THE ORGANISERS of Scotland's largest indoor music festival have expressed their "frustration" after postponing the event again.

Terminal V festival, an electronic music festival in Edinburgh, was originally due to take place before the pandemic hit and has been postponed multiple times.

It was set to finally go ahead over the course of two days during the Halloween weekend.

However, with only a month to go the organisers recently had to postpone the event yet again after local authorities claimed there would be a higher risk of Covid infection with the event being indoors.

Based in the Royal Highland centre near Edinburgh airport, Terminal V was essentially sold-out with only a select number of tickets left and as many as 40,000 people over the course of two days.

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Organisers of the music festival Derek Martin and Simon McGrath said that they are "devastated" with the postponement, but also highlighted that there are economic benefits that were lost with its cancelation.

Mr McGrath said: “It’s a difficult situation to take in, and not because there are outdoor festivals like TRNSMT happening, but there are huge indoor events happening down in England.

“Letting ticket holders know was devastating for us as people have been looking forward to this event for two years now so it was very personal for us and people were not expecting it because the reaction on social media was fearsome.

“We’ve been engaging heavily with local authorities, and everyone is well aware of how significant it is to postpone this event.

“This festival has become a bit of a destination event. We were expecting at least 20,000-25,000 people from outside Scotland to attend and with that you could see up to 10,000 hotel bookings in Edinburgh.”

On top of the possibility of Terminal V’s ticketholders flocking to Edinburgh for the weekend, the pair also mentioned the number of jobs that were lined up for the event and how they think it could impact peoples plans for work.

Mr Martin added: “The knock-on effects are slightly hard to bear. The amount of different companies and people who are involved in the operation is vast and I think that can be overlooked sometimes.

“To highlight the range of jobs it creates, from the local supply and trade to the catering and bar staff, and event staff and even just workers transporting people to the event.

“There really is massive local economy benefits to events like this going ahead.”

Although the reasoning for the festivals October cancellation was due its location being in-doors and the covid transmission would be at risk of being higher, festivals like riverside and TRNSMT only went ahead last month.

TRNSMT welcomed an estimated 50,000 people on each of its three days, whilst riverside festival went ahead a few miles away on the same weekend.

The Edinburgh homegrown festival started out small and has steadily grown into one of the UK’s largest electronic music festivals. According to the organisers 95 per cent of the acts have already confirmed there place at Terminal V’s postponed date in April.

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However, not all is lost for some festival goers as a makeshift consolation event has been put in place to help soften the blow of yet another postponement. A two-day event has been set up at the Edinburgh 02 Academy on November 13 and 14, but the scale of audience will obviously be far less than originally anticipated crowd.

Mr Martin added: “It is more so a softener for people who have been waiting for this event for two years, because we wanted to give them something.

"All ticket holders for Terminal V will qualify for priority access to these tickets. They are of course very limited, so will be first come first served.”

 

 

Terminal V will now go ahead in April with its full capacity of 40,000 electronic music lovers set to attend.

With 95 per cent of the original acts confirmed, the pair have promised that there will be many new additions included and the full line-up is expected this month.