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| Castle magic as the crowds come
to chill |
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The Big Chill festival
Fiona Stewart
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THE tents are going up, the sound systems pulled into place and
the stages built. With just a week to go, the Big Chill festival
site is preparing for the arrival of 30,000 guests who will see
bands including Nitin Sawhney, The Earlies, Roisin Murphy, Norman
Jay, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and Tinariwen.
Behind the scenes, directing the frantic activity that turns Eastnor
Castle in Ledbury, Herefordshire into a playground for festival
lovers, is Fiona Stewart.
Fiona, who lives in Camden Square, spends a month in a field over
seeing an army of workers who make the weekend one of the high points
in the summer festival calendar.
Her job is the production manager and that runs from making sure
the performers are adequately fed and watered through to making
sure the toilets are working and the guitars and record decks are
plugged are plugged in.
It’s a logistical headache not unlike ones faced by Roman generals,
she says.
“It’s a big job –we have 5,000 members of the crew
to look after on top of the guests. I have to be there for a month
to make sure it is all ready,” Fiona says.
“And the areas in the festival are designed so the spaces feel
very personal. We try to keep the arenas small.”
The Big Chill has other north London connections. It started in
a back room of the Union Chapel in Upper Street 11 years ago as
a post-pub chill out party.
“We started as just a word of mouth thing and then it just
grew and grew,” says Fiona, who has worked for the festival
for five years.
Soon the organisers were thinking of how to take their unique brand
of entertainment out of darkened night clubs into wide open spaces.
It allowed them to expand what they could offer to their clientele.
Fiona said: “We offer something different. We put on music
that people haven’t heard before – it is not just the
same old faces.”
And they pride themselves on offering more than just a music festival.
She continued: “We have cocktail bars next to a spa areas,
then we have an arts trail and we offer yoga, massage – all
sorts of things.”
The highlights? “I organised a festival in Corfe, Dorset. There
was an elderly lady – 83 years old – who had lived there
for a long time and she was dead against it.
“So were the parish council – but she came to the festival
to look around and really enjoyed it. She loved the arts trail we
put together and was so impressed – she said she had never
seen anything like it before in her life.” |
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