2:07pm Monday 21st June 2010
By Ruth Campbell
Ruth Campbell meets a music-loving couple juggling jobs, children, building work and planning wrangles to realise their ambition of holding a festival on their land.
A FULL-SIZED drum kit is the last thing most parents with young children would have in the middle of their kitchen.
But it sums up what a central role Kate and Oliver Webster-Jones’s love of music plays in their family life.
The enterprising couple, who used to work in the record industry in London before relocating to rural North Yorkshire, are inviting hundreds of strangers to enjoy a day and night of music, comedy and arts on their family parkland, just up the road from their four-bedroom barn conversion home.
The unlikely catalyst for their small, family-friendly festival was an uninspiring business meeting with their financial advisor to discuss where to invest their earnings. Selfemployed Kate and Oliver decided they didn’t want to put their money in savings accounts, shares or pension funds.
They wanted to do something that was much more fun instead: “We thought: ‘Banks are going bust.
Where is your money safe? We may as well spend it. Let’s do something with a bit of pizzazz’,” says Kate.
Having often complained about not being able to enjoy music festivals with their children, Oona, eight, who plays the violin, Arthur, seven, who plays electric guitar and Dulcie, five, who knocks out a tune on the ukulele, the couple dreamed of putting on one of their own.
The stunning 90-acre historic landscaped site, complete with ornamental lake, obelisk folly and an 18th Century folly, in Baldersby Park, near Topcliffe – originally gifted to Kate’s father in the Sixties as a wedding present – was the obvious location.
The deer shed, an L-shaped stone building that nestles in a dip in a sheltered area of the parkland, was, they decided, the perfect focal point for an open air concert.
What they have come up with is like a mini-Glastonbury, without the hassle, queues and crowds. And, for those of us lucky enough to live in the region, we don’t even have to endure a six-hour car journey or be forced to sleep under canvas in a muddy field if we don’t want to.
“It had got to the point where the land was probably going to be ploughed up and farmed if we couldn’t find another use for it. Friends did think we were mad, but it was one of those things we had to do,”
says Kate.
OLIVER, who has played in a number of bands, produced his death-bed test: “When that day comes, do you wish you had done that thing or not?”
The couple decided they could afford to lose about £15,000 on the venture, but that was before costs spiralled to £35,000.
For former sound engineer Oliver, who now runs a web production company, and Kate, a music company administrator, getting it off the ground has meant juggling two jobs and children along with building work, booking bands, promotions, sorting out health and safety issues and protracted planning wrangles.
Oliver’s candid blog documents their challenge on a day-by-day basis: “It’s been the hardest two weeks so far,” he said at one point, when they were having problems booking bands. “I lost it at one point and the word ‘divorce’ was mentioned.
Not since Kate and I were kayaking in Florida and we inadvertently drifted into an alligator infested swamp, and I slightly lost the plot, has Kate had to use such shock tactics.”
There have been many sleepless nights and Kate, who is also a school governor and helps to run a sports club, confesses to waking up in the night scribbling notes. “The planning takes up so much time, a couple of hours’ work most evenings. We do focus on the children when they come in and read books to them and things. But thank goodness their school has a no-homework policy,”
she says.
“The house is a mess and sometimes the children get fed up of us talking about it, although they are quite excited about camping and Arthur loves the idea of having a backstage pass.”
Despite all these pressures – incredibly, for a first-time music festival held in a sleepy backwater – the couple have managed to secure 13 top acts, including headliners The Wedding Present, who have had 18 top 40 hits and were one of the late Radio One DJ John Peel’s favourites.
Once they signed up, other bigname bands, including The Young Knives and Miles Hunt and Erica Nockalls of The Wonder Stuff, also signed. These acts, along with standup comics and performance poets, will be spread over two stages.
The contacts the couple have in the music industry helped: “We have lots of friends in the industry who we got favours from,” says Oliver, who has worked with Portishead and Massive Attack. “But even then, it has been tougher than we imagined.”
But they never felt like giving up: “What made it so difficult was that our objective was to book the best of the best. It’s about giving audiences great music, so no fillers, no tribute bands, just the sort of tantalizing line up I would want to go and see myself,” says Oliver.
The Deer Shed philosophy is that even the youngest children get as much out of the festival as their parents, so there is also a giant doodle wall, treasure hunts and swing ball games as well as circus, animation and drumming workshops, willow weaving, junk modelling and mosaic modelling.
Kate says: “It’s just what we would want to go to. So many festivals either aren’t suitable for children or are too far away or too big. We’ve never been able to find one that catered for our love of music and our children at the same time. The children’s entertainment isn’t an afterthought at the Deer Shed. And the food and facilities are great too.”
They see it as a super-concentrated version of a big festival: “It doesn’t take two hours to get out of the car park or two hours to find your car,” says Oliver. “You can see all the bands on the list, it’s not like Glastonbury where it takes one hour to get from one stage to the other,” adds Kate.
Although they have planning permission for a three-day, 5,000 entry event, this year they are limiting entry to 1,000 adults. Half the tickets have already been snapped up and are continuing to sell at a rate of about 100 a week, to festival-goers from places such as Middlesbrough, Leeds and Newcastle and also to fans travelling from Sweden and Germany.
“We’re just praying it doesn’t rain,” says Kate.
■ Deer Shed Festival, Saturday, July 17: £35 (15 and under, £7.50, fives and under, free) deershedfestival.com Tel: 01845-595980
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