Fact #140209

EYE WITNESS – THE FIRST T IN THE PARK
Interviews conducted by Johnny Black in July 2008.

Stuart Clumpas (founder of T In The Park) : I’d been promoting gigs through my company, DF Concerts for quite a while, and I’d long had the idea that I wanted to do an outdoor festival in Scotland. We had a couple of little false starts, like Arran, you know? Geoff Ellis and I had trundled out to Arran about two years previously and we had The Levellers lined up to do it but Caley Mac wouldn’t put ferries on for it.

We’d done a lot with the Tennent’s Live thing, and they wanted to crank up their music activities. We’d said to them some while before that they should stop putting money into bands, they should put it into the infrastructure, so they started doing that. Then, we got approached by them. It was Paul Morrison at Tennents marketing agency, KLP, who was very instrumental in the whole thing.

I was suggesting my festival idea but Paul Morrison had been telling me that Tennents really wanted to be doing things with big acts like Rod Stewart, so I said ‘Fair enough’ and that was when I toddled off and decided to do Levellers-type things myself. So Tennents started trying to get together these big rock concerts but it kept falling on its bum, because they were going to all the English promoters, the Harvey Goldsmiths and Barry Marshalls of this world, but they felt they weren’t being taken seriously. They were promised Paul McCartney but it never happened, then they got close with Rod Stewart at Balloch Park but then it fell over.

Around 1992 Paul rang up and told me Tennents wanted to raise their game a bit and wanted to know what ideas we might have at DF, so I sat in a hotel with my then-girlfriend Judith Atkinson who was a co-director of the company at the time. She was Britain’s first female booker/promoter, and I’d been going out with her for a while and eventually persuaded her to come to Scotland, which she did around the time when we started King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, so she was booking the bands for King Tut.

By then Paul had got round to talking with David Bell who handled merchandising for Bjorn Again. David was the main merchandising man in Ireland, and he said to Paul, “Look, my friend Denis Desmond of MCD Promotions, who I work with all the time, is the equivalent of a Harvey Goldsmith in Ireland and I’m sure he’d be interested. After all, he’s in Dublin …”

David Bell (Firebrand Live) : My company, Seminal Merchandising, was fortunate to work on the ground-breaking Feile Festival with promoter Denis Desmond of MCD in Ireland. I happened to meet Paul Morrison, sponsorship manager with KLP through mutual friends. He was excited about a Tennents-sponsored ‘major headliner’ event at Loch Lomond. I related my experiences on the Feile and how I felt Scotland was really missing a festival of it’s own. I put Paul in touch with Denis and Stuart Clumpas and the rest as they say is T.

Denis Desmond : (MCD Promotions) : It was David Bell of Seminal Merchandising who put me in touch with Stuart Clumpas. We were aware of each other, but hadn’t met up to that point. The two obvious options for me to partner with at that time would have been Regular Music and DF Concerts. Of the two, Stuart showed more interest, more passion.

Festivals were springing up all over the place at that time. Feile was doing very well for my company in Ireland, and we were looking to expand.

Stuart Clumpas : So Paul went to meet Denis, but Denis didn’t want to do it himself and asked about Scottish promoters, and he knew about me and said he was quite keen to work with me. At that point, Paul mentioned to Denis that I wanted to do a festival rather than a big gig and Denis said, “I think that’s a much better idea.”

So Denis phoned me and said, “I hear you want to do a festival?” He was sure we could get Tennent’s interested if we did it together and next morning, ten o’clock, he was on my home/office doorstep. I remember it clearly, and this is Denis all over, he had no briefcase, just a rolled up copy of the Irish Times in his hand.

Right then and there we worked out a basic deal whereby we’d get on with running the gig … he brought in the bigger bands, we were very much the junior partner, I was a little younger than Denis, so we’d do the younger, hipper bands and he had access to the bigger bands that I couldn’t get to.

