How ambitious should you be?

Everything about organising this is quantifiable EXCEPT how many people will buy tickets. It is a COMPLETE unknown. That affects the budget which affects what sort of festival you can put on.

The realisation that you can't have everything that you want - last night we downgraded from two stages to one and the whole thing moved back into the comfort zone, but it is easy to get carried away.

We have a certain amount of money that we are prepared to lose on this event. This amount is calculated to just pass the 'death bed' test. This is a test used often by our friend Wilf. Wilf (nickname) is a local farmer who puts most of his life's decisions to the 'death bed' test. Basically when that day comes do you wish that you'd done X thing, or not - most things pass. Wilf is going to be put in charge of procurement as he spends a large % of his leisure time on ebay, buying bicycle attachments. He has the most bonkers bike rig you'll ever see which can accommodate himself and 4 kids under 7, I'll try to get a photo of it. Anyway an obsession with ebay and a list from me off desirable things and a year to find them should pay off. I've not asked him yet.

I'm in charge of marketing this. In charge of parting 500 or so unknown folks with £30 (or so.) One reason for doing a blog, other than therapy and to avoid paying work, is to have some marketing material upfront, a year ahead. I did just notice that a person I don't know has been reading it, god knows how they found it (do tell!)

Father-in-law has a field or two adjacent to the A1, I'm thinking that a banner or two on the side of the road would reach a lot of people. 'They' say you need to hit people 3 times with a message (in this case exposure to the festival) before they act, not sure how true this is...

We do need representatives within large organisations to champion us, like hospitals, councils etc.. Perhaps for a free ticket after reaching so many ticket sales.

Bit random this post, sorry bout that. That's the Guardian put off.

Smithy and Kate whitter on as I'm writing this. I let go of the bull's horns, no one notices. It is our second festival meeting, the aforementioned 'project footing'. It has been the hottest day here I can remember.

I'm sure that when Michael Eaves started Glastonbury that he didn't have 3 laptops on the table. I'm sure that he didn't have trouble getting an excel document off OpenOffice on Linux onto Windows either.

We are at the moment doing the organising quite formally, and rather business like. We're writing down all the areas of festival organising activity, the 'workstreams'. I suppose it's better to have a list of jobs now, a year before F-day and slowly add to it as new tasks occur to you.

Sand pits, graffiti walls, men's urinals, business link - more public sector. Lots of brain storming. I couldn't remember the phrase 'brain storming' (doh!) and ask. Smithy tells me that the phrase is no longer politically correct due to offending people with epilepsy...

Surely if you put on a second festival it will be SO much easier. We put on small shows at a local art centre style venue in Thirsk. They are now pretty slick, we're into double figures, everyone knows their roles and they are SMOOOOOTH. We've had artists like Boo Hewerdine, Miles Hunt, The GroanBox boys. We're hoping to get some of these guys back for the Deer Shed to play the second acoustic stage. We're having two stages we think. Our friend Claire is a live music agent and has agreed to help us book the main stage, especially if we take some of her bands. This is the big coup from Kate's trip down to London last week - as it is a new festival having someone with some clout booking bands brilliant.

I'm starting to feel ill, could be the plastic chocolate swiss roll that Smithy has brought.

Another friend Chrissie and I were talking about how at some festivals the best and most memorable moments are in the camping areas after hours. Certainly the music itself is taking up 1% of head space at the moment.

We discuss wine tasting, celebrity talks, tugs of war and creating lanes in the fields by mowing the grasses just prior to F-day.

Smithy is in charge of the Health and Safety plan. I wonder how long he can keep up this level of enthusiam and usefulness.

Our friend Oliver Smith works in construction as a project manager. As I'm called Oliver I'll refer to him as Smithy, I'm often called Jonsey for a similar reason.

Smithy is a dear friend having gone to school with Kate, and one of my best Yorkshire mates. We share lots of interests including playing music and mountain biking. We both played in 'Education' a band who at the pinnacle of their success got played on Radio 1 in the middle of the night by someone standing in who no ones ever heard of. Thanks for that, whatever your name was.

Smithy always talks about 'putting things onto a project footing', semi tongue in cheek.

Smithy, Kate and I sat around our kitchen table trying to make a start. Smithy asked me if I had ever used PowerProject. Being quite aux fait with Micro$oft's output I assumed that PowerPoint + MSProject = PowerProject. Smithy apologised, we were off to a good start.

Smithy talked about workstreams. Kate looked worried. A worksteam is a list of connected jobs, a 'to do' list broken down into sections. One for SITE, one for PRODUCTION, CATERING etc.... The idea is that once you have a workstream you can assign it to someone (or yourself) to do. Time will tell...

