S3 EP. 04 - Goc O'Callaghan: Beyond the music - What festival design teaches us about crafting unforgettable experiences
We're taking you behind the scenes of an incredible journey, exploring the power of memorable experiences and the lessons we can learn from one of the major memory makers out there: music festivals. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Goc O'Callaghan, co-founder, owner, and festival director of the legendary ArcTanGent Festival in the UK.
This is a festival that started as a childhood dream in a bluebell forest and grew into a multi-award-winning independent festival. This is the first of a special two-part series in which Goc shares her story of building something extraordinary from the ground up. In this episode, we dive into those early days and the magic of creating memorable experiences.
S3 EP. 04 Transcription
[00:00:00] Steve: Why hello everybody. My name is Steve Usher and a warm welcome to the experience designers podcast.
Today we're taking you behind the scenes of an incredible journey, exploring the power of memorable experiences and the lessons we can learn from one of the major memory makers out there. music festivals. And I had the pleasure of sitting down with Goc O'Callaghan, co founder, owner and festival director of the legendary Arc Tangent Festival in the UK.
And this is a festival that started as a childhood dream in a bluebell forest and grew into a multi award winning independent festival. And this is the first of a special two part series Where Goc shares her story of building something extraordinary from the ground up. And in this episode, we dive into those early days, the magic of creating memorable experiences.
And the lessons we can all take from the world of music festivals. About bringing people together in extraordinary ways. And trust me, This one is filled with wisdom, humor, and the kind of inspiration that makes you want to build something amazing. So let's dive in. So Goc, welcome to the Experienced Designers.
[00:01:32] Goc: Thanks for having me, Steve. It's good to be here.
[00:01:34] Steve: Oh, it's amazing. It's been, uh, not too long in the planning, but I know you had, you were pretty busy in between our last conversation and today, which, I'm so excited to dive into, to learn more about what you've, , yeah, to share your story and learn more about what you've, , what you've been up to.
Um, But, um, I'm, it's a
[00:01:53] Goc: small, uh, small summer party. Just a, just a small one, just a smidge, just a small one. .
[00:02:00] Steve: Um, I'm continuing with a bit of a tradition actually as a start point for this, podcast, which is, aptly called the Experienced Designers. , I'm just gonna throw this as a bit of a curve ball to you, if that's okay.
Um, go on, go ahead. So what's your favorite experience and why?
[00:02:21] Goc: My favorite experience is. always the stories that people tell after a good experience that they've had. Because there is something so satisfying in seeing people relive a good experience with their expressions in their face, their hand gestures, their enthusiasm, the grin across their face, and I just find that so immensely satisfying.
It's not related to a specific experience. Yeah. But it's my experiences of others experiences. So the summer party that we're going to come on to talk about, my favorite part of that is, is after the event is hearing what people have to say about it. And, especially when you can, especially when you realize that there's a whole nother part of an experience that you've never seen.
Everyone's experiences are so personal. And even if you're in the same space at the same time, nobody's living the same experience. So, the stories that people tell, it's so deeply ingrained within us to tell stories. And that to me is just immensely satisfying, and I think over the next 45 minutes or so, , you'll start to understand why that's
[00:03:26] Steve: very important to me.
Oh, I love that. Great share. What? That's a great start to the pod. I love it. Thank you for that. Thank you. No problem. So Goc, who are you? , what do you do? And maybe another one. Why do you do what you do? But let's just start with what you, who are you? What do you do?
[00:03:43] Goc: Okay. So my name is Goc O'Callaghan.
I am the co founder and director of a multi award winning festival called Artangent, which is based here in the UK. , I'm also a global experience lead for Brewer Happold, which is a structural engineering firm. My key focus there is on all of the cultural buildings, places, and spaces and entertainment venues.
And my role there is to help our clients to find, define, and unlock the perceived and actual value of the experiences that they're users. I'm also an academic. I'm studying for a doctorate. Based on the quantification of experiences.
[00:04:23] Steve: I cannot wait to unwrap this. Okay. So, um, just for the audience, we've gone from a multi award winning festival to a structural engineering firm to then.
quantifying and measuring experiences. And of course there's a red thread throughout all of those three areas. But wow, what a, what also a really interesting kind of three areas to expand and, explore with you. So just give us a sense. Let's start from the top. Just in terms of ArcTangent, tell us a little bit more about the story, how it came about.
Yeah, where and when did it start for you?
[00:05:00] Goc: I was fortunate enough to grow up in a little wooden house in the middle of a blue bowl forest in the Kent countryside. , I was basically living life in Neverland as a child. All the freedom to run around, build dens, play with fire, climb trees, fall out of trees, get covered in mud.
It was a great place to grow up. And this little wooden house had no central heating. So on the weekends during the summer. , my parents would host what we called working parties, which is where friends would come up to the forest, help us log up the fallen trees, set the wood aside for the winter so that we could have the wood burner on and it would keep us warm through the colder weather.
And I have this very vivid memory of being seven years of age, laying in the long grass with the dew starting to form on the grass, laying, watching the sparks of a campfire. shoot up into the air and sort of do that wonderful dance that, you know, the sparks do. And I had this overwhelming feeling like so deep inside of me that I wanted to create memories for people.
