Brownstock's Adam Brown talks to eFestivals

eFestivals spoke to Adam Brown the organiser of Brownstock Festival which happens at Morris Farm, Chelmsford, in Essex from Friday 30th August until Sunday 1st September 2013.

The festival run by the Brown family has a line-up that's topped by The Fratellis, Mark Ronson (DJ Set), plus The Pigeon Detectives, Benga and Youngman, Doorly, DJ Yoda, Delilah, Devlin, Hadouken!, King Charles, Krafty Kuts, The Milk, Man Get Out, Stealing Signs, Bambi, F.O.X, Creme De Chevre, Grizzly Bears, and The Cuban Brothers, and will feature 100s of unsigned acts during the weekend handpicked by the Brown Family whose ethos is to support the strong local music scene.

Can you tell me how you got the idea for Brownstock?

It all started nine years ago, when a friend of mine in a band wanted to have a party and put a stage up, so we obliged and used one of our fields on my dad's farm. We did the classic thing, got an old lorry, and put some speakers in it and set it up. For some reason quite a lot of people turned up in year one, and we were not prepared or expecting it . It got talked about a lot in the local area, and then it went on year on year. We carried on doing it, it was very low key, with a very basic set up, and it just built momentum in the local area, and got a little bit of a name for itself.

Then in 2009 we decided to do it properly, and decided to apply for a licence. That then went through, and for the last four years we've been licensed and now we are six thousand in capacity, and have a huge reputation in the local area. We've been able to get more and more big name UK acts, which is not what we set out to do, but it's very exciting at the same time.

So, I'm founder and festival director now, I've grown and learnt with the festival. Now, it's grown year on year, it's a case of managing a large team, and a business and a full time job co-ordinating it throughout the year. All from what used to take us a week to put together, back in the day.

How do you envisage it in five years time?

For the last few years now our long term aim has been, not to get huge, but to get to around ten thousand mark, and cap it there. I think the beauty of the festival is that it's small and personable and friendly. We feel that it's very hard to go big and corporate and keep those values. Once we reach that the aim would be just to keep improving the festival, year on year, rather than growing it. We have no aspiration to be the next Glastonbury, or anything like that.

I think there's a big market now for the smaller festivals, were people don't have to go through the rigmarole of queuing for hours to get in, or queuing at the bars or toilets. I think the experience at Brownstock is much more pleasant. Okay, you're not going to see the Rihannas of this world, but you do get to see a strong line-up and you get to stand 50 metres away rather than 500.

You say these kind of festivals are more in demand, why do you think that, are tickets selling faster than previous years?

Yes, last year was a bit of a anomaly because of the Olympics, and the weather, and I think everybody struggled a lot last year to sell tickets. It was slow last year compared to how it should have been. But, this year it has massively picked up again, and we're actually 240% up on sales compared to what we'd made at this point last year, so, way ahead, and looking very strong again.

We're not trying to hit the London market or anything like that, we're just trying to nail down the local towns. We're only 15 minutes drive from Chelmsford, we're only a half hour drive from Colchester, and Southend. There's a lot of big towns around here and there's not a huge live music scene, so we're just looking to conquer Essex really, that's our aim.

How many stages of entertainment do you offer?

We've got six stages at the moment, plus a couple of little ones which are not so much stages as little performance areas. We've got the main the main stage which is where the likes of The Fratellis, Mark Ronson, and the like will be playing. Then we've got the Dance Tent which is very popular with the locals with the likes of DJ Yoda, Benga, and a big mix of dance acts in a 2,000 capacity tent. Then we've got the Treehouse Stage which is a new addition from last year which is all unsigned bands from around the area. We've had the best part of a thousand applicants this year. We have shortlisted them and we have a vote going on our Facebook page at the moment to fill some of the slots. Then the Piano Bar which is completely unprogrammed acoustic, and a come up and have a go type thing, it's a really nice vibe in there, and that's been going for three years now. It's really, really popular actually. They're the main ones. We've also got the Stumble Inn which is house music / beach type vibes, which is all themed, and very popular. You could hardly get in there last year, it was one in one out most of the weekend.

Do you see the number of stages increasing much more if you were to double in size?

Not at the same rate, we will add more stages. We are definitely going to try and have more unfound talent, there's so much out there, and a lot of our crowd do love to come and discover new bands. The size of the festival means we can't just put in more stages to allow those bands to play. But, I think if the festival does grow, that's one area of the festival we'd like to expand with more unsigned talent. But no, although we want to double the size of the festival, we won't be doubling the number of stages. The main attraction is the main stage and I think the key thing is to try and curate that as carefully as possible to make sure that's where the central hub of people is. The thing with some of the stages is that's they're quiet, and you need to think about that.

You mentioned you have The Fratellis, and Mark Ronson did you ever anticipate acts that big when you started?

We never would have dreamed of booking acts of the calibre. When we started out it was a few mates in a band, and a barbecue kind of thing and now we’re out there booking some of the most high profile acts on the circuit. It's very exciting and I never would have dreamed of it, but we're very proud to have them come to our fields to be honest.

If you had a dream line-up who would you be most proud to have as your headliners?

From a personal point of view if I could have booked anyone for this year, it would probably have been Mumford & Sons, I think they would sit in really well with the vibe of the festival. Obviously they're quite a bit out of our price range. That kind of act is more my thing, but we also have a large dance element to the festival as well and the likes of Pendulum, Nero, and people like that would be good.

You do feature a lot of dance music on the line-up, do you think people were wrong when they said dance music had had its day?