Plus, Denis did Feile, and one of the things I wanted to do with my festival, I’d always seen the European events like Tourhout and Werchter where the bands flip-flopped between two sites, and that seemed to me like a really efficient way of doing a festival.

Denis agreed. He saw right away that Scotland and Ireland had this Celtic connection anyway so, bugger England, let’s package the Celtic festivals, which is exactly what we did.

Denis Desmond : (MCD Promotions) : Then we kicked the idea around for a couple of months. Feile had happened in August and we spent the last few months of that year discussing it, thrashing the idea out.

The idea was to package two Celtic Festivals, Feile and T In The Park, together.
The model for that would have been the Tourhout and Werchter festivals in Belgium, which meant you could offer bands two shows over the same weekend.

Stuart Clumpas : We came together in 1993 as Big Day Out Ltd because I’d just returned from Australia and I really liked what the Big Day Out festival was in terms of vibes, so I kind of stole a bit of the idea. The thing about the Big Day Out events is that they take place in the middle of Sydney, Perth, Auckland.

There was some talk of Loch Lomond as a site, and there had been things there before but it seemed to me that it was too far away.

We trundled off and tried to put something together very quickly at Balloch Park, and we got half a very good bill together quite quickly, and Tennents could see it and they started getting really excited.

It was complete last minute thing. The Rod Stewart gig had fallen over, and it was the middle of April when Denis came to see me. In a week and a half we got this bill together for Balloch Park but, when we thought about it, to do it properly needed a lot more than two months.

Denis Desmond : (MCD Promotions) : Paul Morrison, of course, deserves a lot of credit because he definitely brought Tennents into the mix, and they were key to making the whole thing viable.

Stuart Clumpas : Paul Morrison from KLP persuaded the head of Tennents at the time, Scott Minnear, who really bought into it, and a guy called Mark Hunter, who was the Head of Brands at Tennents. Mark was your classic NME reader, in his mid-30s and he used to come to King Tut’s to listen to obscure American guitar bands like American Music Club and The Pixies, a really classic Glasgow guitar type of person, so Mark got it from day one, what we were up to.

Then, as this bill was coming together we realised we really didn’t have enough time to promote it and also I’d been saying to Denis, “I’ve been looking at a site and what I reckon Scotland really needs…” and I have to admit I was wrong about this … I said, “these camping festivals like Glastonbury and Reading are all right in the south of England but it rains like buggery here.” So I thought the thing was to have the festival close to a main city so people could go home for the night. I really didn’t think the camping thing would work in Scotland.

I kept driving past Strathclyde Park and I thought it would make a great festival site, because it was a country park but it was really close to Glasgow, great transport connections to Edinburgh and it fitted with my notion of a city-based festival, which had come from Big Day Out.

It took a bit of persuading to get Strathclyde Park to agree, but it happened.

Geoff Ellis (DF Concerts) : I do remember a distinct lack of enthusiasm from certain quarters. People just didn’t think a festival in Scotland would work because it would be impossible to attract the bands or the crowds. It had been attempted before and come to nothing. (Source : The Times, 6 July 2008)

Douglas Taylor (co-owner, MAndD funfair) : Stuart Clumpas was having serious problems getting an entertainment licence. As it happened, we already had a licence for the park, so we interceded on their behalf, which helped to get them the go ahead.

Stewart Cruickshank (producer, BBC Radio Scotland) : I arrived in my office one day to find a tray of turf on my desk. There was no message, nothing to indicate where it had come from. I was scratching my head trying to figure out where it might have come from. About a week later it was followed by a card announcing the festival. Quite a neat little promotional stunt, I thought, because it certainly made me aware of the festival.

Geoff Ellis : We didn’t sell out the first year and we didn’t get a great deal of media coverage in advance because people didn’t want to associate themselves with something that might be a flop. Not to mention the fact that people were sceptical that all these bands were even going to turn up to a field outside Glasgow.