In fact, millions of people, but I was seven. I was so young. I didn't know how I was going to do this. And it seems that was really formative in me starting this path. Um, so given that I had the benefit of the forest to, to continue to play in, basically, I started throwing parties around the age of nine and these parties got more and more elaborate and more and more out of control until I ended up posting.
What was dubbed Gocstock by one of my friends, which was a, a 300 person festival, , the first year I did it that ran for three days. , there was DJs in trees. There was a solar powered yurt tent. Um, yeah, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I was absolutely winging it. I didn't sleep for three days.
There was no lighting. There was no real toilets per se. Um, it was carnage. Now as a professional festival promoter. It was absolutely disastrous in terms of event production, but it was the most hedonistic weekend of Probably of my life, to be honest with you, it was brilliant fun. So that's kind of set me on, on this journey of, uh, running, running Art Tangent.
[00:07:05] Steve: Amazing. Can I just ask in terms of what was some of those early events? And actually, how old were you at that point as well?
If you had this kind of imagination at seven, uh, through to like nine, and you're starting to put on these kind of first, sessions or meetups, what, what were they? And where, where was it? Yeah. What was. So it started
[00:07:26] Goc: just as having, um, you know, sort of friends from school coming up for sleep outs in the woods where we'd light a fire, we'd build dens and would sleep out there in our sleeping bags.
And that sort of evolved to then having friends come up with guitars, sitting around the campfires, perhaps staying out there for a bit longer. We started to build teepees out of, , like hazelwood and tarpaulin. So we had somewhere that was a bit warmer to stay. And then what prompted the first ever Festival, if you can call it that, was, I threw a party when I finished university.
So I was 21, when I did the first Gocstock, but prior to that, I'd been working with other events as well, either on work based learning opportunities or in, you know, freelance paid capacities, but I didn't have any of the event production know how myself at that point. Um. So the festival came about purely because I was saying to people if you're musical would you mind doing a 20 minute set and we'll try and curate it and we'll have one day of sort of acoustic music around the campfire and then we'll bring in a sound system and we'll have some DJs play for you know a few hours into the evening and before I knew it I had three days worth of music yeah.
Um, curate, manage, provide all the infrastructure for, um, team of one, completely unlicensed. Um, it was very unprofessionally run in hindsight, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.
[00:08:46] Steve: Wow, amazing. And, not to give away, your age, but just roughly when about was this in terms of time? When was it?
[00:08:53] Goc: Um, I've, I will run out of fingers to count them on,
[00:08:59] Steve: Um, so just reflecting back on that period, what's kind of still true today? What's still kind of in that core? Still inside the Goc of today that was about seven year old looking at the dew and the, the crackling of that fire,
[00:09:13] Goc: Yeah, well, there's quite a few things actually. So, yeah. I'm definitely best kept outdoors. You know, I love being out in the fresh air. Especially in forests. I think we have an instinctive draw to fire. I think it's a fantastic way of bringing people together. But I think from the purposes of, , the parties and what continues to be true from where I started through Gocstock to Art Tangent is the principle of friends, friends and friends and friends of friends all coming together.
So you might have a friend that turns up with one of your friends. So when they first arrive, you know who they are, but they're technically a stranger and by the end They're a friend of yours as well. And even of the scale of Art Tangent, you know, 12, 000 people, that ethos is still true. Friends, friends and friends and friends of friends, I think is the golden thread that runs through those early Gocstock days, or even prior to that, you know, childhood parties all the
[00:10:09] Steve: way up to Art Tangent.
Lovely, lovely. And can I just ask, like, how did it evolve from like Gocstock, then what was that next phase of, just exploration and building and evolving.
[00:10:22] Goc: So Gocstock ran for four or five years. Wow. On that same site. , and obviously during that time, my awareness around what was required from an event production perspective grew.
Uh, it became more professional, albeit still very small scale and independently run. , and it got to the point where I outgrew the site, we physically couldn't fit any more people on that piece of land and demand for tickets was getting higher and higher, so I looked to move it to, a site in Eridge, which is just the other side of Tunbridge Wells and had made some really good headway with the planning of that and then unfortunately had an investor pull out six weeks prior to the event, which kind of put the kibosh on it, that was the end of that.
But I think, retrospectively, that's quite poetic. Gocstock was never supposed to leave that bit of land. And at the time, that was a bitter pill to swallow. But, you know, of hindsight and getting older and having more experiences, there's something quite nice about that, having stayed there. so that was the end of Gocstock.
But at the same time, I'd started then a small event production company called Kit Kaboodle. And I'd started working with, various little independent festivals around the UK in various different capacities, whether it was just helping them to bring in their concession traders, or running small solar powered stages, , or curating comedy.
So that was my real foot in the door of proper festivals. Um, and then alongside that during the winter months, I was working as a experiential activation production manager. So creating brand activations just to create, this is the beginning of sort of experiential marketing, some time ago now.
So that was giving me even more knowledge around, um, the complex nature of being legally compliant with event production, the kind of level of detail that needs to go into that when you're building a brand and delivering that. for an end user experience.
[00:12:14] Steve: Um,
[00:12:16] Goc: and then that's kind of eventually led them to ArtTangent.
[00:12:19] Steve: . Um, could you just tell us a little dive a little bit more into that kind of experiential element where you started to, yeah, evolve that kind of competence and Um, because it's obviously experiences are such big business certainly today. Um, but just back in terms of your, own evolution
[00:12:37] Goc: so I, I started as a, I guess, a production assistant. Um, so shadow in the production manager and that was then a case of populating production schedules. So your production schedule would be, the order that things need to arrive to the location where you're setting something up, the build schedule, and then the de rig schedule.
