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 ...
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