Unfortunately there’s no way around it – this is going to be an incredibly soppy post.
Of all the creative projects I’ve ever worked on, Beyond The Woods is the one I’m most proud of – by a long way.
BTW started out as my brother Joe’s birthday party in our back garden, and grew to a 3,000-capacity, weekend-long festival in the middle of the Lincolnshire countryside.
As it grew, the festival pulled together an organising team of some of the most fun, enthusiastic, and brilliantly talented people.
It was, very simply, an incredible thing to be a part of.
The festival actually began life as JoeFest, back in 2015, when we put on a party in our back garden for my brother Joe’s 18th birthday.
Joe invited a load of musical mates, an industrial quantity of sausages was ordered, and we partied until the wee small hours in our parents’ back garden in Lincoln.
Needless to say, we weren’t exactly talking Reading and Leeds levels of production here, but everyone had an absolutely fantastic time.
At the time Joe was in a band called The Pylons, and the lads had just come back from playing their first Glastonbury.
By our 11pm cut-off time there were 60 or so of us at the bottom of the garden belting out their burgeoning catalogue of hits.
Everyone had such a good time, we decided to do it again. Only next time, we’d go a bit bigger.
The year after that, it went so well that we decided to go slightly bigger again.
Every year the festival kept getting better, and we kept inviting more people, until suddenly we were selling 3,000 tickets and entering into broadcast partnerships with the BBC.
In year one, there were effectively three staff members: Our dad and his mate Steve, who poured the drinks and ran the BBQ; plus a security person who we’d hired to stand on the door.
A few years later, we had a team of more than 300 staff, volunteers, artists and contractors.
It was completely unrecognisable from the little gathering we’d put on in our back garden, but we had the most amazing fun.
The executive committee (which was a far more fancy name than the position really deserved) was me, Joe and our dad.
Joe was the most musical of the three of us (he now works for Live Nation), and so was put in charge of that side of things, which meant I was appointed managing director – and was left in charge of pretty much everything else.
It was a lot to get to grips with. All we’d needed to do in year 1 was send a note round to the neighbours apologising in advance for the noise.
When we were selling tickets to the public, I was having regular meetings with the council and the emergency services.
There were licenses to procure, 100-page safety documents to produce, contractors to liaise with, and an enormous team of volunteers to organise.
None of us had ever done anything like this before in our lives.
This is going to sound incredibly boring, but the thing that blew my mind the most was that we had to introduce a temporary speed limit on the road past the festival entrance.
Obviously that wasn’t the most exciting thing that we got to work on, or the most arduous to arrange, but I still find it a bit mad that we got to change the rules of a major A road so that we could organise a bit of a knees up.
What very much was exciting was when Joe started booking the bands, and he booked some really impressive names.
During the festival’s run, we played host to some of the most exciting, up-and-coming artists from across the UK, as well as the cream of Lincolnshire’s musical talent.
Our biggest booking (although we didn’t know it at the time) was Olivia Dean, but Holly Humberstone is probably the feather in the festival’s cap.
In the run up to her festival performance, we put on a gig with Holly in our local pub. At the time she was almost totally unknown.
The pub gig was was decently attended, but a very far cry from the 5,000 capacity Brixton Academy, which we saw her headline (and sell out) a few years later.
It was a very cool thing to see, from someone who lived about 10 minutes away from the festival site.
There’s far too much to go into in one blog post: From the bands, to the underground secret bars, to the late-night sessions around the campfire – and all the very boring bits like organising security and painting the bins.
It was an enormous undertaking, organised by a team of very passionate, and incredibly dedicated volunteers – all working it out as we went along.
And in many ways, that’s sort of why it had to end.
Like so many other independent festivals, Beyond The Woods came up against two fairly imposing problems.
Firstly, the costs of organising these sorts of events are only going in one direction.
Towards the end of its run, the cost of putting Beyond The Woods on had crept into six figures.
For something like Glastonbury or Latitude that’s not an enormous amount. It wouldn’t even get you one of their headliners.
But for us, funding the event out of our own pockets, it wasn’t without its risks.
And then, of course, Covid came along. And that was pretty much the end of that.
In 2021, after a couple of years of pandemic-based uncertainty, and rising costs, we decided to call it a day.
Since 2020, more than 200 UK festivals have disappeared off the map. Sadly ours was one of them.
Happily, the brand is still alive. Joe is still promoting events under the BTW banner, in addition to his day job of putting on gigs for some of the biggest artists in the world.
And although the festival doesn’t take place any more (and nor do we have plans for it to, in the immediate future), the Beyond The Woods fire hasn’t been completely extinguished.
The door is still open for a return at some point in the future.
But for now, we’ll have to make do with reminding ourselves that we had a bloody great time, and that turning a party of 60 mates into a full-blown, 3,000 capacity festival is a hell of a thing to have done.