Um, and it will contain all of your supplier's contact details, your site contact details. And it basically like it's a how to guide to set up the experiential activation or the event that you're working on. As that role grew, I then became more responsible for sourcing those suppliers, budgeting those experiential activations, having.
The meetings with the clients to say, here's the feedback from this one. We propose it. We think about this to do it differently next time and it would improve. But with that became a lot of learning around the value of branding and the perceived value of that branding amongst the audiences. So one of my clients was O2
[00:13:37] Steve: and
[00:13:38] Goc: O2 had intentionally aligned with the academies because they wanted that association with lifestyle.
Um, so with O2 partnering with the academies, therefore you'll have got that. you're instantly putting them in the same lifestyle choices, live music. So that brand alliance became very important. And from that I ended up doing quite a lot of sponsorship work, working with Amex for, Hard Rock Calling, working still with O2 for big sort of day festivals that were happening in Trafalgar Square.
So they gave me like another side of production, but it taught me the real value of branding and the sort of thinking and ethos behind those brands and how that impacts the end user.
[00:14:18] Steve: Yeah. So, I mean, just for those that probably from maybe the U S perhaps, I don't think O2 is in the U S, but that's like, you know, large kind of telco mobile business.
And they partnered, I remember when they did that, they had the academies, in London, there was one, wasn't there somewhere at, uh, O2 Academy. There's Civil, there's
[00:14:33] Goc: Brixton, Kentish Town Forum.
[00:14:35] Steve: Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was like a strategic move for them to connect into that kind of certain kind of music.
Was it, was it a more location or was it type of music or band or what? What was the alignment? What was the kind of strategy behind it?
[00:14:52] Goc: It was to go to the venues that, so they UK, vary quite dramatically in size from. So I think the smallest one's around a thousand, um, up to, well, O2 Dome is, you know, lots and lots of people.
Yes. So it's, it's not a particular genre of music that they're partnering with. It's the venues that are putting on these range of tours and, varied range of artists, but it was more about the lifestyle and the hedonism of going to see live music and O2 being , the company that is sort of at the, the head of that when it comes to telecoms.
[00:15:27] Steve: Yeah. So how did this kind of feed into then ArcTangent, tell us about the kind of the birth of ArcTangent, how it came about, that nucleus moment.
[00:15:39] Goc: I moved from being a freelance expert or production manager to taking a full time job with an agency that, dealt with some of the biggest global brands, as their event producer.
But I very quickly realized that corporate world for events wasn't the right place for me to be. So I walked away from that job relatively quickly. Circumstantially around the same time, one of the organizers of 2000 trees festival had been talking about running another or starting and running another festival.
And I. I'd been at every 2000 Trees, bar the first one at this point, and had done a number of different roles there, from bringing in the traders, to curating the comedy stage, to helping with the build and break, and I'd always been very on the ball when it comes to the production schedules and making sure that everything I'd learned through those early Gocstock days and through my production manager role was being applied to the festival.
So it was simply a conversation in the pub of, shall we have this conversation about starting another festival? And that was 18 months prior to the delivery of the first ever Art tangent.
[00:16:47] Steve: Wow. Tell us about 2000 Trees. Is that right? Tell us about that festival and Yeah. What that was, what the experience with that one was like.
[00:16:58] Goc: Um, so 2000 trees is run by six friends and they started it off the back of getting frustrated with the likes of the bigger corporate festivals that had no heart or soul to them really. So two of the 2000 tree organizers are also now my business partners for Art Tangent. So 2000 trees is effectively this, the sister festival of Art Tangent.
I think it's been around for five years longer than ATG has. Very different in terms of Uh, the audience location. There's some crossover in the music, but it's not mainstream, but it's the more mainstream of Arctangent and 2000 trees, but still with a heavier alternative lean.
[00:17:39] Steve: Yeah.
Amazing. And so tell us a little bit, tell us the concept. Tell us about Arctangent. I'm super curious to hear your journey with, the stuff. Well, tell us about the very first one. What was, um, How did that go? I
[00:17:53] Goc: mean, if we were going to compare Arc Tangent to Gocstock, Art Tangent 2013, which was our first year, feels like Gocstock 1 did insofar as when I look back it's scary how much I didn't know.
Um, I mean, it wasn't small in the first year. We had three and a half thousand people on site. And just thinking about some of the decisions that we made in terms of site layout, were quite maverick now if I think about it. The weather was absolutely atrocious. We had apocalyptic rain for all three days of the festival.
We'd put this scaffolding structure up to put hammocks on and the ground was so wet the whole scaffold structure was just Sliding away and I remember pulling this scaffolding out of the ground and throwing it over a fence just because I was Terrified it was gonna bump someone on the head and that was it.
I was going to prison from You know a lack of due diligence or something like that, but we got through the event When the headline band played 65 days of static played on the main stage A bottle of champagne that I'd been given for my 21st birthday. I opened on the stage and shared with my parents, my business partners and my production manager.
And at that point my mum had said to me, Quite jokingly, maybe not so jokingly, if you haven't made it by the time you're 30, you should probably get a real job. And I shared this champagne with her and said, have I got to get a real job now? Then mum, she's like, absolutely not. You've done it. I love it.
