theartsdesk Q&A: Jo Bartlett of the Green Man Festival

The Green Man festival takes place this coming weekend at the Glanusk estate near Abergavenny in the rolling hills of the Brecon Beacons. What begun in 2003 as a glorified gig for the husband and wife duo It's Jo And Danny has become the very epitome of the 21st-century “boutique festival” - indeed is very possibly responsible for that concept itself.

As well as reclaiming the rock festival from bovine crowds and sensory overload, the Green Man also provided a nexus for a rising scene of hirsute youngsters intent on mining musical source material outside the standard canons of rock and club music. Tags like “nu folk”, “wyrd folk” and “folktronica” may have come and gone, but the network of overlapping acts and collectives that centred on the Green Man has continued to put down roots, with the unprecedented success of young folksters like Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons (both of whom play Green Man this year) just the most prominent vindication of the festival's aesthetic.

Green Man Festival 2009 highlights (YouTube):

Jo Bartlett is not just about folk though. She and Danny Hagan have a long history in the music industry, and as well as their own acoustic-electronic music, they play in the brilliant retro-psychedelic rock four-piece The Yellow Moon Band (pictured below) – while the 2010 festival features everything from the laser-zapping prog rock theatrics of the Flaming Lips to the hip hop and electronica of DJ Food and Matthew Herbert. Theartsdesk spoke to her in London just as everything was finalised for the Green Man 2010 and site logistics were beginning to kick into action, and over coffee discussed grime, squaddies and Led Zeppelin...

JOE MUGGS: So, Jo, this will be eight Green Mans now? Or Green Men?

JO BARTLETT: I think it's eight. [counts on fingers] Haha yes, I have to check, but yes, eight. So you want to know how we got from Green Man number one to where we are, then?

Well yes, essentially. Has it grown steadily year-on-year since the beginning?

Yes, it has. The first one we had 350 people for one day, then for the first few years it grew just totally through word of mouth. We even attempted to advertise sometimes, but it just sold out every time before we got the chance to get the adverts out there. From 2004 onward we had this wicked designer on board called John Clee who was based in Cardiff and was coming up with this amazing artwork, and we really wanted to get it out there, so we took an advert in Uncut or something like that but of course by the time it went to press we'd sold out, didn't need the advert any more!

So yes, totally word of mouth until about 2006 when the whole festival scene just exploded. Every year since we started, the amount of other festivals has mushroomed. When we started in 2003 there was only really Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, Big Chill, T In The Park – the really established ones – and Truck. So we got noticed almost immediately because we were trying to do something different, us and Truck. But since then it's just gone... [looks flabbergasted] Well, someone just told me recently that there are something like one and a half thousand music festivals in Britain now. I've just moved back to Surrey, and I can't walk through the village without tripping over a new festival. We just had Womack and Womack playing the village I was brought up in! Unbelievable, just unbelievable.

And I really think that in no small part that was down to us, because we did instantly get The Times coming down, The Telegraph down very early on, just loads of press reaction instantly – and then things like Latitude followed quickly after; there's no two ways about it, they've credited us as the inspiration for what they do. So now this year we sold out the quickest we have since we've been at this site, and that was between eleven and twelve thousand tickets – we're keeping a lid on it at that level now, though, we're not intending to take it much higher than that.

So you really don't want to be in a situation like the Big Chill which went from similar beginnings of a few hundred people in the mid 1990s to thirty or forty thousand now?

I think so. We've got the parkland to grow it bigger, but we've been at this level since Robert Plant played, which was 2007, and what we've done within that is just moved things around to try and get it spot on. Obviously what's slightly frustrating at festivals is that you design the site, then if something doesn't work you've got to wait a whole year to try it over there instead. So last year, the site we're on now, everything seemed to work. We'd got the cinema tent, we'd put the small third stage in a different place, and it all seemed to work – so I don't think there's any desire at the moment to break that and grow any bigger when we've got it so it's fantastic as it is!

And did you have any kind of inkling it would be like it is now when you started?

