How we got here.

I’ve sat in the room where next year’s ticket price gets set. It’s never cynical. Production costs go up every year, and after Covid they went up faster. So the price went up too.

Then I sat on the other side of it, watching the customer service inbox fill with people who’d come for years and suddenly couldn’t afford to.

From the outside, a price rise that covers costs and one that makes a profit look exactly the same. If you can’t afford to come any more, the reason doesn’t matter.

I’ve watched one festival director absorb losses year after year rather than price out their audience, and another move deliberately upmarket. Both were reasonable answers to the same problem. Neither is straightforwardly right.

So before anyone touches the ticket price, we look at the whole money picture: sponsors, partners, hospitality, the bars. They’re what give you room to keep the ticket fair.

We watched two sets of data live: scans at the gates, and bar and food sales by area and by time of day.

Together they show you where people are, and where they’re about to be. Certain areas were getting really busy, and we could see it happening.

So we sent the litter pickers to where the crowd was heading, not where it had been. And when the gate scans showed the flow rate climbing, we put an extra scanning team on before a queue could build.

Keeping on top of every area live means no big clean-up at the end, and no queue building at the gates.

For Adventure Club we wanted decor that felt magical for children, and that we wouldn’t be throwing away afterwards.

So we started on the ground. Fallen branches, moss and twigs became the arch and the decor around the woods. We brought in live plants in pots, and the colour came from flowers, fabric and paint.

Then we were gifted some beautiful satin to dress the marquee. It needed hemming. I’ll never forget our colleague, and all-round legend, Electra turning up with a sewing machine, surrounded by hundreds of metres of dreamy satin.

When it was over, the branches went back under the trees. Everything else had already been used at other events, and it’s been kept to use again.

In 2019 I spent three weeks on the Black Rock Desert building a stage for Burning Man.

Dust storms cut visibility to a few metres. There was no established way for a UK production team to work out there, and food and basic facilities were hard to come by.

So we made decisions all day, every day, with half the information and very little comfort.

The stage looked incredible. We pulled it off.

It taught me that instinct gets you through the day, but a plan gets you through the week. The best crews I’ve worked with have both, and know when to use which.