Love it. Love that moment. So just as a, to give you an idea of scale. Yeah. That was three and a half thousand people in year one. 2024, which is our 10th edition, due to COVID We, our soft launch on the Wednesday was 3, 000 people.
[00:19:39] Steve: So what's the, what size is it now in terms of total over the, how many days is it on for?
[00:19:45] Goc: It's now on for four days. Four days. Four days, 12, 000 people, five stages, around 135 bands.
[00:19:54] Steve: So
[00:19:54] Goc: yeah, scale wise we've, we've kind of grown up quite a lot since that first edition in 2013.
[00:19:59] Steve: Yeah. That is true experience design right there.
Okay. Let's unpack that journey because I'm sure there's some, as you've already highlighted, some reflections and some, yeah, some areas where there could have been improvements from your first one to today in comparison. So just unpack it for me, Goc. Give me a sense of like, how do you go about organizing?
Are there any kind of, anything you think worth sharing around that evolution and how you approach something like this?
[00:20:27] Goc: I get asked quite frequently, what would you say to somebody who wants to start a festival? And I always respond with, don't do it. And I say that semi tongue in cheek and semi purposefully. , to put on an independent festival, it takes a huge amount of personal sacrifice. You have to put in ridiculously long hours.
You have to become jack of all trades and master of none. You have to juggle a million and one different things. You have to be prepared to take a risk. You have to be prepared to not earn any money, potentially, for the first, sort of, seven years, now seems to be the trend. It's an immensely risky industry to go into.
So you have to have this real deep seated desire to make this work. Otherwise, it's probably not the thing for you to do. That doesn't mean you can't work in festivals. There are a multitude of jobs that you can do within the festival industry. But, to start own and run an independent festival is immensely hard work.
That said, with that comes, you know, some money can't buy opportunities. Uh, you know, I've got endless fantastic stories to tell. It's opened up some fantastic opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise. So, you know, with, with the risk comes the reward. Um, yeah, it's all consuming is what I would Yeah, yeah.
Um, but it's. It is a deep seated passion of mine to deliver these memories for millions of people and to now get to the point where Art Tangent is selling out at 12, 000 people. That people want to rush over to you and give you a hug or shake your hand and thank you for the best weekend of the year.
Um, yeah, it's quite overwhelming. It's a really good feeling.
[00:22:04] Steve: Amazing. I just want to, I just also want to at this moment, I, cause I'm more, I'm just recalling the beginning, sharing the story as that kind of seven year old. I think it's quite amazing to have that kind of vision at that age, but then to realize it and to be able to experience it yourself, is quite the journey.
Uh, and I think, you should be immensely proud of that. I think it's absolutely amazing. Real. Thank you. It's a real lesson for people. I think,
[00:22:29] Goc: I think it's the wrath of entrepreneurship is that When you achieve something, you're like, great, what's next? Yeah. Um, I describe it as trying to catch the tail of a helium balloon that you let go of, that's getting progressively higher and higher in the sky, and you never quite catch that piece of string again, but Yeah.
Reflecting back, especially now on this podcast, talking about where Goc Stock was in year one to having just delivered the 10th edition of Arctangent. That's a noticeable shift. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a crazy thing to do, but it's, it's a damn lot of fun.
[00:22:58] Steve: Yeah, I bet it is. I bet. Um, to tell us a little bit about the, from an experiential point of view, when you're staging something like Arctangent, what are some of the, like the key pillars to.
To, uh, yeah, an independent festival. And to particularly when bringing in kind of the audience experience, some of the storytelling, some of those engagements, how do you approach that? Cause it's extremely complex.
[00:23:23] Goc: Yeah, there's so many moving parts, um, that are all intrinsically linked that if one of them falls over, it can have a detrimental cascade on everything else going wrong.
I think the most important thing that we've probably learned and are still learning. improving, is the site layout. And part of that comes from understanding the lands that you're on. So Arc Tangent is on a particularly interesting farm, that has, uh, ravines and mines and burial mounds and it's a real sort of hippie, spiritual, Uh, farm and it just, I'm going to use this word again, it feels quite poetic that we're almost dancing on the heads of those that came before us, so that, that land to me has a real calling to bring people together, which tallies very nicely with my desire to create memories for millions of people.
[00:24:12] Steve: Um,
[00:24:13] Goc: but because of the land having these very interesting, characteristics, planning where you put things on the farm is very difficult. The farmers call themselves custodians of the land, they don't consider themselves the owners, they're custodians and they're very protective of the soil and the livestock and the various animals that, roam that land.
So there's a huge amount of sensitivity around what we are doing to that land because it's quite brutal infrastructure that's bringing in, there's forklifts, arctics, massive stages and just the footfall of 12, 000 people is quite impactful on the land. So pre COVID we used a different part of the farm.
Which proved very challenging because of a mains water pipe that ran through the arena, preventing us from putting, big pins in the ground to hold structures down. Then also having the challenges of power cables that ran, diagonally across the water pipe, meaning it was very difficult to put infrastructure in.
For a number of reasons, post COVID, we ended up changing the location of the site and putting it in what was our old car park. So that's effectively like redesigning the whole festival again, because you have to learn where everything is. before you put infrastructure in, you're not really sure how the land's going to hold up if the weather's bad.
