Festival organiser Meegan Jones talks about what it’s like to travel the world for work and to be behind the scenes of some of the world’s most famous and trashiest fests.
London, with side trips to Ireland, Morocco and Belgium, as well as a stopover in Hong Kong for a few days on the way home to Australia, is a rough outline of Meegan Jones’ last working trip. She’s a festival organiser who, after years of working on events in Australia, now works on events such as the Glastonbury and Leeds/Reading festivals in the UK.
Meegan’s first leg of work in the New Year will be based at her office in London. After the logistics have been finalised, she will then move onto the festivals sites, living at each of them for about a month. Onsite at last year’s Glastonbury Reading and Leeds Festivals,traveling between the two, she was living in a Bunk-a-Bin: little portable cabins complete with hot shower and toilet. She also worked at the Latitude Festival based in Suffolk/East Anglia, spending a month onsite. Before transforming the sites from farms to festivals, organisers have a month of English countryside visits and excursions to tiny villages close by – which in most cases, also means the pub.
Meegan’s main job is making the festivals sustainable. Working through all the day-to-day operations and assessing whether they are being conducted sustainably, her role is to suggest ways in which festivals can be more green in terms of energy, transport and waste.
Out of all of the UK festivals Meegan has worked at to date, the highlight has been at the Reading Festival. Her satisfaction with the project came from being able to implement several new initiatives that had considerable impact on the event. Glastonbury Festival was also an amazing festival, a “must-do for those interested in festivals,” she says. “Latitude Festival was in its second year, and is the style of festival I would put on if I were to create one from scratch,” she continues. “The attention to detail was amazing. It is an exquisite festival and was just voted the most fan friendly festival at the recent UK Festival Awards.”
Hedonistic crowds of thousands infuse the festivals with adrenaline. Meegan recalls lying in her bed one night listening to huge waves of cheering going across the site, “like a Mexican wave of cheering. It was so electric,” she says, “I got up and wandered the site with a couple of other workmates until 4am. Just being in it was incredible.” This adrenaline, however, is denied an outlet once the music ends on the Sunday night of the Leeds and Reading Festivals. It can then turn into something ugly. Meegan calls Sunday night ‘riot time’ – when “fences go down, portaloos get set on fire, tents get set on fire with people in them, the ‘angry mob’ rove the site creating chaos, gas canisters are thrown in the fires created by burning tents and mini-bombs go off,” she explains. “Lots of people have been injured over the years – eyes out, major burns, et cetera.” In a bid to protect the survival of music festivals and events, the Love Not Riots campaign was born. Created some years ago by some of the festival fans and patrons, they continue to promote safety and peace during the events. Free merchandise are given to festival goers, with the tagline ‘Love Not Riots’ printed on them.
As for festivals back home, Meegan has noted that there is an emergence and an embrace of uniquely Australian festivals, including camping festivals such as Woodford, Meredith, Falls, Peats Ridge and The Great Escape. There are also many boutique events, some with cult audiences like Folk Rhythm & Life in Victoria. Newcomers like Festival of the Sun and Gumball are also having a go. She also ‘bush doofs’ or psytrance festivals like Exodus and Earthcore.
When in the UK, Meegan recommends the Big Green Gathering and Sunrise Celebration. “Due to the number of people in the UK,” she explains, “the festival scene is really healthy and festivals can be quite specific in their style. I really loved the horse-drawn cart camp, with travelers [gypsies] living onsite, tattoo stalls selling their bits and pieces.” The big Kahuna of them all, if it’s big and pure rock concert power you’re after, is the Reading Festival. “It is legendary and the original. Glastonbury, of course, is Mecca, and you can’t say you’ve really been to a festival until you’ve been to Glastonbury.”
Back home though, Meegan loves the Peats Ridge Festival. There are no “big headliners, but the spirit of the festival, along with the natural setting, is amazing.”
