What first inspired the idea of a festival in a zoo?
Matt Dice: “We all come from a promotions background. We’ve done events like the dance weekenders down at Camber Sands and I used to run a drum’n’bass night called Breakology. We talked about doing something on a larger scale, outdoors, and started looking at venues. We went down to the animal park and immediately realised we’d found a beautiful venue, it’s absolutely amazing. Then we started talking about our concept and the whole Zoo Thousand thing and it rolled from there really.” VF: It’s quite a novel idea having a festival surrounded by animals, isn’t it slightly dangerous? MD: “The actual gig is taking place in the Grassland’s Arena, which is away from the animals, but customers have just a short walk into the zoo grounds. We don’t want people worrying that animals are going to get affected or that there are going to be sound systems next to animal enclosures, because that’s not going to happen. It’s far enough away from the animals but close enough that people can go and have a