And that was the time that we also changed from having an outdoor main stage to an indoor main stage. And that was in part because for the seven years that we'd had in the run up to COVID, we'd had horrendous weather for all seven years during the festival. 2022, our first year back after COVID, massive main stage structure so everyone could be indoors and it was like degree heat.
So, you know, there's, there's someone, there's someone around there just having a game with us, you know, telling us off for dancing on their heads. Yeah. Um, so I'd say Having the site layout helps you to get everything else right. And there's lots of planning that I don't think our audiences will be aware that happens.
For example, our info point, our welfare point, our first aid point, and our mental health charity are intentionally located within probably a 25 meter square of each other. So that if somebody came with any particular needs, it's very unlikely that only one of those services would be required. Um, so the idea then is that we're able to physically go and either take that person to one of those resources, or get someone from one of those resources to come and help the person in need.
There's also considerations around, the way traffic flows around the site. And what does that mean for the punters? And what does that mean for L? artists and production traffic. There's considerations around not having a conflict of food stores. So we wouldn't have two pizza stands, for example, because we want to give everybody a fair opportunity to make as much money as possible.
And then it comes down to the choices of the audiences. Um, and we're constantly trying to improve our VIP offering. So this year in our VIP area, we had 1, 700 VIPs, we had 60 beach huts, a whole bunch of pre pitched and glamping options, and we have a cat a hat, like a teepee VIP bar that has now a VVIP bar in it for You know, the likes of Daniel P. Carter from the Radio One Rock Show, for artists, our close friends and family. There's also a sauna there, you can have a sauna at Art Tangent, which still to this day blows my mind. Being able to stand in a field and have a, an ice cold beer served to you is, pretty bonkers if you think about it, but to then be able to have a sauna afterwards is just Slightly mad.
[00:27:48] Steve: You're definitely bringing some Nordic, influence into the festival. Loving it. Um, I mean, it's, it's one of these things, isn't it? It's, and I love that you used the word kind of intentionality, because I think, um, it's something which I, I definitely do champion and it's a message I consistently, um, share to, people.
Um, tell me a little bit, I just want to, as soon as you said it, I was like, I'm really curious. I'm curious, uh, on the, on the traffic element. What are, when you're designing that flow and obviously the site has an impact, how does things like the schedule also impact that flow? Cause I assume like if one of the main stages is finished and then you know, there's going to be a flow coming out from there at a certain point in the day.
I mean, is it kind of to that level of detail to, to kind of try and predict or manipulate or plan how that flow will. Move or the punters will move around at certain times during the day.
[00:28:42] Goc: You're talking about, foot traffic rather Foot traffic. Yeah, yeah, yeah
so I've always been fascinated by this and, through my work at Borough Happel, which will come onto, , a bit later.
One of the projects I'm working on is called Crowd, DNA and Crowd, DNA is a European wide research project that we're working with seven different partners from academics to, scientists to, crowd modelers. And what we're doing is we're creating a series of experiments that show the pressures and the trajectories that people are forced to take, if they're pushed in various different scenarios.
Yeah. We're creating bottlenecks on purpose to measure what's the optimum width of the door to get people through as quickly as possible. And with that, we're also then going to what we call in observatories, which are real world environments. to film crowds from above, to understand how crowds are moving.
And the idea with this is that we're gonna create and release some open source algorithms that security companies and event managers, can use to help predict when there could be a dangerous situation with crowds occurring to prevent things like the Astroworld disaster happening again. So a lot of the learnings from that have been quite influential into positioning of places on site and staggering the programming.
At Art Tangent, we have two arenas that are connected with a relatively narrow, intentionally relatively narrow walkway. That's flanked with our central bar and our merch, so people are constantly walking past the bar or the merch tent. Um, we all have stages that are staggered. So there'll be one stage in one arena, one stage in another arena playing at the same time.
And then those stages swap to the other stages in those arenas. So there's always, we're always splitting the audience between the two arenas, and then there's another stage that sits in the middle that can be accessed from either side. Obviously, when the headline act is on the main stage, that's pretty much where everybody is, but that main stage structure is so big it can house every single person on site.
And the majority of the walls aren't on that, aren't on that tent. So there is also, an element of self regulation amongst the audience. And we're also very lucky that we have an immensely respectful crowd. So if somebody was to fall over, someone's instantly going to pick them up, regardless of whether or not they know them.
But there are definitely considerations about where things go in relation to that, making sure we're not creating bottlenecks, that we aren't putting trip hazards in the way, that we are providing. Almost like a fan. of opportunities of where people can go, whether it's to the bar, whether it's to the merch tent, whether it's to the, the VIP entrance or whether it's to food traders.
So that's very intentional in our planning.
[00:31:22] Steve: Amazing. I love that initiative. That's really smart. I think it's, um, Um, I'm guessing with the algorithms and the data that we're able to capture these days, I'm sure that's going to be really valuable to inform, risks and, hopefully prevent any future issues or, horrendous, situations that could occur in festivals for sure.
[00:31:41] Goc: I mean, it's massively unlocked the inner nerd in me, the fact that, Our French partner have been at Hellfest for the last, I think, three years. And they put people in X TEN suits, which are census suits, and they just put them into the circle pit or into a wall of death and just measure the forces that they're exerted under.