With festival work being seasonal as well as on opposite ends of the globe, Meegan has unique opportunities to travel. Her favourite travel destination is Turkey. She describes the country’s natural beauty as mind-blowing. “The Aegean Sea and the south/west coast areas are stunning,” she says. “The crystal-clear water and stark cliffs and valleys right on the coast were amazing. I had some incredible times in Butterfly Valley – a must visit for anyone wanting an idealic chill space. Mostly backpackers are there, so it’s not a mix it with the locals scene, but it’s an Eden, that’s for sure.” Her cultural experience was heightened by the pride the Turkish people take in creating earthy, comfortable spaces to relax in. For Meegan, these havens engage a higher level of interaction between people. Just imagine… floor cushions and lowered tables, grapevine terraced roofs and outdoor clay ovens. These earthly comforts have inspired Meegan and she has emulated these spaces in every place she has lived in since.
Amongst all the bustle of travelling, her favourite mode of transport is train travel as it is much more relaxed than buses. “I like a bit of comfort,” she explains, “but I don’t mind bus travel when I’m backpacking. It is always fun to discover chickens under your feet or a goat at your side.” Meegan always gets excited about international flights. “I find out in advance what movies are showing so I don’t see them beforehand at the cinema,” she says. “I get all my snacks and books sorted, plan what I will wear, check in online and try like crazy to get the best seat.” Meegan recommends the one next to the window behind the exit seats – this way, you can leisurely stretch your legs and get up easily. What can’t she travel without? Chocolate and something to read. And Vegemite of course – it reminds her of home when she is away.
When directing the Cultural Festival for the 2007 Commonwealth Games, Marcus traveled to 19 cities in 12 countries in 58 days, mining underground art scenes around the world. On this journey he discovered Glasgow, which he revisits in his new television series Not Quite Art.
Marcus Westbury is interested in the unique possibilities of any given place. He’s not particularly interested in conventional tourist destinations and even describes himself as a bad tourist. “I’m not a museum guy,” he says. “I don’t want to look at objects.”
This could potentially be a problematic statement coming from an art expert, but as Marcus explained to the ABC, when he was asked to create a new art show, his art expertise covers what might be called Not Quite Art. The turn of phrase caught the commissioning editor’s ear and became the name of the television show in which Marcus explores the art world outside of galleries.
To the founder of Australia’s biggest media festival, This Is Not Art (TINA), the title was somewhat comical. Having done This Is Not Art and then doing Not Quite Art he opened himself up to a barrage of questions about when he was going do Art.
It seems that art, like beauty, depends on the eye of the beholder. In Not Quite Art, Marcus shares a glimpse of the art world through his eyes, having devoted much of his life to the art that inspires him. During the episodes of Not Quite Art the audience is led into a world featuring abandoned warehouses used as art galleries, a shop turned gallery and skateboarding venue, a bohemian theatre in an old bowling club, lanes filled with graffiti, a hiphop collective and socio-politically focused computer games such as Escape From Woomera, giant paper cabbages, sticker art, stencils, video art, rear-projection urinals, magazines posing as advertising posters, exploding garden gnomes, ringtone symphonies, empty shows, uncollectable art and an iconic opera house bearing the words ‘No War’ in red tile paint.
Originally the series was to be set only in Australia. “The budget for the show was not really enough to go anywhere. It’s not meant to be an international show,” says Marcus. Something, however, was missing in the first episode, which focused on Australian arts funding. It posed the question, “Why does Australian society spend far more money building sterile palaces to dead artists and their artefacts than supporting living ones?”
The episode was meant to focus on Marcus’ hometown, Newcastle, a city struggling to shake off its industrial heritage and form a cultural district with what Marcus calls a “cultural vision… much like a real estate development”. The episode focuses on artists in Newcastle struggling keep grassroots studio and gallery spaces alive, critiquing government funding bodies who view culture as something that must be imported from elsewhere.
“The theme for that episode was the idea of where culture comes from, the idea that culture is something that you grow. It’s not something that you build or that you import,” explains Marcus. The director, Brendan Fletcher, felt that looking at what wasn’t working in Newcastle was not enough. Brendan’s advice was to “find a counterpoint of where it works well.” Marcus knew just the place.
In 2006 Marcus travelled to 19 cities in 12 countries in 58 days, scourging the underground art scenes in all the countries in the British Commonwealth, in search of talent for the arts festival component of the Commonwealth Games. “The Next Wave Festival got the job of co-ordinating the program,” epxlains Marcus, “and as the director of Next Wave, that meant I was directing it.”
