Message from Bill Heckle

Dear International Beatleweek customer,

Hopefully you have had an opportunity to check out our brochure, which details International Beatleweek 2014 packages and events. We hope that the festival appeals to you and you are as excited about the return of The Fab Faux as we are! You may have noticed a slight change in the way we are administering our packages and individual tickets this year? We felt that perhaps this might warrant a brief explanation about why the changes have had to be made.

For those of you who visit us regularly you will be aware that our recent home has been the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, which we learned in the summer of 2013, would be closed for refurbishment between August and October 2014. This of course means that we would have to search for a new home for 2014s festival. Fear not though – the Liverpool Phil will be back for 2015!

And so we were faced with the conundrum of where to house International Beatleweek headline shows. We assessed the options within the city; The Echo Arena holds 10,000, which was too large for us, The Empire Theatre although holding 2700 was not an option as it wasn’t available for the whole festival. We were however, happy to return to an old spiritual home of The Royal Court Theatre and were penciled in. Around December time a potential issue arose with another play that was possibly due to do a run at the Royal Court between August and September which would make it unavailable to us. In disarray we were faced once more with the difficult decision of where to house IBW14. We considered using the Adelphi Ballroom for all of the events but this too was not ideal and so serious consideration was taken to cancel the festival for one year until the Liverpool Phil was back in action. Good news came from The Royal Court Theatre just before Christmas break that the play had postposed its run and so we were not going to be homeless for IBW14! This of course meant we were still able to get our festival brochure out (phew!).

Upon receiving the contract and doing a site visit to the Royal Court Theatre we were horrified to discover that their refurbishment (which is fabulous by the way) had reduced the capacity to 1200! This meant that we were losing 1500 seats over 3 nights that we would normally sell when using the Liverpool Philharmonic. This of course threw our commercial plans into disarray. The outcome of all of this one-off holding operation effectively means that 1000-1200 packages we sell every year (and under pins the whole festival) has to be protected. As an example 4 seats sold individually for the Saturday night Fab Faux Shaux means selling 4 less packages.

We appreciate our loyal fans who return to our festival year on year and perhaps have gotten to know the City so well that they arrange their own accommodation or indeed live locally enough to not need accommodation. To be able to cater for these customers we are offering ‘Just Tickets’ packages but it does mean that the option to cherry pick events has been taken away for all of the reasons above. We appreciate that this solution may not suit everybody but it really is the only pragmatic solution for this year to ensure that the festival still goes ahead.

In closing – if you can’t make 2014s International Beatleweek we do hope to see you back in 2015. If you choose to buy a ‘Just Tickets’ or hotel package we thank you for your continued support and hope that you thoroughly enjoy the delights that IBW14 has in store for you.

 

Bill Heckle

Cavern Director