What it is like to start your own music festival? Alex Thorp, Atmosfield Festival Founder and Director runs through his experience.

In a word? Fantastic.

For those that have worked hard on something for so long and see it come to fruition can only truly understand, it was a special day for us when you all danced in Peel Park on 30 May. The initial idea for a music festival at Salford came to me in 2012 whilst I was living in Castle Irwell because as  any resident knows magical things happen in Irwell when the sun comes out. BBQs, music, drinks, football and other things (naughty) are just some of the things we enjoyed and I wanted to create one big massive party right on that old cricket pitch. Alas, I was just a student with no real clue how to do so.

Two years and two Students’ Union elections later, I was standing on the main stage ground in Peel Park contemplating if this was the year I would finally create this party I yearned so long for. After a few successful REC Night events and the creation of REC Night the Third I decided I had the confidence to create University of Salford’s first music festival. I couldn’t do it alone though, that’s for sure, so I brought along some friends, one of which was seemingly more passionate about the whole thing than I was. His name is Jono, an old and valued friend I met in the University football team and I proposed the festival to him and his girlfriend in my front room. After such a positive response I approached Becci on our way back from Venus Nightclub, having just had a meeting with the manager regarding the February REC Night. Again, yet more positivity, so I brought in Paul (also an old friend and footballer), Orry and Dave, so we had our  first meeting together and decided our entrance fee was £10 and that would cover it, boy we were wrong.

A tip for anyone reading this far (thanks!), when taking up a large project you should surround yourself with a team who share your passion because there’s nothing more annoying arguing with someone who doesn’t believe in the same vision. They also tell you when you are wrong, which is nice, seriously.

I’m sure most of you guessed where the name Atmosfield came from after we renamed the SU Bar to Atmosphere in 2014, but for a time we called the festival ‘Peel Park Project’ (cheap copy of Warehouse Project  I know) and most of our early documentation states just that. I threw the name out there and the team loved it (to my surprise) and we rolled with it. We’re probably talking August 2014 at this point by the way and we had already discussed so much since July. The first hurdle was to get permission from the council for use of Peel Park, I had made enquiries as early as August but only got a meeting with all the Salford City Council and Greater Manchester Police (GMP) officers in November 2014. This meeting was the longest two hours of my life, as we trawled around the park. I detailed my vision, intent and site plan all the while they were simply seeing if I had the cajones to pull this off. Questions came at me a million miles an hour, I was prepared for some, but not for most. Thankfully, I had helped myself by inviting Peter Harrison (MD of FGH Security) along to help allay any security fears. Thanks Peter!

The council gave me the green light and were very supportive; I still don’t think it would have worked if Paul hadn’t prepared a 20 something page document for the council detailing everything from tickets to toilets. We had to apply for what is called a TEN (Temporary Events Notice) which is for Alcohol and Entertainment.  During the application, the GMP  helped me through the process and we were given permission to use the park in January 2015.

At some point during all this Orry had created our website from scratch, complete with a ticket verification system and it would later get up to 5000 hits a month, which isn’t bad at all for a first go.

As sad as it sounds, my most favourite part of the whole thing was ringing up contractors about infrastructure (toilets, fences, bars, lights, sound etc) and beginning to get a feel for the festival. Numerous site visits by various contractors took place and every step of the way it was positive, there was never once an issue during the planning months and it was fantastic. However, this was not set to last…..Read on to find about the problems of Atmosfield Festival.

At this point we had a rough idea of our line up, we had been chasing up acts and agencies as early as November 2014 (we did everything in advance), but you wouldn’t believe some of the quotes we received for some artists. Our chief haggler was Becci, some of the fees she got lowered practically saved us. Despite her efforts, it still meant that we  were relatively new to the whole booking artist thing and we had two solid headliners signed off in February 2015; MistaJam and Sub Focus.  Now at this point our students couldn’t believe it was real, we were met with “Have you really booked MistaJam?” and nobody believed something like this could happen at Salford, except us – which was a part of the problem. We worked tirelessly trying to get together a solid line up to announce and get people excited, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds, we needed a diverse line up to satisfy a wide range of student. The majority of us (the team) love our electronic music and this rubbed off on the line up greatly (and is noted in the survey feedback, thanks!) so we tried to move away from that. The decision to include The Hoosiers and Noasis to the line up was a stellar one, it was a shame due to each bands schedule and our own schedule they couldn’t have played a little later. The student bands should not go unmentioned either, they were on extremely early and had to play to a very small crowd (sorry) but did a very professional job on the main stage, so thanks to for that.

