‘I puked virtually every morning’: inside the stressful life of a festival organiser

Fiona Stewart, the owner and managing director of Green Man festival in Wales, compares launching a festival to opening your own restaurant. You love eating out. You have superb taste. All your friends say you’re a great chef. How hard could it be? Harder than you could possibly imagine. “I have lost all the money I had in the world at least three times,” she says.

Sitting in Green Man’s airy London office, surrounded by posters and awards, she recounts the catastrophes. The first crisis came in 2008, a year after Stewart became MD. The company underwriting the ticket sales went under in the recession, taking all of Green Man’s money with it. Stewart cleaned out her savings, remortgaged her flat and borrowed money from family members and it still wasn’t enough. She was advised to sell Green Man to Festival Republic, owned by Live Nation, but “they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole”. Eventually, two months out, a group of contractors held a summit at Glastonbury and agreed to work on credit. Green Man survived.

In 2012, after Stewart bought out Green Man’s founders, the nightmare was appalling weather. Situated in Glanusk Park in Bannau Brycheiniog, formerly known as the Brecon Beacons, the festival is susceptible to freak downpours. It rained so hard that the bubble stall flooded and turned into a giant mass of bubbles. Green Man didn’t sell out that year, or the next. Rebranded and expanded, it thrived for a few years until the wrecking ball of the pandemic. “When we cancelled, there was a tsunami of sadness,” Stewart says.

Green Man had sold out that year, but lost most of the money it had already spent on deposits because contractors either couldn’t roll it over to another year or went out of business. Regular crew members lost their livelihoods. “We became like a helpdesk,” Stewart recalls. “It was wonderful that people could come to us but we were out of our depth.” In June 2021, with lockdown set to end, Stewart had to decide whether to risk announcing the festival for August, with no insurance in case of a fresh Covid surge. “It would normally take a year,” she says. “We had two months. It was a tremendous risk. As a company we would have been destroyed if it hadn’t gone ahead. I puked virtually every morning.”

You’re building a world. If people buy into it, there’s an emotional connection and it becomes something of cultural importance

Sam Kandel

On the morning the festival opened its gates, Stewart soothed nerves by booking Welsh drag artists in PPE to greet festival-goers before they took Covid tests. When the welcome tent was full, Anita Westmorland, working at the box office, stood up and cried: “Where have you been?” A number of people, Stewart included, burst into tears.

Running a festival is not for the faint of heart. John Rostron, CEO of the Association of Independent Festivals, compares it to owning a shop that you open for just four days a year. “There’s no rehearsal for a festival,” says Stewart. “It’s an enormous project that has to work.”

The industry is in an especially precarious state due to the triple whammy of Covid, Brexit and inflation. Many suppliers sold off stock during the pandemic or folded altogether, making equipment more expensive and harder to procure. Staging, fencing, security and so on all cost more, while the cost of touring, particularly for international artists, has risen so sharply that artist fees have doubled since 2019. For festivals that rolled over tickets until after the pandemic, 2019 budgets collided with 2022 costs, meaning that some lost money even if they sold out.

According to a 2021 House of Commons select committee report, there were more than 900 festivals in the UK in 2019, attracting 5.2 million people and adding £1.76bn to the economy. The AIF has calculated that 96 did not return in 2022, 36 closed or went on hiatus in 2023 and 43 have already shut up shop this year, bringing the overall number down to about 750. The vast majority are independent, although the top end of the market, bar Green Man, Glastonbury and Womad, is dominated by the corporate giants: Live Nation (Reading/Leeds, Download, Latitude, Wireless) and AEG Presents (BST Hyde Park, All Points East, Eden Sessions). These behemoths have the clout to cut better deals with artists and contractors than the indies and the resilience to absorb losses. Rostron dubs Live Nation “the school bully”.

Last November, I spoke to the organisers of three very different festivals – Green Man, Manchester’s 80,000-capacity dance and pop weekender Parklife and Krankenhaus, a 1,500-capacity “micro-festival” in Cumbria – to find out what it takes. The first thing to know is that it is a year-round job. It would be nice to think that after the last reveller has gone home, the last stage dismantled, the last piece of litter cleared away, festival organisers can congratulate themselves on a job well done and take a few weeks off to decompress. But that is not how it works at all.

“There’s not really any time off,” says Parklife’s co-founder Sam Kandel. (Launched as the Mad Ferret festival in 2007, it was renamed in 2010 and is now majority owned by Live Nation.) The team spend weeks sorting out bills, taxes and the return of equipment. Come the autumn, festivals reserve the next year’s equipment, commission bespoke structures and wrangle the lineup into place.