It's a really weird thing, we were just so obsessed... obviously if we'd ever have been able to take a step back or view ourselves from above, we'd have been totally shocked, but we were so obsessed and so living and breathing it 24 hours a day – almost literally in fact: I had outrageous insomnia when we were first setting it up from the stress of it – so we were just on a rollercoaster, and each stage of that rollercoaster kind of made sense.

The first one made sense on its own terms, the second one made sense, and you just get caught up not just in the good side of it but the problems; like anything there are things that are a bit of a drag, it steadily became a real job, the kind of job we're very lucky to have, but nonetheless a job and one that we needed to train ourselves for... We had to train ourselves to put it aside at six; Danny used to gaffertape a blanket over the door of the room we kept the computers in at the weekend to stop me going in, simply to train ourselves to treat it as a job.

So yes we do have to remember to take a little step aside every so often, to just stop and go “oh yeah, we've got a festival!” It's amazing to me that it's now so slick, the early sellout, the lineup, the fact that not only did it sell out early but, not that we're gonna, but if we put another thousand tickets out now I think they'd just GO because it's gone mad on Facebook, it's gone mad on Twitter, it's one of those things where if you can't get something you wanted you then want it a hundred times more, it really is crazy.

I went on a course recently in an art school in the northeast of England, there was about twenty of us on it and it was all walks of the arts – people who ran museums, curators of galleries, people who did an arts festival in Liverpool – and five of the people on the course said “I come to your festival regularly, and I'm coming this year too”. That blew me away, I never even thought in that level of the arts anyone would even have heard of the Green Man. It's things like that which really make me go “wow”, realising it has had an impact on people's lives.

It's become part of the cultural fabric?

Yes precisely: woven into the cultural fabric. When I did that course, on the first day we paired up with people and the person I was put with said “I just want to thank you for giving me three of the best summers of my life!” I was just like [agog] “Wow... um... pleasure! Thankyou for coming” kind of thing. When Danny did his Masters course in Brighton, there were eighteen people on his degree course regularly going, because one of the girls lived in Powys near the festival and persuaded all her mates to go along – we reached this kind of clicking factor where someone from just along the road will persuade seventeen of their mates from university to come along.

The best thing for me isn't about money and it isn't about branding and all that stuff, it literally is – corny as it may sound – when people just have the best time. I get really emotional when I'm there and I just see little ad hoc scenes of people having their own private moment of hilarity that just happens to be taking place because they've come to the Green Man together, I well up, I get really soppy when I'm walking around the site.

Or when they're playing banjos and harmonicas round a campfire, because it's very much that sort of festival...?

Absolutely, all the kind of unbilled music and entertainment that's spontaneous is an absolutely vital part of it, and again makes me really, really happy.

And what did you want when you did the first one?

We wanted our band to play a festival. [Slightly hollow laugh.] We'd been dropped. We were It's Jo And Danny, we'd been signed to a major label and been in the absolute cliché situation of being signed by a major then dropped – we were hip and indie but broke, so we signed the major deal for the money but it all went wrong, and then the indie world hated us because we'd taken the major money and we were just like [fretful face] “ohhhh!”

We'd just moved to Wales, I was pregnant with our first child, and it really was “What are we going to do now?” We'd moved to Wales with this kind of image of ourselves going on world tours then coming back to our country retreat, and suddenly it just wasn't going to be like that. Now we'd done promotions before – Danny and I had done the Buzz Club where we lived before in Surrey – and we'd always been in bands, we knew the music world, the summer before when It's Jo And Danny was at its peak we played all the big festivals. So we kind of knew what we were doing...

I said, “Shall we start a club night in Brecon?” and Danny came up with some ideas and a few hours later it was a festival. So we kind of started it, took a year learning how to set it up, changed locations at least once... but primarily it really was so It's Jo And Danny could keep going, we could keep doing music, and working out how we could not work for The Man if you like.

That's interesting that you mention approaching it with the mentality of club promoters. That precise period, 2002, 2003, was when a lot of people from club music got into the folk thing. It, and other scenes forming at the time like grime and dubstep, were written off by many as a flash in the pan - it became received opinion that there was no such thing as an underground any more - but they've really gone from strength to strength. Did you feel you were plugging into a scene with potential?