Stuart Clumpas : One thing I got badly wrong was the camping. I thought we’d get a few campers from Edinburgh and Aberdeen, so we made a space for 750 tents, but at least 2000 turned up, and we were absolutely swamped. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There were tents pitched all over the place. I clearly remember talking to two lads from Motherwell, and saying, “What are you doing with a tent? You live just three miles down the road.” And they said, “But it’s a festival. You camp at a festival. It’s the vibe, man.” And I hadn’t understood that.

So we made provision in the second year for 3,000 tents and even that wasn’t anything like enough.

I felt it was important to have a real Scottish element to it, make it a genuinely local celebration, because Scottish people are fiercely patriotic, and the West of Scotland in particular, since the 70s, has been an absolute hothouse for ‘rock’ bands.

The booking style, well, Scotland and Ireland have always gone for much more guitar-based music, stuff like that, whereas the r’n’b/soul/dance/disco style stuff was more the south of England, so we knew the market we were looking at. Crowded House, for example, were big in Scotland before they took off in England. That’s why we went for them, because they were at their peak. They were that kind of songwritery band that you could line up with Del Amitri, Teenage Fanclub and all that kind of stuff. We’d have been mad to go for Luther Vandross, you know?

It’s still the same. It’s Franz Ferdinand and The Fratellis that come out of Scotland even now, not some hip-hop act.

With Crowded House … I’d always had a good relationship with them, so I asked them to come over and do T In The Park and Feile and, to his credit, Neil Finn and the whole lot of them flew over from Australia for the weekend and then flew home. I remember Neil saying at the time, “If it was Poland and Hungary I wouldn’t have done it but Scotland and Ireland are two of my favourite countries. How could I say no?”

Neil’s mum was Irish and Scotland was the first place in Europe where they broke through.

We did a comedy stage, with great people like Eddie Izzard, but it didn’t work. People weren’t prepared to sit.

One thing I remember was Cypress Hill. That was a classic. They’d turned up at the airport in LA with no work permits so they weren’t allowed to fly. Once they’d got permits and got on the plane they landed in Glasgow at five o’clock on the day of the gig, so they’d missed their slot. I was having to juggle all the other bands around and cut down the length of Cypress Hill’s set, so they were refusing to go on.

I ended up sitting round a table with them, and we had their fee in cash, it was $30,000 if I remember right, and they wouldn’t go on until they were paid.

As it happened, they’d done a single with Rage Against The Machine who were headlining, so I went and spoke to Rage and they very kindly agreed to come on at the end of Cypress Hill’s set and they’d do the song they’d done together, then Cypress Hill would go off and Rage would begin their set, which meant we wouldn’t have to have a changeover between bands, so it would save time.

Cypress Hill refused to do it. So I ended up sitting across the table from these guys from South Central LA and I pushed the money into the middle of the table and said, ‘Hey guys, I really want to give you this money but if you don’t want to go on …” and I pulled the money back to my side of the table and their eyes all followed it. “But we’d really like you to play.” And I pushed the money to the middle again. “But we can’t pay if you don’t play.” And I pulled it back again.

I couldn’t believe I was actually doing it, playing the Glasgow hard man, but in the end, they agreed to play.

One of the nicest things … we were struggling a bit with sales on that first one. We got 17,000 people, and it didn’t bankrupt us but Denis and I had agreed that there was a pot we could afford to lose before it got too uncomfortable. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but at least we’d know we could have another day, and in the event we lost almost exactly that amount. Any more and we’d have been in the shit.

Geoff Ellis : We were looking at a loss in the first year. There were no grants or council money available, the only help we had was from Tennent’s lager.

Stuart Clumpas : I did struggle to get across to people what we were trying to do, but it’s the same with any kind of event I’ve ever done, if you get it right at all, then you get it about 65% right in the first year, so you feel the concept is right but there’s a list of things you know you have to change or improve.

Then in year two you get it 85% or 90% right and after that it’s on a level of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. Everything I’ve ever done has been like that.

