Flounder Murray exclusive eFestivals interview

OUT West Festival 2014

Friday 18th to Saturday 19th July 2014
secret outdoor location, Bath/Frome/West Wilts area, Wiltshire, England
tier two £45

Earlier this month eFestivals brought news of a brand new event for next year Once Upon A Time In The West aka OUT West Festival. eFestivals spoke to co-founder Flounder Murray to find out more about the new event set to happen on Friday 18th and Saturday 19th July 2014

Flounder works with festivals, events and venues with his wife at Inkapa City. They’ve been going to festivals since their first one - Treworgey Tree Fayre in 1989. Since then they were regular punters at festivals until 1997 - the Glastonbury Festival muddy year. After a short break they returned in 2000 to work within the festival scene, and since then they have been involved with events including Endorse It In Dorset, Watchet, Bearded Theory, and Orchestra In A Field.

After Endorse It finished they decided to set themselves up as, Inkapa City Events, as they were already involved in other events. Having met up with old compadre, Steve Henwood (who runs Bath Fringe Festival, Glastonbury Festival’s Babylon Bandstand amongst other things), on another project, the trio decided it would be a good idea to try and put on their own event. They know enough people in the industry and enough contacts through their festival involvement to get a professional crew of likeminded souls together and start a new event.

Flounder explains that they intend to start small with this new venture, as a more intimate affair, to begin with it will be about getting “the vibe right, and the people in the right positions.” He says, “I’ve seen it before with other festivals, they’ve got to big too quickly, and they’ve not had the staff infrastructure to cope, and that’s when things start going wrong.” The organisation will be starting from a real baseline, and once the venue and the right people are organised, they will look at expansion.

Flounder reveals he has taken some time seeking the right location to host this new venture, and whilst the exact location is a closely guarded secret at this time. He does reveal it’s around the Somerset/Wiltshire borders and has great rail and road links, with the nearest mainline station about a mile away. The location is “very rural and with beautiful views. It’s just a fantastic site to hold a festival. It’s all flat, level and dry. We were up at the actual site at the end of last year, when it had been just tipping down all summer, and the site wasn’t too bad at all. It’s definitely a winner.”

The event is to be called Once Upon A Time In The West, and whilst he doesn’t want to give too much away, as “we keep getting our ideas pinched.” He does reveal that it’s, “A celebration of the West Country, and the west in general. There’s always been that frontier edge to things in the West, and there’s going to be a little bit of that.”

I ask if it will be similar to other events in the past, or a more unique experience. He answers that they’re not looking to emulate any other festival. “Our concentration and focus will be on having an excellent time in a field, with your friends, in a nice environment. It will be family friendly, and about having a really good time.” The festival won’t be offering any “bangin’ raves” and will steer clear of what he calls “the pedestrian element of festivals” where the same stuff is presented to festival goers time and time again. “We’re going to break out of that,” he says, “and put our quite unique stamp on there.”

Any new event, needs a line-up of acts to attract festival goers so I wonder if any of the line-up has been signed up yet. “There’s one act that we have booked, when we did a launch party at the Cheese & Grain, in Frome. We had the Zen Hussies, and New Groove Formation, and a new band called Oscillator who feature members of Elastica, Los Albertos, The Kooks, and Kalakuta Millionaires. They were really good, and so there will be music along those lines. But, we have no actual defined music agenda.”

The team have all been bookers before at previous festivals, and events, and so he feels they have quite a good knowledge of what will work and what won’t at the new festival. “There are quite a few up and coming bands who just put on a great show. They may not be particularly well known, but we’re sure they are going to do the business.”

I ask Flounder whether starting a new event will mean he has to be less involved in the other festivals he’s involved with. He’s keen to point out that’s not the case, “With Bearded Theory we’ve just moved site, and there’s lots of new things to play around with up there at their new location, on the same site as Bloodstock at Catton Hall. It's all very exciting up there and its gonna be a corker next year.”

In fact there’s been interest in some other festivals having his team onboard, “but our priorities with Bearded Theory and The Out West Festival at this point, and then we’ll see what happens. Obviously Steve has Bath Fringe, and Glastonbury.” They also both have band commitments. Flounder is frontman and banjo player with The Boot Hill All Stars, who Morph also performs with and Steve is also in a band called Hodmadoddery.

Flounder also reveals they are keen to have installations, and is interested to see what people will come up with. “We are already having people offering various things for us.” They have also had interest from ticket agencies, but “We are not rushing into anything. We are going to see what’s best for the festival, and what’s best for the punters. The aim is to keep the price as low as we can without sacrificing anything."

The current countrywide financial climate has clearly left a mark on the festival scene, with many events having struggled through the last few years of recession, is this the right time to be starting a new festival? Flounder believes it is. “Yes.” He replies emphatically, adding “We have talked to a lot of people about it, and this has been at least two years in the planning, and everyone from punters to industry professionals have been getting very excited.”

The location of the festival he feels is an important factor. “In this area there has never been a festival of its ilk, and there is space for it. But, the idea is not to get too big, and not grow too fast. It has to be kept at manageable levels. I don’t think that there’s much space in the calendar for new festivals which are pushing 5,000 capacity. I think that is a difficult area to start a new festival in. However, if you start small then you can see how it goes.”

The farm has he feels the land available to hold a really sizeable event. Whilst they won’t be using it in the first year, there is a bigger 18 acre field which he has his eyes on, “one of the fields we have been offered, is flat, surrounded by trees, and no neighbours. It’s a big old field, and could cope with quite a large festival. It’s a big farm with a lot of land, and with the state of farming as it is, they are having to diversify to survive.”