Definitely. I hadn't really heard the American stuff, the Devendra [Banhart] and Joanna [Newsom] and all that when we first started, that would come a year later. But there was definitely “folktronica” as it was being called – us, the Beta Band, Four Tet, The Memory Band, the Fence Collective boys like King Creosote and James Yorkston, and then also The Mountaineers who were on Mute who were mixing up the folk-psychedelic thing with programmed drumbeats and patterns like that.

So that was kind of where we were coming from, and it was all referring back to a specific kind of folk from the sixties, as in Pentangle and therefore John Renbourn and Bert Jansch – exploratory, innovative stuff. We didn't want to be associated in any way with the Cambridge Folk Festival kind of real ale drinking beard stroking kind of people. Finally it was John Clee who designed our bearded antlered man... he tragically died in 2007 in a car accident, it was horrendous... but it was him who introduced me personally to the Devendra compilation The Golden Apples of the Sun.

That's when I realised, wow, this was worldwide, or certainly it was reaching as far as America, and at the same time you were getting people from Scandinavia, people in France, there was a real thing going on with beards and long hair on young guys, a very hippie kind of look on young girls, and an emphasis on talent and knowledge and involvement, it was really very exciting, a very exciting time.

But at the time there WAS a rapid assimiliation, Joanna Newsom on mobile phone adverts, Shoreditch hipsters adopting the look and so on – did you think it was just going to get sucked dry, or did you feel like there was a sustainable, rooted cultural movement going on?

I don't know, really, if I thought it would be commercialised. We don't have a telly and as I say we were living in Wales then, so I missed a lot of the “becoming trendy” stuff – I would hear of the odd thing by word of mouth, like Vashti [Bunyan] had a mobile advert as well... actually I saw that one at the cinema I think. But I just found it exciting really. Then I thought the 'folk bubble' was finishing a couple of years ago, but suddenly you've got this whole Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, Johnny Flynn, Sons Of Noel And Adrian down in Brighton and there's just a whole other resurgence of it, and then it's just kind of merging with all the new set of psychedelic stuff coming from America too.

So it's a cliché I suppose, but it comes like waves against the shore, just when you think it's ebbing away there's another one following it up. And again, what it's about is erudite people with real knowledge of a few different genres, including the modern ones – I don't want to be negative about the Cambridge Folk crowd too much, but I do want to think that our audience do listen to grime as well as folk, and will even be thinking about how to merge the two, because that's what excites me most of all – seeing new hybrids emerge. So yes, I thought it had peaked a while ago, and it hasn't actually... It just keeps getting bigger, I think.

Well whole new areas of source material keep opening up for people into rootsy, artisan music, don't they? Whether it's warehouses full of old Afrobeat tapes being discovered in Ghana or Togo, or folk archives being digitised, or new dance genres being created...

Absolutely, and likewise people create new ways of looking at the past as well – just like with the creation of grime and dubstep the home studio technology allows more and more people to create their own take on things. A really interesting one is Avi Buffalo, Washed Out, Toro y Moi, all this stuff that's getting galled “glo-fi” which I'm really really into as well, because it goes absolutely with a kind of folk, psychedelic, DIY ethic.

Talking of available technology, it's not just music production that gains – we couldn't have set this festival up at all a few years previously, because as we did it all we needed was a laptop at home, to get a website to enable people to buy tickets and tell people the bands that were playing. In fact in year one we were without a venue, so there were three horrendous weeks where the place we'd planned hadn't worked out but we were still working towards the festival as we ran round and round trying to find a new venue... So for that period literally we had a festival that was on the computer, that existed on the laptop but had no real physical place. Thank god we found somewhere, but that proved that everything could be done with one computer and a book of tickets to send people.

So you combined the tools of the internet age with your existing promoters' know-how... But where did that come from? How did you get into promotions in the first place?

[slightly embarrassed chuckle] Ah, again it was to get our band on. Danny and I are basically childhood sweethearts, we've been going out forever, and we've always been in bands together and always been main songwriters in those bands. In our teens we were in a couple of bands on Dan Treacy's Dreamworld records and quite involved in that really indie sort of scene.

