When I was 17 my friend Paul Higgins’s band won a Saw Doctors song contest on Midwest Radio that led to the band playing in the gymnasium of our school.
Fast-forward almost 20 years and the Saw Doctors are headlining my music festival, with Paul’s current band Bannered Mare also on the bill for Night and Day.
This is just one of the full circle moments that has happened over the past five years since I decided to become a music promotor, while juggling a busy role as the Political Editor for the Irish Daily Mail.
Through all the chaos and craic, I’ve learned a lot. Here are some lessons and memories that stick.
1 Tackle tasks with a positive mindset
Whether I’m wearing my political or festival hat I step into the trenches with a positive outlook. Neither are ever going to make me a millionaire, so they need to be enjoyable and thankfully they are.
That was why I said yes to the quixotic adventure in the first place. My uncle Brendan Hurley was the first to get involved professionally in the music industry. After graduating from Paul McCartney’s School of Performing Arts in Liverpool as a sound engineer, he worked a couple of intense years as a production manager for the World Economic Forum in Davos.
After he decided to move back to the west of Ireland with his family he set up the Claremorris Folk Festival. I helped out in a small way at the intimate festival in the Co. Mayo town.
Over a pint at a family get-together Brendan suggested to me that we could do something bigger together.
And so we did. His brother – my uncle – Dermot, who works in service delivery in a large multi-national, was also dragged in to manage operations, making it a family affair. Everyone told us we were crazy. They’re not wrong, but we chased the dream rather than just talk about it!
Whether I’m wearing my political or festival hat I step into the trenches with a positive outlook. Neither are ever going to make me a millionaire, so they need to be enjoyable
2 Delegate to other people
The first Night and Day took place in Clonalis House in Castlerea, Co. Roscommon.
It was the subject of a five-part TV series on Irish language station TG4. Not bad for a first outing.
Thankfully, it focused on the music and not the chaos behind the scenes. That first year we learned you can’t do it all yourself.
Being able to find people you can trust to take some of the workload off you is essential. We’re fortunate to have great people around us who take up the slack.
This year, we’ve leaned on the experience of photographer David Knight who is a founding member of the Boyle Arts festival. Our core team is small, with myself and my uncles Brendan and Dermot Hurley, working all year on the festival.
3 Time waits for no festival!
When you’re trying to eat the giant behemoth that is a large-scale music festival, it’s one bite at a time. This means clearing anything you can as soon as possible.
The final weeks ahead of the gate’s opening and the punters arriving is chaotic. Less so as the years go by, but only because we’ve learned to eat as much of the elephant ahead of time as we can.
While our core team is three, the wider team is much bigger and comprised mostly of family members. There isn’t a branch of our large west of Ireland family tree that hasn’t been tapped to give a helping hand.
Whether that’s another uncle, Declan, who plans the family area, aunties Valerie and Loraine who look after the volunteers and traders, cousin Gerard Harte who oversees our health and safety, or my parents and baby brother who are always on hand to help.
Having more people involved also means we have a broad music taste. But our headline acts need to be household names that will attract the big crowds needed to make the festival viable.
While our core team is three, the wider team is much bigger and comprised mostly of family members. Here I am with my relative Bailey Barbour
4 Don’t stop at one unique selling point, add more
The festival market is crowded, so you need to stand out. The move to Lough Key Forest Park in Boyle, on the other side of Roscommon, was transformative. It is the perfect location.
We instantly became the only festival in the country where you can arrive by boat, with rentals available from Emerald Star in nearby Carrick-On-Shannon allowing you to sail down the River Shannon and moor at Lough Key during the festival.
The park is the jewel in the crown of Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands and has thousands of visitors already coming to visit each year as a tourism destination.
As it functions as a year-round camp-site so much existing infrastructure is in place: indoor toilets, showers and a camp-site nestled inside the deep woodlands. The luxury campervan pitches even connect to water and electricity.
The park is already home to a range of activities such as kayaking, boat tours, ziplining and a sauna that can all be availed of during the festival. But we only brought the most exciting piece of the existing infrastructure last year when we transformed the 150ft high Moylurg tower into the home for our electronic Sol stage.
Visual artist Sergey Khadjava turned the brutalist structure into a living, breathing piece of art with a spellbinding visual display. It has become the festival’s calling card after going viral and being hailed as the most unique festival stage in the country.
5 Learn the skill of time management
Political life is busy. My role as political editor of the Irish Daily Mail is demanding, time consuming but fun.
During a busy political day, I will be working right up until deadline around 9pm. I’m often asked by colleagues where I find the time take on the herculean task of co-organising a major music festival.