It does all move so fast though, and we have tried to move with the times as much as possible. Rather than just stick to one genre we do try to have a good mixture, and I think that's important. I think if you're trying to sell a hundred thousand tickets then you've got to be on the cutting edge with your bookings. There's still people out there that want to see dance music, and as long as you move with the times. The big thing at the moment is the House Music scene, and that's why we brought the Stumble Inn in last year which is programmed fully with that kind of stuff, and we've expanded on that this year, and built on it. I think you have to balance moving with the times with keeping our customer base happy, and they're not shy to let us know what they want, and that's what we try to go out and book.

Now that you've been running a festival for a while, what advice would you offer someone trying to run one for the first time?

Think very carefully (laughs) about doing it before you start. I started very naively thinking it was going to be a very straightforward put some bands on and putting a stage up affair. But you learn the hard way that there's a lot more to it than that. There's many, many layers to it and you can't miss any one bit. You've got to make sure that everything's safe, you have to make sure that doesn't affect things too much so that people still want to come to it. There's an awful lot of juggling that goes on. I think anyone who wants to do it should come and talk to someone who has been doing a festival for an amount of time, as there's lots you can learn by seeing how other people are doing it.

Good luck to anyone who wants to try, but it's definitely a labour of love, you've got to be prepared to dedicate a few years to get it off the ground. It's not going to be an instant thing.

 

Do you try to go to a lot of festivals to see what they're doing?

Yes, as many as possible actually. Last year I did Lovebox, Wireless, and V Festival I go to every year as it's just up the road. I was at LeeFest last year, I try to get to as many as possible. We're right at the end of the summer, so the summer is a busy time for us, and we're one of the last festivals of the year and so we're often busy in that period. I do try and get to as many as possible, I thoroughly enjoy being out there doing the music part of the thing.

How do you see festivals evolving over the next decade?

I think there will always be a place in the market for the festivals with the huge line-ups but I do think that a lot of people are starting to change what they look for. I do think a lot of people come to our festival for the whole experience - the camping thing. A lot of them buy tickets before the line-up is even announced, and it's not all about the line-up it's about the whole experience. We make sure it's a more pleasant experience, we make sure we handpick nice food, make sure we have more than enough toilets, and all those things I think are going to cause a shift in demand. I do think it's going to go even more that way, and we get a lot of interaction through social media from people saying that now they've been to a smaller festival like ours they're not going to a big festival anymore. I realise that's only a small cross section of people but I can see it going that way.

I think I agree with you. If you weren't organising a festival what do you think you would be doing?

To be honest I've never even thought about doing anything else really. It's been since I was 19 years old such a part of my life. I still have my hand in with the farm at home, that's like a family thing, and I imagine I'd fall back into that. I thoroughly enjoy what I'm doing. We don't just do the festival we do parties all throughout the year. Weird obscure parties in strange venues, and things like that which I get a buzz out of. People come and have a good time and go away thinking that was a great night I want to do another party. We've also done weddings and things like that, I think that's where my passion lies, is in the events. In creating something different and interesting, doing the same thing like that in the same town can get a bit repetitive, I think anyone that's doing something a bit different out there, hats off to them, they take a lot of work, and it's nice to offer a different form of entertainment.

This year for the first time we've also gone into a partnership with Y-Not Festival in Derbyshire, and Truck Festival. Basically, the project has just grown and grown and grown until it was more than our team could handle. It was a case of either increase your team more and more or go into a partnership like this, one where we are sharing assets and staff, and office space and things like that. To be honest it's working out really well and hopefully that's the same for them too. We get to share our experiences, I put my input into their festivals, they put their input into my festival, and we get a mutual benefit out of it. It's also about shared assets, this year for the first time we're building in the shed a Saloon Bar, a 200 capacity bar, that flat packs down into a container and can be transported around the three festivals this summer. The steel frame structure will have country music playing inside it. That's just the start of something that we're going to try and do more and more of year on year, and with the three of us going at it together we can afford to go more extravagant and we're starting to think of ideas for the future.

I think a lot of festivals are starting to share resources in partnerships like that.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense because one of the tricky things about a festival is that you need about fifty staff for two months of the year, and two staff for the rest of the year. You can't obviously bring in experienced staff for that short a length of time, so this is a way around that. We've got a good team of really passionate people in the middle that are on it all year around, and that improves the customers experience because customer services improves, and the management of festivals is better and safer, and putting all these things together is just strengthening what we're doing, whilst not losing what we've built. It's been very successful so far.

Thanks for your time Adam, is there anything else you'd like to add?

Yes, we'd like to get out there, that for the first time this year we won't be selling day tickets at the venue. We're trying to move away from that, and the way our tickets are going it looks like we may have sold out before the event. We're trying to make sure people know that if they turn up on the day expecting to get tickets like they usually do, they're going to be disappointed. The way the event has always been is walk up and pay on entry, but we're taking a big step this year to move away from that. It's happening that way naturally, the number of people we get on walk up is getting smaller and smaller, but we're trying to get the message out there that people should book their tickets early and not leave it until the last minute because there won't be any on the gate.

Now in its 9th year the festival for 6,000 visitors is still completely independent and alongside music offers comedy, storytelling, street art camp, skateboarding park, parquour displays, dance tent, a silent disco and the 'Brownstock Sunday Roast'. 

A combined weekend and camping ticket is priced at £69 but this tier price is going quickly. Children aged under 12 can attend for free. A car parking ticket is priced at £5.

To get tickets for Brownstock before they sell out, click here.

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