The area also has a lot of the festival industry living close by and a lot of potential suppliers to the festival are also on their doorstep. “The village has a local tent supplier, there’s a local power logistics company, a local stage supplier, and their crew live nearby. So, there’s a lot of festival infrastructure all available nearby in the Frome, West Wilts area. We’ve been talking to them and they’re all keen to get involved.”

Flounder has been going to festivals for sometime now, and I’m interested to hear how he thinks festivals will evolve in the next few years. It doesn’t look good for those events, which he described earlier as becoming ‘pedestrian’. “I think a lot of festivals will fall by the wayside.” He predicts, adding “The ones that will survive will be the ones who have managed to put their stamp on things and keep evolving. I think that’s the trick to it.

“I think the days of turning up to an event and seeing the same tent in the same place with the same people and similar bands, I think that has a really limited shelf life now. You look at the events that are doing really well, they have got something about them which is their unique selling point. The trick is to get that.

“If you look at BoomTown and what they’ve done from what was Recydrate the West to what it is now, which is this huge production of the most incredible artwork and effort that goes into it. That sort of thing is the way forward. Look at Festival No.6 they’ve got a really unique take on things. They’re doing something that’s a little bit different in a different area of the country, that nobody really gets up to unless you know the area, or you’re a fan of The Prisoner. It’s that type of thing you need, we’ll be doing that too hopefully, but at the lower end of the spectrum.”

Once Upon A Time In The West is a much smaller event than the ones the media tend to concentrate on, as are many of the successful smaller festivals that flourish in this country. How does Flounder feel about the mainstream media’s lack of interest in the smaller industry? “There are so many smaller events though, where would they start? They do do the occasional nod to ones like Blissfields. But the mainstream media do have their hooks into certain festivals, but then they are taking the mainstream with them.”

Flounder has also noticed a shift in the people who attend festivals. “The demographic for festivals nowadays has changed, at the up and coming events, you don’t see dreadlocks at festivals anymore. You get the occasional event like alchemy which is really aimed at that portion of the old school festival going public, but really if you look around the crews and the people who are coming in they are all there for a good time - festivals are all much more accessible and socially acceptable the days.

"It’s no longer the crusty masses that used to fill events back in our day when we started going to festivals. The masses at festivals now are all hotpants and wellies, or blokes in shorts and wellies, and all quite well presented, there’s little of the alternative culture of the past. Maybe that's partly down to the fact that we are more homogenised and people less willing to to be labelled into categories of yore - or maybe its because that festival culture has been absorbed into mainstream, things like green ethics etc”

Flounder makes a crucial point though, that the crowds that go to festivals have moved on slightly from those that just went a few years ago because it was trendy. He adds, “I don’t think they just go because it’s fashionable these days. I’ve had a chance to sit down and talk to a lot of them this summer. It’s a bit like the old clubbing scene. They’re just normal kids with normal jobs, some of them with quite high flying jobs, and it’s not because it’s trendy, it’s because that’s where they want to go and party, that’s where they want to go and let off steam.

“I think there is still a degree of trendiness, with the events like Glastonbury, and V, but then Glastonbury is a bit of a monster in it’s own right, and it’s got so many bits to it that you don’t need to interact with anybody that you don’t want to really.”

Looking to the future, I'm keen to know if he feel festivals always be able to attract an audience? Flounder is optimistic, “I think the likes of you and I who have taken our kids to festivals are now the new generation who have grown up with festivals. They know how to handle them, what to do with them, and they’re not going in completely green, and that will be the next line of people coming through. A lot of people take their teenagers now, to the older ones the bigger ones and festivals need to keep them entertained too. The skill now is involved in having a look at what’s going on and what’s changing very slightly, the changing trends, and much of that comes out of the free party scene.

“The free party scene is still out there and it’s still going on, it’s just at a much lower level than it was back in the early ‘80s and ‘90s. I think a lot of stuff does still come up through there, but the general public are much less aware of it. The public don’t really know until it really hits the mainstream. Like Ghetto-Funk, it’s been around however long, three years or whatever, but it’s only now hitting the mainstream. I think the whole scene does evolve it’s just keeping your eye on what’s about, and a lot of it does still come from underground culture. It’s a case of seeing what’s going on in the underground culture and looking at whether it will work at festival or not, because some of it does and some of it doesn’t as it’s too off the wall or whatever.”

Flounder believes there are now three types of festivals, and they have now gone three distinct ways. “They’ve become the corporate ones, the independent ones, and then there’s your posh ones, and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of middle ground. ”

For others starting their own smaller events without major capital investment, and trying to keep their ticket price affordable to all, Flounder has some advice, “There is a degree of just surviving from year to year when you are running events, but you have to, in any business, be looking three or four years ahead. And it changes, so what we’re looking at now for three or four years ahead, won’t necessarily be what occurs. But you’ve got to be thinking and you’ve got to be on it, and your programming... If I’m doing an event in July next year, we’ll be looking 14 months ahead, at the bands when we go to festivals, to book in the year after. That’s one of the things you really have to pay attention to.

“Booking the same festival bands, good as they are, and producing the same festival line-up which has just been done, round and round and round, is going to get tedious. That has only got a limited lifespan. Whereas the little events, they may have a couple of big acts there, but they’ve also got a load of quality acts you just wouldn’t see anywhere else.”

It sounds like OUT West Festival will offer an interesting mix of acts, and a unique direction. We will have to wait and see who Flounder and Co. announce for the line-up, and eFestivals will bring you news of the line-up, and ticket details once they’re announced. For more information see the OUT West Festival Facebook page (here).