The answer is simple but one I had to learn the hard way: When you’re time poor, you need to make more of it.
The first key time in my day is 10.30am when I need to have a political news list ready to guide our coverage for the day ahead.
Getting as much work done before this time then is crucial. I wake up between 6.30/7am and am ready to work by 7.30am (at the latest). I catch up with emails and tackle my list of tasks.
My primary responsibilities are marketing, communications, commercial partnerships, the bars, programming our electronic Sol stage – as well as overseeing the wellness and festival merchandise.
The typical long hours of political journalism, which have peaks and troughs, mean I also have some flexibility to tend to the occasional festival call that leak into the political day.
By 10.30am our daily political news list is ready but like anything in the news cycle it needs to be fluid. Our political team is ready to react to emerging stories while also toiling away on exclusives in an attempt to set the next day’s news agenda.
Our weekly core team meeting is at 9pm on a Monday night, which acts as a clearing house for any major decisions that the three of us need to sign off on.
6 Controversy isn’t always bad
During the first Night and Day, I decided to blend my day job with the festival and hosted a series of political talks. Five Cabinet ministers attended, as did some members of the Opposition.
During an interview with Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin, he told me that the chief economist at the Department of Finance John McCarthy should be sacked for his orthodox views on housing policy!
It caused quite the political stir, and generated lots of free publicity for the festival.
During an interview with Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin, he told me that the chief economist at the Department of Finance should be sacked
7 Creating memories that last a lifetime is special
In our second year Jen and Mike Foley travelled from Minnesota in the US all the way to Lough Key to see The Hothouse Flowers.
They fell in love with Night and Day and became fast-friends with another couple, Karen and Andrew Wood, they met there and ended meeting up with them in Dublin before heading back to the US.
Fortunately for us they fell in love with the festival and the following year made the journey back across the Atlantic for Night and Day again.
We’ve always focused on making Night and Day suitable for kids, with an immersive programme tailored to those under 14 (otherwise its an over-20s event).
There’s nothing more heartwarming than seeing families creating memories with their children that will last a lifetime and the smiles on the faces of our junior festival-goers attending their very first gig.
In our second year Jen and Mike Foley (centre) travelled from Minnesota in the US all the way to Lough Key to see The Hothouse Flowers. They became friends with Karen and Andrew Wood
8 A vision without people who believe in it is a pipe dream
We started on this journey with little more than an idea and the confidence that we could pull it off. But that wasn’t going to be enough.
The first person to back us was the CEO of DMG Media Ireland, my employer, Paul Henderson.
Paul didn’t hesitate in pledging DMG’s support, which covers this newspaper, the Irish Daily Mail and websites Extra.ie, Evoke.ie, EveryMum and many more.
We could have thrown money (we didn’t have) at a PR company but none would have been able to get us this level of exposure.
But we remained cash-poor – a pretty big barrier when it comes to running a music festival.
Roscommon developer Sean Mulryan, whose company Ballymore are major property developers in the UK and Ireland, thankfully sponsored the festival in its first two years which meant we could pay deposits for some acts and get the ball running and allow sales to start coming in.
The final piece of the puzzle was the support from Roscommon County Council and Coillte, the two shareholders in Lough Key Forest Park.
After some convincing by the park’s then General Manager Louise Fitzpatrick, they opened up the doors and backed our vision which puts Lough Key Forest Park on the map for a new audience to enjoy outside of the festival.
We started on this journey with little more than an idea and the confidence that we could pull it off. But thanks to the likes of DMG's CEO Paul Henderson, Ballymore Group's Sean Mulryan, Roscommon County Council and Coillte, we succeeded
9 Cashflow is king
One of the motivations for stepping setting up a large-scale music festival in the west of Ireland, close to where we grew up, is because there wasn’t one.
I can’t count the number of times people have come up to me at Night and Day and thanked me for starting a music festival in the west of Ireland.
Cashflow is a major challenge for music festivals. About 50% of our sales take place in the month prior to the festival, but a lot of bills need to be paid before then.
To start, when you book your headline acts at the start of the year they require a hefty booking deposit to confirm the booking.
They’ll need to be paid another chunk of their fee in advance of them stepping on stage. This is why festivals offer early bird tickets to encourage early sales to help with cashflow.
In the aftermath of one of the early festivals, before we had established a loyal and growing fan-base, we feared the dream would be short-lived and that the curtain would come down on Night and Day.
Instead, the numbers kept growing and the tents have kept getting bigger!
- Night and Day is in Lough Key Forest Park, Co. Roscommon from May 29 to 31. For more info and tickets, visit www.nightandday.ie