at face value.
The festival has advised fans as follows:
PRINTED TICKETS: If you have a printed ticket (ie not an e-ticket bought viawww.skiddle.com) , the only approved way of buying and selling these is the ethical secondary ticketing site www.thetickettrust.com where the ticket changes hands for its original face value. We do not advise buying or selling on any other sites including social networking sites, eBay or Gumtree. Free tickets for children 12 and under cannot be acquired in this way. If you acquire tickets via the Ticket Trust, please emailadmin@tartanheartfestival.co.uk for parking passes and information leaflets.
E-TICKETS: If you have an unwanted e-ticket of any type including campervan/ caravan, you are advised to get in touch with the ticketing agents Skiddle who issued these by emailing support@skiddle.com with your order number. If Skiddle can find a willing buyer for the tickets, they will cancel and reissue them. You will be refunded minus the booking fee. If you want to buy any unwanted e-tickets via Skiddle, these will be put on-sale viawww.skiddle.com at 1000 on Tuesday 9th July. Free tickets for children 12 and under can be acquired in this way as can parking passes and information leaflets.
The following types of tickets are still available, only via www.skiddle.com:
- Campervan/Caravan Electrical Hook-up
- Advance Bar Tokens (5 x £4 tokens per e-token to be exchanged at box office on entry for bar tokens)
- Portaloo Sunset tickets: Posh loo tickets for adults and children
A further upgrade from Saturday to weekend ticket will be announced shortly.
This year, Bella patrons can buy e-tokens for their bar tokens in advance and exchange them on the way in at the box offices. Tokens can also be bought at the usual tokens booth at the event. And tickets are also available for the Portaloo Sunset posh toilets which will be sited at the top of the Red Campsite, near Mother’s Ruin. All these are can be found at www.skiddle.com
Manchester indie legends James and Glasgow rock prodigies Twin Atlantic have been booked to headline along with an exciting and wide-ranging list of other acts including:The Straits – former members of Dire Straits; the British band Noisettes; bluesmanSeasick Steve; stellar garage rockers The Horrors and Bella favourites Alabama 3;King Charles and Scots indie artists Admiral Fallow; Rumours of Fleetwood Mac,indie favourites Pi`geon detectives, We Are The Ocean, Baby Strange, Frank Hamilton and Celtic rockers Peatbog Faeries who played the first Belladrum Festival way back in 2004; acoustic-folk-hip hop artist Lucy Spraggan and emerging soul artistJacob Banks, fresh from touring with Emile Sande; singer-songwriter Andy Burrows, former member of Razorlight ; Scots folk stars Dougie MacLean and Julie Fowlis with folk legend Martin Carthy and singer songwriter ex-Arab Strap Malcolm Middleton;Gavin James, an impressive young singer-songwriter from Ireland and Rick Redbeardof the Phantom Band; pagan pop-folk all-girl trio Stealing Sheep and gentle Geordie jazzy swingy country troupe Shipcote and Friends; It’s A Beautiful Day, created during San Francisco’s 1967 ‘Summer of Love;’ folk rockers Treetop Flyers who won Glastonbury’s 2011 emerging talent competition; C&W exponents My Darling Clementine and bluegrass Southern Tenant Folk Union; Scotland’s much loved Celtic rockers, The Dangleberries; Jericho Hill – three ex-punks and a cowboy playingJohnny Cash; Victorian Trout Conspiracy, great ska from Edinburgh; Scots indie bands Meursault, Washington Irving, PAWS, Withered Hand, The Boy Who Trapped The Sun, Anderson McGinty Webster Ward & Fisher, Shutter, Vasquez, Wooden Box, the Oxides, Ashley & The Cosmonauts, Be Like Pablo and The Lafontaines ; emerging singer-songwriters Tich and Nick Mulvey; Scotland’s most tipped unsigned band, Fatherson; local heroes Scooty and the Skyhooks, Brown Bear and the Bandits from Largs. Skerryvore, Coca Tenorio, FaR, Taghta, Feis Rois, Rhythm and Reel, Mind Funk, Hoodja, Caledonian Ceilidh Trail and Toby Michaels Rolling Damned from the Highlands
The 2013 theme is ‘Carnival’, in keeping with the birthday party atmosphere the milestone event is bound to create. A video of the 2012 event created by Tom Welsh from Deluxe.com, Edinburgh, can be seen on the event’s web site.
Belladrum 2013 takes place in the beautiful Highland surroundings of Belladrum Estate, near Beauly in Inverness-shire. The independent festival has built a reputation for its eclectic line-ups, its offbeat non-musical entertainments and its all-ages approach. The festival won a VisitScotland Thistle Award in 2009 and is a past winner of the Grassroots Festival Award at the UK Festival Awards, the festival industry’s ‘oscars’.
