Mr Big Chill setting the summer alight again
This week Glastonbury owner Michael Eavis was quoted in The Times on the precarious future of festivals again in today’s Times…“A lot of commercial festivals are in serious trouble. I don’t see that the market will be there in the future. Womad and Latitude aren’t selling. Honestly, it’s on the way out.” Here, DMCWORLD speaks to Pete Lawrence, the man behind one of the greatest festivals the world has ever seen on the eve of a brand new book and cracking little outdoor gathering.
Hi Pete, a big welcome to DMCWORLD Magazine. So, tell us about the book coming our way through Unbound…
“‘The Big Chill and Other Alfresco Stories’ is a travelogue about life, love and inspiration. It sounds like a cliché to say that I’m finding the writing process cathartic, but it is enabling me to dig deep and re-visit some parts of my life which I’d filed away, some moments which were a bit too raw and emotional, and perhaps needed the benefit of overview in order to lay certain ghosts to rest. Having a couple of months to really focus on writing has also given me the opportunity to find a degree of lineage in my life, to spot patterns and preferences which weren’t obvious to me while I was in the thick of things, and in some respects to attribute a different level of meaning and continuity to the randomness that we call life. The publishers Unbound are natural partners for me because they are, in many ways, reinventing the whole way that publishing happens, and I like the fact that they crowd-fund their books and have a close involvement with their followers, and are carving their own ‘scene’ around what they do. They make pitches for each book and if it reaches its target, it goes into production, so the reader is very much involved in the process. Mine is a little different in that the bulk of it is written already so would come out in some shape or form whatever happens, but with Unbound it would get a full release through the shops, and they also have a deal with Faber and Faber if something really crosses over which would enable them to penetrate right to the heart of the mainstream market. I think this book will, by its nature, be fairly niche, as most things I get involved with tend to be quite niche.”
What can we expect inside the pages?
“The main issue is what to leave out! Once I get in the mood, the words come thick and fast. There’s stuff in there about my early childhood, and how my love of music takes shape and how it affected me, there’s a chapter on the death of my mother and my father’s attempted overdose and how that impacted on my teenage years, then about forming my first band, going off into the big wide world of University, my first jobs and girlfriends, and my path into non-conformity. And taking the plunge into self-employment, starting the Cooking Vinyl label, that chance meeting with Michelle Shocked and recording around the campfire – and its aftermath. And of course, what inspired me to come up with the idea for The Big Chill and its rollercoaster ride through 14 years, and how I came out the other side, my tendency to set myself ‘golden fleece’ style, mission impossible tasks. There’s lots of new stuff in there that hasn’t been made public before, around the reasons for leaving Big Chill and around some personal stuff too, but ultimately it’s about how people inspire me, about what I can give back to them and about keeping dreams alive – and turning them into reality when possible. There are often alternative ways of doing things…”
Crowd funding seems like a progressive way to involve a community in making decisions on what does or doesn’t happen. I know you have been a champion of it for a while now, in particular with your new Pic-Nic concept.
“There’s still an element of resistance to the idea of crowd funding, a feeling that it is resorting to a whip-round amongst your mates. But for me, it’s a truly progressive way of promoting inclusive involvement which takes things into the far more interesting realms of the modern-day co-operative, the idea of people having a stakeholding in something and being able to engage with a community and influence its soul and purpose. The whole way that businesses interacted with their customers seemed in need of reappraisal at the time that we started The Big Chill. What we tried to do was not only invite people to participate in as many ways as possible, but to really engage with them on a fundamental level. The Big Chill’s forum became an amazing, vibrant hotbed of chatter, ideas, relationships, new arts and music, current affairs. It really was a great example of social media 1.0, as someone suggested at the time – a dynamic forum-based community which, at a stroke, transformed the Big Chill from being a once a year festival into a 365 days of the year community, with its festival as the main focus. When I was in the process of leaving The Big Chill and a lot of stuff didn’t feel right, I thought long and hard about the way forward and it always came down to capturing that powerful sense of community spirit that I’d seen work wonders for so many people; and taking the essence of that forward to the next level. And so the idea for Pic-Nic Village was born, which aims to create a dynamic community online, and then tie in real life events on a global scale. One of the central ideas is to enable all the creative people who have met and exchanged ideas online can meet in real life. We’re in it for the long haul with Pic-Nic – it’s a big idea, far more challenging and ambitious in scope and potential than a music festival, but will also put emphasis on smaller scale local connections, on values associated with community and kinship, alongside craftsmanship, skill and raw creative talent. It will attempt to blur the boundaries between work and leisure, to empower people who are looking to take their skills, passions and interests to a wider potential audience. Our initial crowd funding initiative was perhaps too ambitious and too early, but it has provided us with a lot of input and energy, and we’re moving forward as we speak with building the site, and still intend to fund the whole thing as co-operatively as possible. Nothing is set in stone and everything is up for grabs; as our strapline says, it’s a playground of possibilities. My recent chats with investors and entrepreneurs have shown that most of them see adaptability as an asset. In today’s economic climate, involvement from a variety of people can make for a more fluid, enduring and democratic proposition, and new and fresh business approaches are needed all the time. There’s a fair amount of what is known in corporate speak as ‘blue sky thinking’ in the book – I suppose it’s a business manual in many ways, but not in a traditional sense. I’d like to think it might be useful for any aspiring entrepreneurs, even if it’s just in terms of what not to do.”
