SUMMER FESTIVALS
DON’T EXPECT TO MAKE MONEY This is Micklethwait’s first piece of advice. Boyle agrees immediately: ‘If someone had told me the situation I’d be in after the first Kelburn festival or if I’d had too much advice, I wouldn’t have done it!’ Thankfully both have never let a little thing like potentially massive debt prevent their great parties. Also in both cases, a seed of an idea was planted by a previous event – The Insider came about when the nearby Outsider festival was cancelled in 2009 with weeks to spare and Micklethwait decided to fill the space left with something ‘smaller and cuter’. Kelburn Garden Party was inspired by the ramshackle unofficial parties that took place during the Graffiti Project, which turned one face of Boyle’s ancestral home into a colourful riot of Brazilian street art. Before they knew it the two were both tackling the planning of ‘proper’ festivals, with all the attendant licensing woes, band booking and portaloo count deliberations. DO OWN A CASTLE ‘This is a fallacy I never understand,’ says Micklethwait, ‘why festivals build huge and elaborate sets one year, and then take them down, destroy
them and change the theme for next year. I guess we’re quite lucky in that we can just leave stuff here, so every year we just add to the infrastructure.’ (Interesting fact: that infrastructure includes a ‘mad, Gothic-looking wooden structure’ lovingly known as ‘Medieval Knievel’.) A good site can also provide inspiration, as Kelburn’s wooded glades, waterfalls and psychedelic castle do for the Garden Party. DON’T COUNT ON THE WEATHER ‘From seeming faintly amusing at about 5am, by 7am the comedy value of a month’s worth of rain in a single night had decidedly worn off,’ remembers Boyle about 2010’s notorious Saturday night monsoon at Kelburn. ‘Tents were getting blown off the campers while they slept and rolling across the field like tumbleweed. Along with the first aid tent getting blown away, our second stage being unusable, a river running through the dance tent and a waterfall flooding over the gutters onto the main stage, panic stations were upon us.’ The List can vouch for this, having had to replace sodden trousers with a new pair bought from Largs Red Cross on the Sunday.
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26 May–23 June 2011 THE LIST 21