The Friendly Festival 

NORTHINGS catches up with festival director JOE GIBBS as the Tartan Heart Festival at Belladrum moves into its third and biggest incarnation this month, with Echo and the Bunnymen, Embrace, The Wonder Stuff, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Biffy Clyro, Martha Wainwright, The Automatic and Arlo Guthrie headlining a much expanded bill.

NORTHINGS: That time again, Joe, and another big rise in the scale of the festival this year?

JOE GIBBS: That’s right – we have double the number of artists this year, and we have five music stages as against three last year.

NORTHINGS: How much further can the festival expand?

JG: I think we are getting near the limit now. We wouldn’t want to make it much bigger. Every year we try to introduce new things and new amenities, and there is a huge amount of work involved on the planning and production side of things.

The festival has always been conceived and designed as a kind of boutique festival, if you like. The model I have always had in mind is actually the Cambridge Folk Festival, which is about 12,000 people, but is seen as a very prestigious event. It would be nice to try to get into that league.
 
NORTHINGS: How close are you?

JG: We are looking at something like 11,000 people each day this year, although that doesn’t mean 22,000 individuals – we find that the vast majority of people are booking for both days.

Tartan Heart has been described as the friendliest festival in Britain, and we are very anxious to keep that feel to it

NORTHINGS: That has been the pattern, has it?

JG: Yes, and one of the things we noticed in the comments that we got after the last couple of events was that a lot of people coming to Belladrum had never been to a festival before. I think it takes a while to people to feel their way into the festival experience, and it’s for us to learn to build up the experience for them as well.

NORTHINGS: There seems to be a greater emphasis on rock and pop artists this year, or is that just a function of the general increase in size?

JG: I think that impression may be down partly to the bigger number of artists, yes. There is still quite a heavy Scottish bias. We would love to have been able to programme Scottish headliners, but that is actually very difficult just now. At the level of bands that we can actually afford to bring here, there seems to be a bit of a dearth at the moment.

The top echelon, your Franz Ferdinands and so on, are out of our reach financially, and once you get beyond those, there aren’t so many bands in the middle order, so to speak, so it is quite difficult to find a Scottish band that could headline the programme.

One of the other big problems for us is that T in the Park place exclusion clauses for the summer period on the bands that appear there, so they are not contractually able to perform at any other Scottish festivals. I think that is a bit unfriendly, to be honest, but we have to work with that restriction as well.

NORTHINGS: Are you happy with the balance of the programme?

JG: In general terms I would probably like to have had a bit more in the way of World Music, and again, that is mainly down to expense with travel and so on. It is a side of the festival I would like to grow in the future, though. It is a strong line-up, and it includes quite a lot of miscellaneous, hard to classify stuff, so there is a fair bit of variety and a little rogue element in there as well as the familiar names.

NORTHINGS: So what is new in the mix this year?

JG: Well, we have the BBC Radio Scotland Seedlings Stage devoted to emerging bands, with at least 16 bands from all across Scotland performing there. That provides a focal point for new talent in the festival, although I would hasten to add that there is plenty of new talent playing on other stages in the event as well.

We also have a kind of performing arts-cum-cabaret tent this year, the Venus Flytrap Palais. We’ll have cabaret, theatre, some left-field music, folk music – an eclectic mixture.
 
NORTHINGS: You have always been keen on a bit of theatre in the programme, haven’t you?

JG: Very much so, and I think having a theatrical element broadens the experience for people coming to the festival, especially if they are here for both days. That whole side has increased this year, as has the kids’ side, including lots of workshops and a big dragon procession on the Saturday afternoon. A lot of people want to go to festivals and enjoy a day with their kids. I don’t feel that is really on offer elsewhere in Scotland, and my own preference is for an event with a wide appeal rather than one focused on a specific age range or style of music.

We have some quirky sideshows as well, like Miniscule of Sound, which is the world’s smallest club, and we have secured some funding for the Green Machine, which is a waste recycling project that will be running at the festival itself, and will involve an environmental artist working with children to create art work from the waste. We’ll also have the Eco Police circulating and reminding people of their responsibilities! We are looking at pay as you go showers and a barber as well. There will be an awful lot for people to do this year as well as listen to the music.

