Surbiton's Hillcroft College, celebrating its 90th anniversary this year funded the venture, in a brave bid to raise urgent funds to fix the leaking roof, improve disabled access and carry out essential maintenance - spurred on by the collapse of £13m of Learning and Skills Council funding.
Working from the college, a team of just three people managed to secure some of music's top artists. Among the names who performed to a 14,000 crowd on 28 August were headliners McFly, Chipmunk, Tinchy Stryder, Roll Deep, Alesha Dixon, The Wanted and Julian Smith.
Ipswich-based DHE Professional were contracted to provide sound reinforcement for the festival, and put together a full HK Audio FOH and monitor set up consisting of Cohedra, Cohedra Compact, ICON and Contour Series systems, with speaker processing through the HK DSM2060 and powered by Lab Gruppen PLM14000/PLM10000 amplifiers.
DHE Professional's Gavin Matthias comments, "We used the HK Cohedra system comprising of eight tops hanging per side and eight 2x10 bass units per side. Side-fill was provided by the HK Icon system and 12 CT115 wedges for monitoring and in-fill. CT118's provided drum-fill subs."
It was Sandown's first ever stand-alone concert, and there is already talk of it repeating next year with an even bigger line-up, perhaps across two days.
(Jim Evans)