Kate has always been a fantastic organiser, and talent used as a teenager in her Mum's catering company. Smithy is a fantastic mediator, once bridging a seemingly unbridgable gap between Jim, Education's drummer, and myself after our first rehearsal where I told Jim exactly what to hit and when, and he came away thinking that I was at best a middle class twat. With some justification I hassen to add. (Jim btw is an important person in the whole shebang and is likely to be incharge of managing the festival site. A man 'who can'. A trait often found in the sons of farmers.)

Kate can hold the whole thing in her head. Unfortuately once we had written down all the aspects of organising a festival it was clear that one person could not. Organising a festival is a MASSIVE undertaking to do well as you can imagine. The thing is that organising a festival for 500 is not that different from organising one for 5000, it just scales up, but you've still got to hire toilets and generators, just fewer of them.

We have a massive document called THE EVENT SAFETY GUIDE published by the health and safety executive. It is the bible of putting on a festival and can be used, according to itself, to put on any sized festival including Glasto style. It has equations for working out how many toilets you need, with some interesting variables and doubtful results. It has been contributed to by The Mean Fiddler and other 'heavy' festival organisers.

We talked about having a agenda for meetings but worried that this degree of organisation might kill off the green shots of interest from 'The Daltons'. Gasp. (more on them later)

We have been to see Harrogate county council about getting a licence. If you have over 500 people on site you need one. If you have less than 500 you can go nuts. The 500 includes everyone not just punters, so we need a licence.

We are aiming at 500 to 1000 punters.

The folks at Harrogate were very helpful. I have a pretty dim view of the public sector since working in Wakefield council for a month on an IT project. One woman got compassionate leave when her cat got cancer (!) and spent 40 minutes watering all the spider plants in the office using a small jar (requiring a mental number of trips back to the tap)

So we had a meeting with 4 council officials. It was constructive, they were lovely and positive and pleased that we had though to go and see them 12 months in advance rather than 12 weeks in advance. They representated Health and Safety, noise pollution and the licencing departments. The sheer number of them did seem to indicate that they were all sitting about waiting for a couple to call to organise a festival. For once I felt that we'd had some value from our £2500 pa council tax bill. Rest assured that whenever you fancy putting on a festival on a whim there is a small army at Harrogate council waiting for your call.

We don't need to worry too much about the licence until early in the new year.

What is the term for someone paying to go to a festival? Punter infers someone paying for sex (or is that just me) Festival go-er is lacking in imagination.

I'm supposed to be building Damien Dempsey's new web site, but I'm somewhat distracted by this and ease of the BlogEngine.NET install on my web server (good work boys!)

I'm Oliver 38 year old fella with own web production company which consists of me. Some call it free-lancing, I call it having my own company coz it sounds better. I don't go so far as to answer the phone in different voices (reminding me of the hotel Hells Bells in Carry on Abroad) www.digred.com

My wife is Kate 36, she has always worked in the music biz since leaving school, never earning more than £20k pa as she will tell people who immediately assume she is some jumped up high roller. Kate works with me from home, we have a nice office in our house and a helper for Kate, Rachel. Kate and Rachel are music biz administrators for various clients - record companies, publishers, management companies - all pretty small outfits.

We are in North Yorkshire, God's own county of course, we're not religious.

We moved from London in 2000. I used to be a recording engineer, working with some quite big names whilst not actually being very good. I did an M.Sc at UCL in computer science which ultimately lead me to being sat here, not working on Damo's web site.

The village where we live is where Kate grew up on the farm. My Father-in-law Tim is a retired farmer. It's all dropping into place now isn't it! What do farmer's have. Fields and knackered old Manatoo fork-lifts.

So we live in a barn conversion, given to us by Tim, built by us (well I fitted the kitchen) whilst we had three kids. We are middle class and consious of it in a slightly uncomfortable way.

Anyway. Tim was given some park land as a wedding present along with 9 cafetieres, we've all been there. It is beautiful. It is working farm land but has for certain had some landscaping done to it over the centuries. In the corner of the park is an old deer shed - an 'L' shaped building which the deer used to shelter in. Kate and her siblings hold the park in high regard, the place where they all played as kids with no supervision - then kids actually played out on farm machinery. Ahhh.

So we have the land, the contacts, the friends to help, 'some' money, not much time - but youngest does go to school proper in September. We want to put on a music and arts festival, targeted at all age groups, in the park in the summer of 2010. It will be called Deer Shed 2010 unless I change my mind.

We're going to take some shots over the weekend, and then I'll tell you where we are at in the organisation. The whole thing is already the only thing that Kate thinks about.

Lost count of how many first posts I've put into Blogs. As I'm a web developer I always seem to be testing blogs, and one post is often all the tests you need.

Anyway, this blog is not about testing, thankfully. It is about setting up your own festival. I'm writing this as the first bands are due to go on and Glastonbury 2009 and Michael Jackson died this morning. It's the day to start a new blog alright.

This time next year my wife Kate and I hope to be in the final stages of organising our own festival or it might have already happened. I hope that this blog will go beyond this entry (!) and document the highs and the lows. I anticipate a lot of lows.