Local residents chased me across the common saying: We don’t want your syringes on our land!

Fiona Stewart

Parklife’s team began investigating possible 2025 headliners back in 2022. “Artists are booking tours two, three years ahead,” says Kandel. “Then you get into the offering process, which takes a long time. It’s not just about money. It’s more to do with scheduling. They don’t want to commit to something they might have to unpick. A lot of it is a waiting game.” Festivals across Europe have a double-sided relationship, collaborating to bring over international artists for multiple appearances but then competing over specific dates. “Sometimes it’s absolute torture and sometimes it’s slightly less painful. You never get everything you want.”

This year’s Parklife headliners, on 8 and 9 June, were Disclosure (for the third time) and Doja Cat, with the likes of Peggy Gou, Four Tet and Becky Hill filling out the bill. With a core demographic of 18- to 25-year-olds and no camping, Parklife is many people’s gateway festival. “You’re building a little world,” says Kandel. “If people buy into it and you create an emotional connection, it becomes something of cultural importance rather than just a day in a park.”

Krankenhaus, launched by the rock band Sea Power and their manager David Taylor five years ago, also builds its own little world. Staged at Muncaster Castle in Cumbria, it plays to the band’s love of history and nature, with a literary tent, steam train, bird of prey displays and fell-walking. “This is not a normal festival,” says Taylor. “People say it’s almost like a fantastic family wedding weekend.” The lineup also cleaves to a certain aesthetic. “Most people are coming to see Sea Power. Short of me getting the spoons out and doing the hopscotch, people will come. We’ve never gone down the big-name route.”

The first Krankenhaus, in 2019, was put together in just four months as a “glorified Sea Power gig” with 400 fans and a lineup consisting of the band’s friends, including the poet Simon Armitage and the snooker star turned DJ Steve Davis. That lost money, as did its 2022 comeback. “Basically, it cost more than we thought,” says Taylor. “We were a bit like: ‘Oh, it’ll be fine on the night!’ Maybe in hindsight we were a bit too cocky.” But the performers and fans seemed to love its remoteness, intimacy and beauty so much that Krankenhaus kept going. With tighter organisation, larger capacity and an Arts Council grant, it finally made a profit last year.

While Taylor is relatively new to the game, Stewart is a three-decade festival veteran who remembers when the average festival was “a shitty auditorium in a field”. She started working at Glastonbury in 1995, when she was in her mid-30s, and moved on to the boutique alternative and dance festival The Big Chill in 2000, at the very start of the festival boom. When she was preparing to move the festival to Lulworth Castle, Dorset, in 2001, the local residents behaved “like the Vikings were coming. They chased me across the common saying: ‘We don’t want your syringes on our land!’”

Still rooted in the old carnival trade, the business was an overwhelmingly male concern. “There were literally no women I could talk to,” says Stewart. She remembers meeting a regular supplier in the pub and pretending to call her male boss at the payphone in order to seal the deal. Gruellingly long hours were not just expected but celebrated. “I didn’t get any sleep at all. The security used to give me tips to keep awake: don’t eat carbs, don’t rest. Now I don’t think it’s cool to be up all night. I think it’s a sign of bad management.” She is still an early riser, though: “I’ve had so many years of waking up to a crisis that I can’t sleep in any more.”

We’re sourcing what you source to build a city: plumbing, tents, lighting, generators, cleaning, recycling

Fiona Stewart

As the first boutique festival, The Big Chill became a font of advice for newcomers like Green Man, which began in 2003 as a 300-person one-day event at Craig-y-Nos Castle. Stewart was already co-running Green Man when she left The Big Chill in 2007. “I developed something that I didn’t own and then I lost control of it and it wasn’t working,” she says. “I was watching a festival die.” The Big Chill was bought by Festival Republic in 2009 and closed two years later.

Stewart brought to Green Man a more horizontal, collegiate, progressive way of working, and a broader offering. In addition to the music, it has a children’s area, a book tent and a science and wellness space called Einstein’s Garden, evolving each year in response to audience feedback. This year’s festival sold out in two hours last September, six months before the lineup was announced, with 42,000 people still waiting in the queue.

“The lineup is very important but people love the other bits as well,” she says. “It’s one of the last places in a polarised world where you can get everyone together, different ages and backgrounds, to have a mutual experience. A festival should be a feast of delight. If it’s not, then you’re not delivering.”