What can you tell us about the Alfresco mini festival…is it something similar to the wonderful early days of the true Big Chill?
“Going back to ideas of niche, I think this has to be the way forward to me, as it feels like the way that events should go right now. A move away from any notions of ‘big’ to something much more intimate where the roots are more obvious. I’m talking under a thousand people, a spontaneous open-ended gathering, a celebration of life and a meeting of minds without the feeling that you’re sitting there being passively entertained, targetted by marketeers, or ripped off for bad food and drink. I’ve always been interested in breaking down the audience / performer divide. creating space and allowing for a more organic styled event, but there’s a new steely determination to do away with as many festival cliches as possible, and for me, that’s not only the stuff I was spouting off about back in the days I started doing outdoor events – no VIPs, no sponsorship etc but going a step further and suggesting that we could even have no stages, no line-ups, no flyers, no grand claims. that’s not to say there won’t be some great artistic things happening, just that we won’t depend on names for sales, so we’ll keep them secret. I hope that people will subscribe to the event because its going to be a weekend of fun on a working farm in glorious Warwickshire countryside, not for any names on the line-up. Whatever happens, they’ll get some surprises when they turn up. The central area will be the campfire, which is a return to my Texas Campfire Tapes roots where we’ll be having book readings, Q and A sessions, spoken word, storytelling and acoustic music sessions. I’m not saying any more for now. As for whether I’d get involved in such a project as The Big Chill again, I feel that it’s time to make an attempt at reinventing the wheel…The Big Chill had its own trademarks back in the day – ambient music and stages, the art trail, Norman Jay on a Sunday lunchtime, the mediamix tent…but that was another era for me. I think that people are looking for something different now. Events in the great outdoors are a big risk – even Melvin Benn from Festival Republic described them as “gambling of the highest order”. There are exceptions to the general trend – folk festivals, village fairs are thriving – but in the main the feeling is that the larger festival has had its day. James Drury, managing director of the Festival Awards, arguably the industry’s equivalent of the Oscars cited 2007 as the peak, which is the last year I was involved co-incidentally. People still love the idea of getting together in a (preferably sunny) field but it feels as if it’s time to move things on a bit. In many ways I would rather be putting my energies into more technology based projects such as Pic-Nic, especially if it develops a real life element. As intoxicating as the online forum is, the energy generated is more palpable in the here and now, so there will always be a unique value in bringing people together offline.”
I’d like to know a certain story about managing to achieve something against all odds: A point when you thought it couldn’t be done, but then you did it….
“Ah, back to that Golden Fleece thing…I guess that after Norfolk Big Chill in the mid 90s, our first attempt to do a proper licensed Big Chill festival, it seemed that our world had been destroyed. That was the closest I’ve ever been to total breakdown, in so many ways, spiritually and financially, emotionally. The whole tale is told in the book so I won’t go into detail here, but some good inevitably had to come out the whole saga, though it was difficult to see any future at all for The Big Chill in the months that followed, especially when summonses and repossession letters were dropping through our letter box. Then hope gradually emerged and we saw light at the end of the tunnel. What really drove me on was that so many people seemed to be willing it to happen. I knew that we must have something worth persevering with.”