Oh, no way. And just all the kind of maths behind it and the science behind it is, is so nerdy, but it's so interesting. Fascinating. But, this is a sort of level of detail that, that is going into some of the art tangent planning that the audience would never be aware of. And actually I think it's, if we're doing our job right, the audience should never be aware of that.
They should just be having a fantastic time and not understanding why.
[00:32:22] Steve: Exactly. Great design shit, yeah. Is, uh, is normally you don't see it. Um, I think this is also a poignant moment to maybe stress back to when we first started about talking about festivals. Was this is for anyone thinking about starting a festival.
This is where you, need to get to in terms of that level of detail, um, and really into the kind of the nitty gritty of it all. And that journey to getting to that takes time iteration and learning and all of those elements. So it's a lot of work that goes in. So I'm really curious to, to dig into it.
Um, and really, yeah, it's what can we extract from the ArcTangent experience into other worlds and other industries and maybe, yeah, just explore that. I
[00:33:00] Goc: think my response to that. Ties in a little bit to Burro Happold work that I'll come on to later, but the benefit that we have at the festival is that it's all temporary infrastructure.
So apart from the fixed hard standing rows, we have the opportunity year on year to slightly tweak where things are, um, which is great because we can take feedback from our audience, feedback from our suppliers, and just make, what might seem like quite miniscule changes, but that could have a massive impact on the overall visitor experience there.
If you're working in a space whereby you have more fixed infrastructure or you're building a specialist entertainment venue, for example, you might not have that opportunity for change. So to engage with an experienced designer right at the very beginning when you're talking even perhaps about the concept of the space will help you to design a space that is going to deliver that best end user experience.
But you can't do that after. No. You know, it's a bit like, it's a bit like putting the sprinkles on top of a cake when you haven't got, the eggs, the flour and whatever else goes into making a cake. If you haven't got the foundations of that there, those sprinkles have got nothing to sit on. No. So you really need to integrate experience from the very, very beginning in order to deliver an optimum experience in the end space, especially if it's a fixed.
Fixed venue or a building or, you haven't got that flexibility to change temporary infrastructure there.
[00:34:21] Steve: Yeah. Oh, amazing. You're in the memory business, right, as well, right? So you're definitely creating memories. Could you just share, like, how do you think about that?
As I say that, like you're in the memory business and you're, creating an environment that enables and creates memories inside of people. What sits in your mind as I share that? How do you get intentional about that, as part of your thinking and approach?
[00:34:45] Goc: Wow. So I think this comes back to the whole, question you asked me at the beginning about what's my best thing about experiences and me stating it's storytelling. Now, gonna go nerdy again here. Seems that you're unlocking my inner nerd today, Steve. , until quite recently it was thought that a memory was an intangible thing.
It wasn't something that we could ever see or measure. It was just something that was perhaps an energy or, something inside, like our spirit inside of us that we couldn't actually measure. But recent studies have found that actually memories are a protein string. And every time you recall a memory, you're unlocking that protein string.
And every time you tell that memory to someone else, you're adding to that string of protein. So that memory string gets longer and longer. However, every time you open up that protein string and you add something to it, you're slightly distorting the original memory. So in fact, the only real memories that we have are the ones that we have forgotten, the ones that we don't tell because we're not adding to that protein string.
But what this allows experienced designers to do is to be slightly exploitative of our audiences, because if you can encourage people to have a good time and create that first memory, But also encourage them to tell the story for a lifetime. Our human nature means that we embellish our stories. We want to make things sound better than they were.
We become, ultimate storytellers. We change our story depending on who we're talking to, if I was to tell you a story versus to tell my youngest niece a story, the language and the body language that I would use would have to be slightly different to enable you both to understand that story in a way that I would like you to understand it.
So, creating memories are often done unintentionally, but if we start to include memory curation as part of our experience design, The power of that is huge, and I'm, I've been researching this for years and years and I still feel like I've only just scratched the surface.
[00:36:50] Steve: My mind is blown right now.
Oh, wow. It makes sense. It definitely makes sense. And I can relate, I definitely relate to it, just how you share stories with people, and to who? Hmm. Hmm. Tell me a little bit more. What can you share a little bit more on that?
[00:37:10] Goc: I mean, I guess it's also the, there's a saying, isn't there?
That if you say something often enough that you start to believe it. And that is also part of that memory string being effectively rewritten. And if you, let's use Woodstock as an example, the number of people that claim to be at the first ever Woodstock Woodstock. It's something like 400, 000 people.
There's no way there was 400, 000 people there. But they get caught up in the storytelling, and they're reciting the stories that other people have told them. And this is called mirroring. If somebody tells you a really good story, you start to feel the same emotions that person might have experienced during the thing that created that memory.
Um, and it's so powerful. It's our fundamental human nature is to tell stories. It's how we learn. It's how we process, extreme scenarios. And it's how we connect. So if I can create an environment where I'm helping people to start these memories, it's then for them to run away with and do with what they want.
But this is why I love the stories that I hear from people afterwards, because I might have been part of the team of people creating the environment, environment for that first memory to be created. But their story is theirs and how they embellish that and how they change that and how that's perceived is wildly different to what happened, but it's still authentic.
It's still that person's feeling and emotion. And that to me is. Very, very powerful.