And we were inspired by Dan Treacy and the way he used the room at the Enterprise in Chalk Farm for his club Room At The Top, where we supported The Mekons, Housemartins, June Brides, all that jingly-jangly kind of stuff – that inspired us to start a club in our own area, in a venue that was mainly an arts centre, and that was the Buzz Club. Even when we moved to London, we kept on doing the Buzz Club, so we'd travel down to put posters up on a Tuesday night under bridges and whatnot.

So yeah it all started with that sort of C86 scene, and by the time we finished it we'd travelled through... well, the Stone Roses had played, Happy Mondays had played, right through to the start of Britpop with Blur playing, Elastica playing – and that's the time we stopped it because we'd got really into clubbing at that point, and all we were doing with our spare time, while still being in bands and trying to make music, was dancing to Andy Weatherall and Terry Farley and people like that.

You didn't have any ambition to be acid house promoters yourself, then?

Ahh, we did a couple,- we did a couple, at the West End Centre in Aldershot still, so it didn't have that anarchic illegal vibe – it was all organised, we got a late license from the local council... We got one flower strobe, because that's all we could afford, one ice machine, and really excellent DJs and just set it all going. I remember when the lights finally came on at the end I saw this sticker on the strobe saying “only to be used in bursts of fifteen minutes” after it had been on full blast for six hours... so lucky that didn't blow or we'd have been dancing in the dark! We did put on the Ruthless Rap Assassins once too, which was great, we did try to do a few different things like that – but we were essentially kind of indie, that was us. The Charlatans, the Stone Roses were wicked, but yes, that's what gave us our first taste of pop promotion.

So many of the people you mentioned, from Dan Treacy through to the Mondays, are loose cannons to say the very least... You must have got very confident that you could deal with challenging musicians if you had to.

Yeah... Well, being musicians ourselves we could relate to certain things like being a pain in the neck because the monitor's not good enough – but really the big lesson we took to the festival was just to start small, that was the trick. We started small, we only had 350 at the first one, we lost nine pounds ten pee in year one. We didn't need to remortgage any house, we didn't need to borrow £100,000, we just survived on what we had – which was nothing – and we just kept going. Danny had just qualified and had to go and become a teacher for the first year and a half because we'd just had our first kid and so on, but he was able to give that up not long after the first festival.

I'm interested in whether you also learned networking skills from your early experiences. I mean, whether it's C86 indie gigs or acid house raves, these are things that thrive off face-to-face meetings...

Yes, god absolutely, I mean most of my friends in London now are people we met when we were going out regularly to the Gardening Club in Covent Garden or to Full Circle and places like that.

So is that something that you explicitly aim to do in your own promotions: not just to create enjoyment but to propagate more networks?

I think that's fair to say. When it's actually happening face-to-face something happens that can't in any other way. When you're clubbing it'd be wicked that one night you'll see someone and nod to them, then the next week it'll be a chat, then three Saturdays later you're squished this tight on a sofa with them and you're best of friends...

...then a month on you're setting up a company together!

Exactly. But you know, it's great: you go back to somebody's flat after the club and that's when the ideas come out and when the fun starts really properly happening. And yes, absolutely yes, that's the kind of thing we want to promote.

Have you had any specific examples of things being catalysed by encounters at Green Man?

Yes, definitely. I remember Geoff from Static Caravan, I know he got together with the Fence guys and Tunng in the early days... but god, LOADS of people have told me how they got together with so-and-so at Green Man, and ideas formed and they did this or they did that...

And those individual projects bind existing networks of people together. Someone like the Fence Collective started very informally, literally mates in the pub in Fife – but became part of something bigger.

I was always very envious of the Fence lot actually, because they had that great pool of musicians and creative resources all in one place, literally down the pub. But their festivals were inspired by Green Man, they came to us and said, “We're going to do something like this,” and I really admire what they do, it's absolutely brilliant.

And then you'll have someone like the Drift Collective...

…who have played for us too...

...who are geographically spread out, they have cores of people who were old schoolfriends and whatever, but they can operate from Sussex and Devon at the same time, connected by the internet and so on.

