Corporate Festival in Harrogate

At the beginning of June, Stormont London headed up to the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate to kick off the summer season with a large scale corporate festival.

Although the weather was less than ideal, a large tipi was set up in the hotel’s garden,filled to the brim with hundreds of guests who didn’t let a little rain put a dampener on their annual company party.

Keeping in line with the festival’s country team, guests enjoyed a selection of delicious summer treats, including a whole roasted pig, flame-grilled burgers and other goodies!

For a true country experience, Pete’s Bluegrass Gang provided music for the first half of the day — this talented group expertly mixes country classics with current pop hits, incorporating banjo, guitar and double bass into their arrangements. They are a great themed throwback option who are guaranteed to make any event a success.

In order to make sure that the band sounded as good as possible, we used London Event Productions for AV support.

LEP also provided the stage for the band, as well as lighting around the marquee and the dance floor. Our compere for the evening and the company’s MD also relied on their slick sound system for announcements and speeches.

Pete and the boys even roped the clients into an impromptu hoedown — their stompin’, jump-jivin’ rhytms made everyone want to get up there and spin on the dance floor.

Guests also had a chance to have their picture taken in a greenscreen photo booth and created old-time ‘Wanted’ posters of themselves, like you would see in western movies. This was an additional fun touch to suit the theme of the event perfectly, while also providing a fresh spin on the standard photo booths you normally see at corporate parties. Guests left with a unique memento of the night that they can treasure for a long time.

However, the surprises did not stop there — as well as the bluegrass band, the clients also tasked us with finding and hiring an authentic Dolly Parton tribute act to serve as the headline performer and surprise guest.Lo and behold, we found her!

Our Dolly sang, smiled, posed, hosted and entertained the guests with all the energy, charm and charisma as the real Dolly herself! It’s safe to say that she went down a treat with the guests, with most of them ending up on the dancefloor — and in some cases, the stage itself — by the end of the night.

As Dolly herself would say: ‘You can’t have a rainbow without a little bit of rain’ — and even though we had plenty of rain at this particular event, it’s safe to say that the event turned out to be a massive success.We had so much fun working with such a fun, creative brief and we’re hoping for a repeat performance next year!

If you’d like to find out more about our entertainment options, or if you’d like to book the featured acts for an event please get in touch with us: 0207 686 2611 hello@stormont.com