Around late March we decided to open up a third stage with something a little different (deep, grimey house, ask Jono) curated by the talented music collective Big People Music (BPM) to try and attract the Manchester music scene. Both myself and Jono witnessed BPM do their thing at Pangaea Festival (Manchester SU’s music festival) and were very impressed, so we asked them to be involved. I take my hat off to a man called Tunde from BPM who on behalf of ourselves booked all of the artists in the igloo. He is genuinely lovely bloke who knows his music. I do have to apologise to Tunde though, for not selling enough tickets to fill that musical dome of his- next time buddy.

So around loan day in April, the majority of our line up was released and ticket sales were steady (praise the loan). We were feeling confident about everything. Until I receive a phone call from the Council explaining that contractors have over-ran on the park works and we wouldn’t be able to have access to the back road, which was where our main stage was coming in. A lovely lady at the council soon rectified this problem and had the contractors sort themselves out. Then a tree was planted right by the path they were coming in, so we had to buy ground protection matts so that the stage could come through a deep, dark and dank section of the park.

Fast forward a month, and it was just tickets, tickets, tickets and tickets on our part, oh and paying contractors for their services, boring stuff really – but necessary. But then came the day - Friday 29 May, and we are building the festival site from 7am. The aforementioned main stage on a lorry came through a deep dark place and grounded itself in the mud – for 5 hours. It was a good job this was the only contractor to enter through this area, we ended up having some random guys (who are building the new halls) bring down diggers to try and dislodge our main stage lorry.

Now I mentioned some trouble with booking acts. Let’s talk about our headline act, Sub Focus, who was due to play at 10pm and to close our main stage. For two weeks leading to the event, the agency representing Sub Focus wanted to move him to 5pm, Now I’ve never heard of a drum and bass headliner at 5pm anywhere, ever. So our stance was simple, he was to play at 10pm as previously discussed in the planning months. A lot of emailing and phone calls happened leading up to this and I received a phone call at around 6pm on Friday 29^th explaining Sub Focus will not be able to attend because he was due to play at another gig at, yes, you guessed it, 10pm. Panic.

After many emails and phone calls to various agencies (remember, this is Friday evening) we finally got a yes from Matrix and Futurebound, a very similar act in terms of music played – they also came with an MC, which was an absolute bonus. They saved us. Around 9pm Friday evening we had full confirm they were going to replace Sub Focus, we still had some details to iron out but we were good. The announcement was done via both Atmosfield and Salford SU FB/TW channels in the following morning to reach maximum exposure, we did not send an email simply because we weren’t in the office to do so, we were on site finalising the set up of Atmosfield.  Now at this stage our festival is looking good but a number of things got dropped during the evening of the 29^th (set times release, key travel details, token info) as we were simply pre occupied with replacing Sub Focus last minute.

Anyway, that resolved, we were so excited on Saturday 30 May! Big day was finally here and we opened up on time (1pm). People flowed in slowly, we had a few small issues but nothing major happened throughout the day which was great. The rugby lads enjoyed themselves a tad too much, flip flops were thrown at the main stage, many a Red Stripe beer was drunk and a good friend of mine had a very good birthday, not that he would know. Throughout the day we were overjoyed in witnessing our festival come to life and received positive comments throughout. The only on day issue for me? I couldn’t get involved in that moshpit during MistaJam’s set (who’s got videos?).He put on a really good show for us and we thank him for it. Matrix and Futurebound smashed the main stage at the end too. Was worth all the stress and hassle to have such a supreme replacement. I should never have grabbed those glow sticks to throw into the crowd as they were immediately thrown back, but I’m sure you all enjoyed that, which is what mattered.

The following morning was a struggle, we were down on site from 7:30am cleaning up the party and getting contractors off site, we were swimming in free Tropical RedBull (who had that with Jager? Eurgh.) though which was a bonus. I have to thank everyone involved, be it the bar staff, volunteers, our event consultant, our artist and tour managers, security, food guys, production company but my personal mentions go to Courtney, Luke,  Alison, Rachel, Julie, Jasmine, Sara, Evie, Becci, Dave, Paul, Jono, Orry, Emma and Paul V. Some of our partners/contractors went above and beyond, in no real order I’d like to personally thank The University of Salford, Salford City Council, University of Salford Students’ Union (SU), Dom at RedBull, Jonathan at Niche Events, Igloo Disco, FGH Security, The Big Red Bus Bar and Yellow Bus Events.

As for the next one in 2016? Well the SU and University have every reason under the sun to continue Atmosfield and if you’re reading this far then I highly recommend you get in touch with the SU guys as soon as possible, it’ll look bloody brilliant on the old CV! They will need help, I know I did!

I leave the SU on 23^rd June after 2 years as Vice President, I’m so pleased to have been able to achieve what I set out to do all those years back in Castle Irwell. It’s been a pleasure.  Cheers!

The team (minus Jono and Dave!)