“I went from Australia to New Zealand to Canada to Belize to the UK to South Africa to Kenya to Singapore, back to India to Malaysia, back to Singapore, then home. In six weeks I worked out that I spent more than six days of those six weeks actually in the air, without my feet actually touching the ground.”
It was during this mission that Marcus discovered Glasgow. Its industrial landscape pockmarked with abandoned warehouses and derelict buildings had something very exciting hidden under the corrugated iron and dark red bricks. Renegade artists. In Glasgow, artists have moved into the derelict sawmills, Chandleries (large ship warehouses), empty fish markets, abandoned shops and many other spaces.
“What I loved about Glasgow,” explains Marcus, “is that there is a whole bunch of people there that are part of the Glasgow scene and Glasgow culture that’s grown out of Glasgow, and Glasgow’s proud of it. I know it sounds almost stupidly obvious, but it’s actually really rare. It’s really difficult.”
Artist collectives around the city avoid rotten patches in floors, deal with water ruined paintings that have been hung on leaky walls, occasionally turn up mummified cats buried under sagging walls and turn them into exhibition icons, build pizza ovens out the back with their seventy-six year old grandfathers for a pizza party gallery opening… and produce some amazing art.
“There’s a cultural energy… an ethos in Glasgow that I think is embraced by people who are just making the culture that they believe in happen, because there’s no-one there to tell them that they can’t. There’s no-one standing around saying, you know ‘we’re the gatekeepers and you have to do this and you have to do that.’ There’s just a lot of DIY stuff going on. To me, that’s the kind of culture that I find interesting.”
Glasgow particularly touched Marcus because it is so physically similar to Newcastle. He regrets not having shot the Glasgow part of the show before the Newcastle part, to match up the almost identical landmarks “for those really nice transitions.” The post-industrial poverty of the towns also led to similar cultural and artistic expressions. As Clare Simpson, a Glasgow council member says in the series, “There’s a lot of poverty in Glasgow. With that comes inventiveness.” What makes Glasgow such a fertile area for artists and what makes it such a good counterpoint for Newcastle is that the local government, the landlords and even the police support the underground art scene. When Marcus tours the ex-fish market (now a sculpture gallery) with Simpson she explains that the council understands that “for the arts in Glasgow to thrive, there needs to be an infrastructure for production as well as presentation.”
Although he doesn’t revisit them for his series, other highlights from his Commonwealth Games tour were Montreal and Nairobi where he discovered similar DIY culture.
“Montreal is quite a different city. There’s quite a different layer going on there for lots of historical reasons to do with French Canada and Quebec,” he explains, “but Montreal had been through a similar process where it was bankrupt in the 70’s and the whole city fell apart and then became a very interesting, vibrant place. It unleashed certain possibilities.”
As for Nairobi, Marcus had “read in the guidebook before I went that Nairobi’s the most dangerous CBD in all of Africa, which makes it the most dangerous CBD in the world, but I actually found Nairobi an incredibly welcoming warming kind of place. I found the most amazing people there doing amazing things. I found a good entry point. I’m sure I could’ve gone there five hundred times and never found the stuff that I found there or even the pathways into being embraced by them, but I really loved it.”
With so little time, travelling to so many countries, it seems remarkable that Marcus got so quickly to the hidden artistic underbelly of each place as can be witnessed in his televised sojourn in Glasgow. He puts it down to thorough planning, the internet, hunches, chance and an unconventional way of doing things.
“Traditionally, I think when you do an international program you’re meant to do it the other way round where you go from the top down,” he says. “We probably could’ve got a lot more money and more resources if we’d gone to the British consulate and said, ‘Who are the best young artists in Britain? Can you please bring them out to Australia?’ When you do something like that, that’s how you’re expected to do it. But we did it from the other way round. Basically we just set out feelers across the networks that we knew and said, ‘Does anyone know anyone that’s doing anything interesting in these places?’ I found out little bits and pieces … I went to Kenya on the basis of one article I read in a newspaper about Kenyan hiphop musicians.”
But although he loves Glasgow, digs Nairobi, finds Montreal interesting, lives in Melbourne and works in Sydney, he says that there’s no place like home. “My favourite place to go to is Newcastle because it’s home,” he says. “It’s the place I get most excited about when I get off the plane.”