I reconnected with Stewart and Taylor in the spring, after the lineups had been announced. Green Man’s headliners are Big Thief, Sampha, Jon Hopkins and Sleaford Mods, while the Krankenhaus bill is topped by BC Camplight, Nadine Shah and (of course) Sea Power. Assembling a lineup is a fiendish, ever-shifting puzzle, which has to take into account budget, availability and crowdflow throughout months of uncertainty. While waiting for last-minute confirmations, Taylor was juggling seven or eight alternative running orders. “It was all by the skin of our teeth,” he says. “We’re battling other festivals who are offering more money but at the 11th hour it fell into place.”

Spring is the time for finalising the running order, recruiting bar staff, security and volunteers, booking accommodation, liaising with the local council and making deals for food, beer and additional infrastructure. In April, Stewart holds a managers’ day in Camden Town in London, where 70 core team members meet to discuss logistical issues and new ideas before retiring to her flat for a party. Green Man hires 5,000 workers, 600 stewards and 500 litter-pickers.

E ach festival has its own distinct challenges, shaped by size, location and audience. Krankenhaus can make use of existing facilities at Muncaster Castle, which is a popular year-round tourist attraction, whereas Green Man, says Stewart, is “a city for 25,000 people which we literally build from grass and then have to dismantle at the end. We’re sourcing what you source to build a city: plumbing, tents, lighting, generators, cleaning, recycling … ” Its remoteness means that it doesn’t have a curfew, while Parklife’s urban setting, Heaton Park, requires constant negotiations with the council, police, transport providers and local residents.

“You’re setting up shop in a residential neighbourhood,” says Kandel. “Managing that disruption is a huge part of what we do. Obviously, any time you have 80,000 people in one place it’s never going to be perfect. They’re human beings, not robots. But we do everything we can to be good neighbours.” He says proudly that Parklife has only crashed its 11pm curfew once, and only briefly, when Frank Ocean overran in 2017. Licences are delicate things.

So, too, are budgets, now that the pandemic has squeezed festivals’ financial headroom. In 2019, according to the AIF’s John Rostron, a festival could survive by selling 85% of its tickets; now the benchmark is more like 98%. Festivals are forced to do less or charge more. In 2019, a Green Man ticket would set you back £189 and Krankenhaus cost £125; now they are £260 and £190 respectively. Compared to the cost of going to see several bands individually, festivals are still tremendous value, but organisers worry about excluding less well-off fans. This year, Parklife chose to streamline the bill rather than jack up prices. “We’ve set a ticket price and worked backwards from there,” says Kandel.

The AIF is lobbying the government for a temporary reduction in VAT on tickets from 20% to 5% until budgets stabilise. Festival owners are all gamblers, says Rostron. “Post-Covid, they’re holding a really bad set of cards. What I’m trying to do is give them a better hand and the rest is up to them. Without intervention it will get worse before it gets better.”

Even in those final weeks when lineups have been set, tickets have been sold and staff have been hired, a lot can go wrong. As the weekend draws near, so does the possibility of a headliner dropping out at the last minute for health reasons, technology failing or the rain falling with a vengeance, which can damage equipment, suppress bar sales and shake morale. Krankenhaus has already experienced all three. “You’re in the realm of anything can happen,” says Taylor, though he remains upbeat. “Sea Power fans are fairly outdoorsy types so it would have to be force-eight gales and monsoons.” On the eve of the festival, the whole team sit down for a meal in Muncaster’s sheep barn, “knowing we’ve done everything we can. It’s the calm before the storm.”

Related: Borrow a tent and bring food: how to cut the cost of UK summer music festivals

It is reasonable to wonder why so many people continue to be drawn to running festivals. The job requires not just a passion for music and a brain for organisation but an ironclad stomach for risk and stress. “You have to go into it with a do-or-die mentality,” says Kandel. “It’s a bit of a crazy endeavour. Like with anything you do for 20 years, you have moments when you question why you’re doing it, but I can’t actually imagine doing something else.”

Next year, Stewart will have been in the business for 30 years. What drives her?

“There is a moment before the festival opens when it’s like the whole world is holding its breath,” she says. “Everything’s done, everything’s beautiful, everyone’s ready. It’s such a magical moment. I’ll never, ever get bored of it.”

Green Man takes place 15-18 August, and Krankenhaus 23-25 August. Parklife will return in 2025.