NORTHINGS: Do you differentiate between Friday and Saturday in terms of the kind of artists you programme, or are you looking for a similar kind of balance each day?

JG: There is usually a slightly harder edge to the headliner on the Friday, but being a child of the 60s I am always keen to see an artist from that era included, hence Lee ‘Scratch Perry’ and Arlo Guthrie this year. We had planned to have Desmond Dekker, but sadly he passed away, and we were very lucky to get Scratch.

We do try to get a balance of music on both days, so that you have a chance to hear the kind of music you are interested in on either day, but what we are very much hoping will happen – and we know does happen – is that we will get people coming along to hear Embrace, say, and catching something else that they really enjoy, but had maybe never come across before.

NORTHINGS: A festival like this is the perfect place to do that, isn’t it?

JG: I think so, yes, and that is one of the great things about a festival. Again, it is down to broadening the experience for the people who come.

NORTHINGS: Presumably you are all still on a steep learning curve, this being only year three of the festival?

JG: Absolutely, and these are the hard years, where a lot of time and energy and expense is still going into building up the actual logistics of the event and reaching a certain level, and I’m hoping that in future we will be able to concentrate even more on the artistic side, and develop it even further. I would also like to be able to add in a bit of jazz here and there in the future, and maybe a bit of classical music at well.

NORTHINGS: You were also involved in mounting the Rock Ness event in June, which seemed to go well. There is already talk flying around about inviting big name artists next year – do you have any concerns about keeping the identity of the two events distinct if Rock Ness becomes more performer rather than DJ-oriented?

JG: Being involved in both I am very concerned that they do retain a very distinct identity, and I think Belladrum will always be a more family-oriented, performing arts-oriented event, harking back more to the Glastonbury or Cambridge model of less corporate festivals.

Rock Ness is a different type of event as it was positioned this year, and although we haven’t decided yet what to do with it in the future, if indeed anything, I think it is likely that we will carry on, and we will want to keep it distinct, I think it is more of a youth-oriented event than Belladrum. Tartan Heart has been described as the friendliest festival in Britain, and we are very anxious to keep that feel to it.
 
NORTHINGS: For people coming new to it this year, remind us how Tartan Heart came about in the first place?

JG: The idea came from a lifelong obsession with music on my part. I had been involved with a fund-raising project through a compilation album I produced with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull when he was still at Strathaird, called ‘Lion in the North’. He donated tracks, as did other people, and he produced it, and it raised quiet a lot of money for the Highland Hospice.

I wanted to go on and do some kind of festival after that, but the hospice changed their funding methods, and I was no longer involved with that. Then I was recruited by Maggie’s Cancer Care to do the same sort of thing. I felt this was a great opportunity, because Maggie’s is actually quiet a hip charity, with a consciously contemporary feel that I thought would fit well with a festival.

NORTHINGS: And you had a ready-made potential venue in the Italian Gardens on your property at Belladrum.

JG: That was the other main impetus. The Italian Gardens is a kind of natural outdoor arena, but it had been crumbling into a rather over-romantic ruin, and we needed something that would provide the impetus to do them up, so it all came together for that first event in 2004.

NORTHINGS: That inaugural event was a one-day affair – why did you decide to move to two days last year?

JG: First of all, around 20% of our audience last year came from outside the Highlands, and it is clearly more attractive to them if they are going to come all that way to offer them a second day. It makes more sense in economic terms as well, being able to spread production costs over two days.

The principal thing, though, was that there is so much great music around that we felt the event could easily stand the expansion, and it seemed a shame to have to turn lots of great artists away. We found a format we felt worked, but what happened then was that even more people got in touch, so we still had to turn some away, and ended up with a fringe as well.

(The Tartan Heart Festival runs on 11-12 August, 2006, at the Belladrum estate, near Beauly)

© Kenny Mathieson, 2006

Link

• Tartan Heart Festival