Yeah there are lots of different ways now to keep these relationships going. I'm just about to work on some tracks with Stephen Cracknell [of The Memory Band, The Accidental, Folky Dokey Soundsystem and a dozen other collectives connected to the Green Man] where we'll be doing it entirely by sending things to each other online, I'll record something, send it to him, he'll do his part and so on. It's the first time I've done that and I'm really looking forward to that, to working in a different way from being in the room with someone.

"Maybach" by Jo & Danny's Yellow Moon Band (YouTube):

That's funny that you're working remotely, as he's originally from your neck of the woods isn't he?  Is there a mentality that comes from growing up around Aldershot?

Well Aldershot is quite hardcore, it is the home of the British army! It's funny that that's where we always did the Buzz Club... One guy got in touch recently, he used to go down regularly, and he'd taped loads of the gigs on a hand-held cassette player. He had the shows by Happy Mondays, Charlatans, Blur, all of these and he offered to put them all on CD for me, so I've got this whole pile of CDs now and I'm going to put some tracks up on my blog site.

But the really funny thing is that just about every single band when they've played go [swaggering, insolent tone] “So, is this the home of the British army then?” I mean, actually I don't think any of our crowd really came from Aldershot, they all came from the rather more middle-class enclaves around it, and somehow that was alright and we never had any problems. I remember one squaddie wandered in drunk one night, took a look around and wandered out again, and we were all like, “Oh no!” then “Phew!”, bunch of indie kids that we were.

Mind you, Primal Scream did insist on going down to the local pub down the road that had a Union Jack full of bullet holes from the Falklands on the wall – this was when Bobby [Gillespie] was in full leather trousers and long hair era, and full of Glasgow attitude – and they came running back. Running back. And they were a bit quieter after that. We nearly lost our headline act! [laughs, makes mock-scared face]

Going back to what you said about the festival, have you got any key moments where you just felt “this is it – this is what we're doing it for?”

Yeah, memories from every one! The first one that comes into my mind is hearing Robert Plant do “Whole Lotta Love”. Crikey, we nearly missed it as well – we were just so knackered, because obviously come festival time Danny and I will wander around and it's just packed with people that we haven't seen for ages, friends and family event, so it's just constantly, constantly taps on the shoulder and a big hug, or just people recognising you and wanting to say thanks, or whatever... so walking from A to B just takes forever PLUS we've got little kids and if they're with us it becomes even slower.

We'll try and have power naps where we can, but we'll be up all night partying then up early with the kids, and as you can imagine we just get exhausted. So we thought we'd have a bit of shuteye I think just when Vashti came on – where we were based we could hear Fridge on the Folky Dokey stage, Vashti on the main stage and it was really weird, I remember drifting off to [sings] “just another diamond day...” with a dub bassline underneath. It kinda worked... but then Danny was shaking me going “Wake up! Robert Plant!” and I went “Fuuuuck!” and we just ran as fast as we could and got to the front of the stage just as it was going into [“Whole Lotta Love” riff] “da duuh du-du dum...

And this year, what are you actually hoping to see yourself?

I'm looking forward to... well, in all honesty I'm as excited about seeing someone low down the bill like [emerging Oxford folk/classical crossover composer] Message To Bears as I am about Laura Marling or Joanna Newsom, because... well, because I book 'em all! Actually, I'm really looking forward to the cinema tent this year, yeah let's go for the leftfield option – but it is going to be amazing. Really proud of it, want to big it up definitely – because we sold out before we did the mailout with all the cinema tent stuff in it feels like it's been overlooked a little but it shouldn't be.

We've got Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, we've got loads of live soundtracks going on with people like Sons Of Noel And Adrian and with Richard James who used to be in Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, we've got a whole Welsh section on the Saturday afternoon with this guy Ewan James Morris who's just done the John Grant “Mars” video and an artist called Casey Raymond who works with him – there's four Welsh bands with visuals and short films in between, loads of stuff... On the music stages, I am looking forward to Laura Marling actually, very much... Bear In Heaven... Steve Mason – who's great to have, as we've had all the other former members of the Beta Band play apart from him. But as I say, just as important are those impromptu campfire moments that you can never predict...

• Green Man Festival website
• Find It's Jo And Danny on Amazon
• Find The Yellow Moon Band on Amazon
• Jo Bartlett's first solo album Upheaval is out soon on Static Caravan