What would you say made the Big Chill such a success? Why do you think Big Chill as it is today has seemingly failed – low crowds, no 2012 festival?
“To answer the first part, I’d have little hesitation in saying that it felt like a shared journey for so many Big Chillers. Admittedly, we were doing something very different anyway, even as a club event in our early days – the whole idea of the all-day multi-media chill out with a cafe, board games, full screen visuals, free internet (remember this was 1994), mattresses, art installations. We lost money on every Union Chapel Big Chill despite getting 900 turning up some months, but we had a certain amount of pioneering spirit in us, we didn’t just want to go against the grain, we absolutely had to! When it all came unstuck in Norfolk, we didn’t run away, but we faced the music, told the story about the bankruptcy, tried to claw back whatever we could for those most in need, almost to the point where we were evicted from our home. On some level, I think that people engaged with it because it was a real life story, warts and all. It was two people, me and Katrina trying our very best to make it work against the odds, working out of a bedroom office in a cramped flat without any financial backing. There was an almost naive belief that it could be done, that we could overcome all our setbacks and ultimately win. In that sense it became much, much more than just a good festival, and that was the precursor to the emergence of such a vibrant community, a great mix of people who stuck with us and got know us, and a feeling that together we were all building something unique which was worth nurturing and treasuring. In terms of why it recently failed, I think it just may have lost track of virtually all the original Big Chillers and a lot of its original spirit with it. There was always a desire amongst the other directors to attract a new, younger crowd – and this became even more pronounced when Festival Republic took over – but it was at the expense of the hardcore loyal supporters. It was also a victim of its own success – in a quest for bigger profits, the incomers didn’t really seem to be that interested in what was already becoming quite a rich history and heritage. It began to lose its special qualities to the point where it wasn’t chilled at all and was in many ways just like all the other larger festivals it had set out to provide a radical alternative to. There’s much more on all this in the book (plug, plug!) but I felt in the latter years that I was always fighting a battle to avoid getting into huge, expensive headliners – in my experience they inevitably end up dominating the whole weekend, whilst not really guaranteeing many extra ticket sales> what ended up happening was that they changed the whole dynamic of the event and made it more generic, and line-up weighted. There were also pressures on me to broaden out the line up but it no longer felt like a scene, it had outgrown that into more like of disparate bunch of eclectic artists selected by committee. People began to get confused as to what The Big Chill stood for, where it was coming from. In its latter years, it became far too geared towards maximising bar sales across the site in as many outlets as possible, and a lot of its soul was lost in the latter years in a rather intoxicated ether of lairy commercialism, which was accurately described, sotto vocé, as The Bill Till. The golden years of The Big Chill were probably the Larmer Tree years when there really was a proper chill scene which we’d played a large part in creating, and maybe the first two or three at Eastnor up til about 2005. After that it had just lost a large part of its magic for me, and had attracted too many people who just wanted the generic festival experience, the hedonistic escapism, and possibly didn’t value or respect the different ethos we’d built over the years. Pitching growth at an outdoor event is a fine art, and we got it surprisingly right up to the point where we expanded too quickly and were left with the stark reality that the event was no longer selling out. In many ways that ushered in the beginning of the end, as it piled on the pressure from several directions, and things were no longer fun from that point onwards, which could be easily sensed by the Big Chillers.”
Who were your favourite guests?
“We may have had many, many great artists through the gates over the years, but my favourite guests were the Big Chillers themselves who came and made it the great event that it was.”
So what’s next?
“The expression ‘be careful what you wish for’ is always a constant leveller and check mechanism for me. But it would be great to get the book funded, launched and to celebrate by having a fantastic, intimate party on June 9th weekend, which we’re calling Alfresco. Then to move onto Pic-Nic and advancing to a point where we can go live. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than being able to craft a platform that brings people together, gives them a focus, a increased sense of purpose and inspires them to greatness and to achieve stuff they never thought they could – a vibrant community where cynicism is given the swerve, and positive energy and love are given free reign. There’s nothing I enjoy more than providing a context, stepping back and watching the sparks fly. I still believe in the power of magic.”
http://unbound.co.uk/books/the-big-chill-other-al-fresco-stories
