I was always obsessed with music. I would play, badly, in bands, go to all the gigs and festivals I could, and lie about my age as a teenager so I could DJ in clubs. I would have loved to have worked in music, but I left school at 14 and set up a building and decorating business. By my early 20s, my partner and I had bought a house and we had two young children, but I still wanted to be involved in music in some way.
In 2001, I went to the festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, where the lineup was curated by bands and artists. I was jealous. I thought I should either work at being in a band big enough to be invited to create our own lineup, or somehow try to create a festival myself. The latter seemed more doable. I came to that realisation after we had been watching the American indie rock band Yo La Tengo. I stood at the bar with my friend Jason, working out on the back of a cigarette packet how much it would cost. We thought it would be about £120,000. I looked around, and there were 1,500 or 2,000 people at the festival, so it seemed within my grasp. Before then, I’d been going to big festivals and I wouldn’t have had a clue how to put on something of that size.
Back at home in East Sussex, it felt like a drunken idea but I couldn’t shake it. For the next couple of years, every time I went to a smaller festival, I thought: “I could do this.” Eventually, after visiting another one in 2004, I went home and spent two weeks doing research, calling security firms and portable toilet companies. It felt like it could become a reality.
The stately homes and wedding venues I contacted all said they wouldn’t let us hold a festival. I Googled “festival site to rent”, and the only place that came up was Larmer Tree on the border of Wiltshire and Dorset. They said they’d be up for letting us do it if we could get the licence approval, so we had to get councillors on side. The social network Myspace had launched the previous year and I used it to contact bands. It was exciting to get responses – I heard from Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian and singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart. They didn’t seem as untouchable as I’d thought, and they were interested, which felt motivating. The record shop Rough Trade, where I was a regular customer, helped out with contacts.
My friend Sofia – one of many friends who helped – was an expert in getting into gigs for free and making contact with bands. We’d try to catch them when they were doing sound checks and I’d give them these mix CDs I’d made of the kind of festival we were trying to create, along with handwritten letters. We flew out to the South by Southwest festival in Texas, where you can meet the bands because it’s small and intimate. Then I got a call from someone saying: “What are you doing, contacting my band?” That’s how I found out what a booking agent was. It made it easier, because I realised there was a system, but there were also a few agents who wouldn’t put their trust in us. Some did, and we had to put deposits down for the bigger bands, but a lineup started to come together.
The first End of the Road festival was going to be in September 2006. By April, ticket sales were slow, and no matter how much we put into advertising, it didn’t pick up. I realised then that we were going to lose a lot of money. We kept on booking bigger names, but sales weren’t picking up. I hired a van and got eight friends together, and we drove around the country for a few weeks, dropping leaflets at any festival we could find.
Pretty quickly, I’d spent £150,000. We sold our house to cover some of it and the rest came from loans. There were so many moments where I nearly pulled out, but my pride was at stake – if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be able to be involved in music again. I went to see another friend and I convinced him to remortgage his house. I was borrowing money left, right and centre.
I worried about the weather and about making sure we had enough people for an atmosphere. We had sold 1,300 tickets, when we’d budgeted for 4,000, and we ended up giving away another 1,200 just to have enough people there. I knew we would be losing a lot of money – it ended up being about £350,000. I was 25, and if I had been older, I’d have been more cautious. I still had my decorating business, and if I worked really hard for five or six years, I should be able to pay everyone back, I thought.
It was stressful and at one point I was drinking every evening. Just over a week until the festival, I was on the site, driving across a field in the dark. I crashed into a fence, the car flipped over and was a write off. It was a wake-up call that I had to get it together.
On the day we opened, the first band played and I just burst into tears from the emotion and relief. It was finally happening. I remember being very tired and living off caffeine, but there was a buzz and a feeling of satisfaction at the same time, that I’d created this thing. I could see in people’s faces that it was giving them a moment of escape.
Lots of people said I should pull out, or take a year off to reset, but I felt that if we didn’t keep momentum, we’d never go back. The second year, we lost £50,000. By the fourth year, the festival had just about become profitable and I started to pay the debts back. All the stress and anxiety was worth it – I had created the festival I dreamed of. As with all good art, it nourished my soul – everything materialistic didn’t matter to me any more. I still get very excited when I discover a new band and for the last 20 years I’ve been lucky to follow my passion.
