ORGANISERS of the biggest music festival ever held in Sussex have said they will consider carefully before returning again next year.

SJM Concerts, organisers of the Wild Life Festival held at Shoreham Airport over the weekend, hailed the two-day musical celebration as a success.

SJM director Rob Ballantine told The Argus that despite positive feedback from residents and revellers alike, his team would “take it slowly” before committing to a second festival in 2016.

He said: “People keep asking us but we want to take it slowly and in a considered way. We’ll sit down with the partners and agencies and see what their thoughts are.

“I went round Shoreham and Lancing on Sunday and spoke to the locals, and the feedback was positive so I’m happy with that.

“But we’ll listen to what other residents have to say, we’ll canvas them for their opinions and see how it goes.”

Mr Ballantine, whose firm SJM runs the likes of V Festival, praised the Wild Life crowd as one of the best audiences he had ever worked with.

He said: “The highlight has been the audience. We work with some very difficult and challenging audiences around the country, but the crowd at Wild Life was just so enthusiastic, happy, well behaved and compliant – and they love to party. They’re brilliant.”

Asked what lessons his team had learned over the weekend, the SJM boss said: “We learnt a lot about the bus operation on Saturday. We had a load lined up at the Amex waiting for the students to come down en-masse and they didn’t materialise.

“We had much more demand in Hove than we ever thought, so we switched it around and it paid off.

“We would like to thank festival partners and the local authorities for a great team effort.

“However, most of all we would like to thank all the residents in the vicinity of the Wild Life Festival as, understandably, they had major concerns at our proposal.”

Gerard Rosenberg, chairman of the Shoreham Society, said he was concerned the location would not cope with a suggested 70,000 capacity crowd next year. However, he said: “We had grounds for concern this time round but it went much better than we all feared.”

Neil Parkin, leader of Adur District Council, said on the whole the event ran smoothly but said it was too early to say if the festival should return next year.

He said: “I am pleased with how it all went off.

“The traffic problems that were predicted didn’t happen. There were some problems with buses on Saturday night but these were sorted out by Sunday.

“The music was noisy on Saturday but it did depend the way the wind blew.

“We had 18 complaints logged with the council on Saturday and I received three directly.

“We are planning a wash-up of the whole thing to see how it went next week. Our licensing officer was on site all weekend and is still working on her report.”