I remember David Belcher putting something like ‘Thank You Mr Clumpas and can you do it again?’ and that was the headline in the Glasgow Herald.


Bill Nicholson (event traffic manager) : When T In The Park started in Strathclyde Park in 1994, I was the events manager. I was employed by Strathclyde Region as, if you like, the landlord of the park.

Prior to that first festival, Strathclyde Park had mostly hosted things like Commonwealth Games Rowing Events. T In The Park was a whole new ball game for them. It was the first major festival that had ever been held in Scotland. The Strathclyde staff were really up for up but, on the Friday night, we were just overwhelmed by the number of people that wanted to come and camp.

The event site was on the Hamilton side of the park and the camping was across the River Clyde on the Motherwell side. We just assumed that everybody would bus in or walk in, because these were urban areas.

So when we were doing the planning, we identified a strip of grass along the banks of the River Clyde as the location for whatever tents came. On the night we just had to keep extending the area.

There was just one wee box office selling camping tickets, like the wee pay booths you get in public parks, and it just couldn’t cope. I remember Geoff Ellis, Stuart Clumpas, Colin Rodger and I having to stuff money into our pockets because we didn’t have a collection system that could cope with it.

In 1996, local government re-organisation meant that although the event was still held in Strathclyde Park, it now came under South Lanarkshire. I had become the leisure manager for South Lanarkshire, so I managed the event again on behalf of the local authority.

In those early years, instead of using numbers, the car parks were designated with the names of planets, like Mars and Venus. So in the middle of Saturday, for some reason Colin was live on BBC radio, they were following Colin for the day, seeing what an event manager does. So at one point he calls me up to find out how things are in the car parks and he asks me, “Bill, what’s you location?” So I said, ‘Colin, I’m in Uranus.” It went out live on the radio.

When it got too big and moved out of Strathclyde Park to Balado, they asked me to go with them, and that’s when I inherited the role of Traffic Manager, which I’ve been doing ever since, through my own company Event Traffic Management Ltd.

I remember also, in the first couple of years at Balado, we were sitting in the Landrover watching people flooding in off the buses towards the campsite. It was wet, very muddy, and there was this wee guy and he’s pushing a wheelchair with at least ten slabs of lager on it. His right hand is on the handle of the wheelchair and his left is on top of this mountain of lager to hold it in place. He’s pushing the wheelchair through the mud to the campsite, and twenty yards behind him is the wife, on crutches with a stookie on her leg, and she’s shouting, “Tam, can I have my wheelchair back.”

Geoff Ellis (promoter, T In The Park) : We booked Rage as a headliner for the very first T In The Park which was an amazing gig because Cypress Hill were treated badly on their way through customs which caused a delay, so they decided they weren’t going to come up to do T In The Park. So we were on the phone negotiating with them, saying, 'Look, you’ve already cleared customs. This is just an internal flight.’ We said, 'The police will give you an escort from the airport to the site." This is Scotland, we do things differently, and I remember that David Levy was on the phone to their manager in LA trying to help, and Scott Thomas. David had Bjork (??) playing on the bill, Scott was doing Cypress Hill and Mike Dewdney was doing Rage for ITB at the time, and we had all these conversations going on. Stuart Clumpas was on the phone to Cypress Hill’s tour manager at the airport. I was on site trying to talk to all the other artists, and we managed to make it work by agreeing that Rage and Cypress Hill would segway into each other and they did Killing In The Name together, which was amazing, and is still one of the all-time highlights of T In The Park. And it came out of adversity. I remember sending Mark Lamarr, our compere, out on stage to announce that Cypress Hill were going to be very late and he demanded a hard hat, quite rightly because people were chucking stuff at him. All of the bands moved their sets forward to facilitate what we were trying to do for Cypress Hill, and it worked magnificently and went down amazingly. Rage and Cypress Hill had such a good time that they went on to do the same thing again at other festivals.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, January 2019)