[00:38:36] Steve: What a privilege. That's amazing. That's a privilege in life, let me tell you. Wow. Okay. We, I think we could come back on that and just do an academic piece. Just click absolutely on that. I'd love to dive into that. Post podcast, I think.
Um, so there is a poignant moment as well, because I think this is also something like on a more industry level, that I think has been, wildly impactful, of course, was COVID for the independent festival scene. Tell us kind of what happened in that period.
How did you guys survive for start? But also what's the kind of the, been the wider ramifications, in this important area of, culture in the UK? Yeah, I
[00:39:17] Goc: mean, COVID hit everybody, let's be honest. You know, , it's impacted everybody's lives in one way or another. Absolutely.
And. From a festival perspective, we closed our, our gates in August 2019 and we then didn't open our gates again until August 2022. So that means that we missed 2021, sorry, 2020 and 2021. So effectively that's three years that the festival wasn't on. There was a huge amount of work being done behind the scenes to look at the ever changing rules and regulations around COVID.
and whether or not we could put on something resembling a festival. But there was no, no cancellation insurance at that time. You took the risk that if you put the festival on, the rules could change and then you'd pay for all that infrastructure to come in and you couldn't get the punters in.
There was also the risk that if you could put on the event, people wouldn't want to attend because they were too scared because of all the scaremongering, especially here in the UK that I think went on. So through various different iterations and exploring different ways that we could have potentially put the festival on, it was decided that we would wait until 2022.
That posed a lot of challenges because we'd sold tickets in 2019 as early bird tickets for 2020. So we were heavily reliant on our audiences to roll the tickets over. And in the most part, a lot of people did, and I think it was only those that financially couldn't that didn't, But that posed other issues is that some of our suppliers went up 65 percent in terms of their costs with an average of 25 to 35 percent budget increase for the independent festival sector.
Now we hadn't added another 25 to 35 percent on our ticket prices and we couldn't do that. So we're hosting an event in 2022 based on ticket prices that were sold in 2019. We've no, no way of knowing whether or not it was going to be financially viable for us to. to deliver that event. Our saving grace there was I think a lot of people had been furloughed and therefore had some disposable income that they perhaps wouldn't have done because of the lack of social activity that happened during COVID and therefore our audience went wild on the amount of beer they bought and the amount of t shirts they bought.
Yeah. That made 2022 and has allowed us to get to where we are in 2024. Um, 2024 has been, hugely damaging for the festival sector. We've seen over 60 independent festivals go bust this year. They've either cancelled because it's not financially viable to continue or that they've actually gone bust. And this is still an impact from COVID.
Festivals were so deep in the deficit of financial deficit that they're still recovering. so at the moment there's a big call through the association of independent festivals for a 5% VAT rate on tickets, which the government did instigate for about three months, during COVID to help. And it did help, but it's still not enough to help these festivals survive.
Another area that Art Tangent, became very lucky, I think, we crowdfunder and the intention was to raise 30, 000. And that 30, 000 was purely to cover the overheads of running the business that wasn't a salary for the directors. It was purely to keep things like the website up and running, to maintain our social media team, to still have an active presence.
And we hit that 30, 000 target relatively quickly. So we put in a stretch target of, I think it was then 90, 000, 90, 000. Not in a million years ever thinking that we were going to reach it, but we just thought let's see how this goes. Um, we raised something like 139, 000 from a crowd funder.
through our audience and the majority of that was raised in the last 24 hours. It was a case like sit there with the popcorn and just watch this number get higher and higher. Um, I want to make it abundantly clear, none of that money went in our pockets. That money all went to helping keep the festival survive.
And a lot of the benefits that we offered also had a cost implication to them. So for example, you could buy a 50 pound bar tab. as part of the crowdfunder, but we would give you 100 worth of beer vouchers, which meant that we won, but then you won later, or a limited edition t shirt, there was still the production cost that went into that.
So 139, 000 is by no way, shape or form a small amount of money. But there were probably around a third to half of that were actual costs. But what it allowed us to do was to have some cashflow and absorb those costs further down the line, which I think is. a very fundamental reason why Artangent has survived COVID and come back as strong as we have.
[00:44:00] Steve: I love that. Community and, people who believe the fest, in the festival, previous attendees, when you see these, crowdfunding initiatives, around, really good purpose and supporting a person or people or, an event like this, it's, it must have been a beautiful thing to watch for sure.
[00:44:18] Goc: Yeah, it's quite overwhelming to think about.
[00:44:20] Steve: Yeah, amazing. Was there some kind of initiative with the Association of Independent Festivals at the moment? Is there a bit of a drive, to try and change some of this landscape in addition to the 5 percent VAT?
Because these festivals are so important to uK culture and I don't know, we saw this kind of years ago, we saw lots of clubs closing down and being turned into flats or apartments, particularly in London.
, And certainly, music, particularly in the UK, is so intrinsic in the culture. Where is it in quite a, is it in, is it in the balance right now? Is it that serious? What's happening? There's definitely a change.
[00:44:54] Goc: I think the independent festival sector in the UK, especially, is at crisis point.
Yeah. Um, , for a number of reasons. Obviously, the impact of COVID is still going strong. So that is meaning that we're losing festivals left, right, and centre. Um, there's a lack of government support. I don't think the government are really listening to the value of the independent festival sector here in the UK and the workforce that comes with that.
