The Zombies Ball
Poster for the first (and so far only) Zombies Ball in Totnes, October 2006.
On October 28th 2006 in a sleepy town in Devon we threw a huge and, even if I say so myself, quite spectacular party which is still one of the best parties I’ve ever been to and something I can hardly believe we pulled off.
The idea was simple: a party full of zombies in our local civic hall. Inspired by our love for zombie movies such as Dawn Of The Dead, Night Of The Living Dead, 28 Days Later and, of course, Shaun Of The Dead. We really just wanted to fill a room with zombies dancing wildly because we thought it was such a perfect theme for a Halloween party.
Paddy, Dom and I had been putting on great party nights as The Yard for a couple of years and were confident we could step it up a notch and produce something amazing. This was about two years into the era of social networks, and Myspace was the network of choice (in the UK at least). None of us had discovered Facebook yet, and so our party was promoted via our myspace page (to all of our 200 friends or whatever) and by sticking good old fashioned posters onto lamp posts, in shops, bars & cafe windows, or wherever we could get them around our hometown of Totnes.
We tried to make it the best party we could think of, transforming the civic hall into a kind of hell, with bodies hanging from the rafters (made from wetsuits stuffed with clothes and newspaper and dressed in shredded charity shop clothes to look like zombies) and a graveyard of tombstones in the downstairs bar. We had two bands (all in full zombie costume of course), a zombie freestlye BMX demo, zombie dance-off competition and anything else we could think of. Even the security guards were zombies, and if anybody turned up without makeup we had an obligatory makeup station (very few arrived without fancy dress). There were prizes for best dressed and a raffle with gear supplied by our contacts in the surf and snow industry.
On the morning of the event we had barely sold 100 tickets of our allowed 450, and were beginning to get very nervous. We had committed to bringing an 8 piece funk band down from Bristol (assembled specifically for the event by legends Dan Moore and Guy Calhoun), and had another band, DJ’s, security and all manner of things to pay for.
Of course we needn’t have worried, as people bought up all the tickets on the day and when I looked outside at 7pm there was a queue of gloriously gory zombies wiggling across the town square.
Amazingly our great friend Will Whipple surprised us by turning up with a photographic backdrop and camera and set up a portrait area by the doors so we have a wonderful document of some of the zombies in attendance.
Enjoy the photos below…Thanks Will!
