David Munns, chairman of the MITS Award committee, said Eavis was being honoured "as the creator of the world-renowned Glastonbury Festival, the largest greenfield festival in the world, attended by over 175,000 each year and raising millions of pounds for charities...Through his tireless dedication, Glastonbury has become an important landmark in the cultural life of this country, with its influence spreading well beyond these shores."
The Music Industry Trusts Award, now in its 23rd year, has raised over £4.5m for Nordoff Robbins and the BRIT Trust. Previous recipients of the award include Sir George Martin, Sir Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and Annie Lennox.
Going Underground - The Cavern Club in Liverpool is taking the Hard Rock Cafe to court in a battle over who owns the rights to use the Cavern name in the US. The club became legendary as the home of the Beatles in the early 1960s. The Hard Rock Cafe chain filed for the Cavern Club trademark in the US in 1994 and has its own Cavern Club in Boston. The Liverpool Cavern's Dave Jones said it was "an outrageous insinuated claim to an association with fame that has nothing whatsoever to do with them".
The Beatles played at the original Cavern 292 times as they were on the road to stardom between 1961-63. But the underground club was filled in after it closed in 1973. A replica was built on the site in 1984 and now attracts 750,000 Beatles fans every year.
Hearing Aids - Ambassador Theatre Group and the National Theatre will be among the first organisations that will trial new technology, aimed at increasing access for deaf and hard of hearing audiences and providing more accurate automated captioning. Stagetext, a charity that provides theatre captioning services, has won around £125,000 from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts. The fund supports ideas that use digital technology to engage audiences in new ways. It was awarded to Stagetext to fund the development of its CaptionCue project, which will develop a system that would no longer require a person to operate the captioning systems in theatres. Instead, CaptionCue will use voice recognition software to generate accurate automated captioning.
The NT and ATG will join English Touring Theatre in acting as development partners, offering spaces to allow the technology to be tested. The project is led by Roger Graham, who hopes that the technology developed will expand the amount of shows available to deaf and hard of hearing people and improve the accuracy of automatic systems.
"The idea is to try and output the lines absolutely simultaneously to them being spoken so our client audience can get what is as close as possible to the experience that anyone else gets at the theatre. Right now, it's quite hard to get that sort of sensitivity without a manual captioner there", Graham told The Stage.
Get Back - The Beatles show Let It Be is to return to the West End for an 11-week run. The show originally ran in the West End in September 2012 at the Prince of Wales, before moving to the Savoy Theatre in January 2013. It has since toured the UK and will now return to London, playing at the Garrick Theatre from 9 July to 21 September. Jamie Hendry, the show's producer, said: "I am delighted that Nimax Theatres has worked with us