And as we lose more and more of these independent festivals, we're going to lose skills as well. There's going to be less opportunity to pass these skills down to the next generation that are coming through. Also, the kind of cascade effect of. lack of independent festivals and the grassroots music venues is that there's not going to be the same number of places for our emerging talent to grow.
And, we can't have these mega bands, like your Biffy Clyros of the world. They can't get there if they haven't got the festivals and the grassroots venues in which to grow to get to the point where they can be stadium ready. So there really needs to be some intervention from the government to support this sector.
I think, compared to the theatre world is very good at asking for grants and funding. I'm not suggesting that the theatre world is an easy world to work in either, but historically there is a history of grants and money being provided to keep theatres afloat. Basically, to run a festival, it's a series of production problems that you need to find solutions to until the festival's done.
And one of that is dealing with the budget. So independent festival promoters are now learning to, to have more of a voice and to say, we can't do this without some government intervention. And the 5 percent fat on tickets is the biggest thing that will, help us keep the festivals that remain alive and potentially provide a space for new festival promoters to come in with new concepts around festivals and give this a fair.
A fair go to make it work.
[00:46:51] Steve: Yeah , I wish you and all the other independent festival owners the best in that because I think it's Um, it's a fight worth having for sure if we're going to pick our fights. That's one of them without a doubt. Absolutely. Oh, yeah I guess close this kind of first session off with a little bit of a, a primer for our opening element of our session two for the audience, , Goc is what some of the kind of like from a festival focus perspective, some of the key experience design principles applied to it.
Just get a little bit more of a sense of what that looks like from an organizer's perspective. ,
[00:47:25] Goc: I'm. I think especially in the world of festivals, find your niche. There's a lot of, I think personally, this is very much my opinion, but I think a lot of reason why independent festivals are going bust, beyond just the budget issues, is this copy and paste model.
There's too many festivals that are competing in the same space. So find your niche, whether that's the concept for your festival, whether it's the location of your festival, whether it's in the, whether programming of your festival and stick rigidly to that. And with that, I think you will draw the audience.
When we first started Art Tangent, we knew that we were going to be curating this unorthodox artistry, this music that doesn't quite square your fit within the genre. What we hadn't forecast was that was going to attract an international audience. We have people come from all over the world to come to Art Tangent.
It's a wonderful melting pot of different languages and cultures. And it creates a very different but wonderful community there. So I'd say to a Wallaby Festival promoter or in whatever experience design you're doing, find your niche and stick rigidly to that and people will find you. I think for us, community is such a huge part of who we are.
So listening to the feedback from your audience and doing your best to implement that into the next iteration of your event is going to help you grow and retain that audience. And ultimately without an audience, there is no festival. Um, the key experience design principles, we spoke quite a bit about them earlier with like the layout and thinking about the flow of that.
So the next stage on from that, I think is to think about your visitor journeys. Now, lots of people think about a visitor journey as being quite a linear thing. Like from A to B. With a festival, that's absolutely not the case. And I also, I'm really pushing for people to stop thinking so absolutely in demographics.
We should be thinking about the psychographic profile of people. We could have a seven year old that is as obsessed with the headline band as someone in their 60s. Their demographic, sorry, their psychographic profile is very different to their demographic profile. Their motivation to be at Art Tangent is to see that one particular band, and they will want to be front and center to watch that band.
They'll want to buy the t shirts, they'll be absolutely fanatical about this band. But as someone in the 60s and someone in the 70s would never be categorized the same demographically. No. So demographic profiling is absolutely fine, but when you want to think about the behavior of people within a space, let's start to think about the psychographic profile and designing for that.
And with that comes that extra level of detail that can really escalate somebody's experience. I'm going to echo a point I made earlier as well, if you have well designed a site, that should be facilitating these opportunities to create good memories and the audience should never know what's going on behind the scenes for them to have had such a good time.
[00:50:28] Steve: Do we do enough psychographic in business? Yes. It's more demographic, from my knowledge, but yeah. Okay. So, thank you so much for this session. We are going to move on to a second session to look at the dark side of Disney. And hopefully that might be an enticer for the audience. But, look, first and foremost, from the very first time I met you, I was like, I have to share your story. And, and this podcast, hopefully one way of, enabling that because I think it's such a powerful one.
I connected with it immediately. So look, thank you so much for, sharing that. And it's, been a pleasure to record this first session with you.
[00:51:04] Goc: Thanks for having me, Steve. It's been a lot of fun, not just this last 45 minutes, but the conversations we've had to get to here. So yeah, I'm excited for the next session now.
[00:51:12] Steve: Awesome. Let's do it. I'll see you on the other side. Thanks Steve.
And that's a wrap on another episode of the Experienced Designers podcast. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Goc as much as I did. From her early days dreaming in Bluebell Forest, to running one of the most iconic independent festivals.
Her journey is a reminder of the magic that happens When passion meets persistence. But we're not done just yet. This was just the first part of our conversation. And in the next, titled, The Dark Side of Disney, We'll dig more into Goc's work as an experienced designer, exploring how she crafts meaningful moments and navigates the complexities of creating extraordinary experiences.
And if you love this episode, make sure to subscribe, share, and leave us a review. It goes a long way to helping the podcast and absolutely attracting Let's keep exploring what it means to create experiences that last a lifetime. And until the next time, stay curious and keep designing those unforgettable moments.