by Marina Carnwath

Check out our footage of the night : STARfields ’15

In retrospect, it’s always difficult to distinguish the quality of an event from your own perception of it, so I’m just going to say now that I, personally, enjoyed Starfields. It was just a great night. It made one attendee feel “warm and fuzzy like a wet tennis ball”, which is no mean feat. Overall, however there was a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction among the guests of Starfields this year.

At a basic level, this was likely to do with ticket price, as ever. Student run events in coastal Fife are rarely going to be worth £40, and if guests are constantly assessing whether their experience is worth the cost, the chances are that they aren’t going to manage to lose themselves in the moment. The main reason most people enjoy these events is the chance to see and chat to huge numbers of acquaintances and friends they wouldn’t otherwise meet in one place, and taking advantage of that comes down to the individual, not the organisers.

The organisers vision for the event was clearly ambitious, but the boring administrative details were consequently overlooked, crowd management being the primary example. Okay, so everyone was supposed to arrive between 6pm and 9:30pm, leaving a wide time period for the guests to trickle in. Obviously, since there was no real incentive to arrive early, such as drinks tokens, there were few people in attendance until around 8:30pm, when the hoards descended, turning Butts Wynd into something of a scrum. So great was the intensity of the crowd that some considered “just blowing the whole thing off and going to get a bottle of Glen’s from Tesco”.

Honestly, it seems quite a bizarre aspect of the night for the organisers to have overlooked. They created a great atmosphere, booked engaging entertainment, gathered enough attendees – but after all that, failed to notice that having an estimated ratio of one bartender to every one hundred people was hardly going to make for effective service. It was actually strange to notice the number of attendees who were relatively sober, not through choice, but through lacking the physical strength necessary to reach the front of the bar queue. “We were collecting drinks so we didn’t have to go back there, because we knew we couldn’t make the journey again” – a phrase which doesn’t exactly scream quality organisation.

All that being said, the choice to shift the musical direction of Starfields towards house was a solid decision. Klingande was an inspired booking, the saxophonist being the real highlight, and by the end, I doubt many people were still thinking about the night’s shortcomings. A few minor changes, and more attention to the basics could have taken the “but” from “the night was great, but…”, so perhaps the committee would do well to remember the more menial side of event organising, rather than getting caught up in the glamorous ideal.