Tartan Heart festival boss on how it all began

“It was definitely a case of fools walk in where angels fear to tread,” he says, “because I had no idea, really, what I was taking on by starting a festival, and what a risky business it was, and how much it was hedged about with - and has increasingly been hedged about with - regulation of some form or another.”

The festival takes place each year within the picturesque walled Italian gardens of his home - Belladrum Estate, near Beauly, in Inverness-shire. The gardens, he says, are a “most fantastic natural arena”.

In a classic story of a landed family struggling to afford the upkeep of a mansion in the 20th century, Gibbs’s grandfather ended up pulling down Belladrum House in the 1950s, having tried and failed to offer it for sale as a school or hospital. The demolition of the house, over time, gave the gardens the appearance of a decadent ruin. Gibbs and his wife, keen to restore the gardens, finally hit on the idea of a music festival.

As it turns out, Gibbs had spent “what I thought at the time was a mis-spent youth” in the mid-to-late seventies, going around open-door rock festivals in Britain. There weren’t too many back then: Glastonbury (which had started in 1970), and Reading, and almost nothing in Scotland. The first outdoor festival north of the border was in July 1970 - in Inverness, curiously enough.

“In the early days [of Tartan Heart] it was very difficult,” Gibbs, now 61, recalls. “You would have thought that, if you offer an artist the right amount of money to come and play a festival, they would shake your hand and say, ‘yes, please’.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. An event has to have credibility to attract artists, and agents who work for the artists won’t just say yes to any old offer. In the first year or two we had a difficult time attracting people to the bill, particularly in the first year. Linda Gail Lewis is a fantastic performer and we were very lucky to get her, but it was difficult to get her - it was difficult to get anyone else on the bill that year.

“The local council was understandably quite nervous about having a festival, and so they very much restricted the numbers that we could have. I found myself up against all kinds of unforeseen problems and obstacles that I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I would encounter.

“I'd had a career working in the film industry as a location manager [Gibbs worked on such films as John Madden’s Mrs Brown, the story of Queen Victorian's love affair with her ghillie John Brown starring Billy Connolly and Judy Dench]. We’d been scooting around Scotland looking for locations and managing the film unit on them. I realised just how gung-ho the film industry was in those days. It was a lot more difficult, from a health and safety point of view, to manage a festival, because the regulations were a lot more intense. So where you’d look at a slope and think, well, nobody in their right mind is going to jump off that wall and fall down that slope, the officials would say, ‘You have to put a fence up’. It’s a huge learning-curve, really, to get one’s head around the fact that you have to protect people from themselves.

“That incurred huge expense, because, having thought you had a functioning venue for an event like a festival, you suddenly found that you had to put metal railings in, and access roads, and all kinds of stuff.”

Lessons duly learned, the inaugural festival, a one-day affair, took place on August 14, with Lewis, James Grant, Karen Matheson & Donald Shaw [Shaw would go on to become artistic director at Celtic Connections] and the Peatbog Faeries. It went well. The next festival took place over two days, with the main acts including Alabama 3, The Proclaimers, Jah Wobble, British Sea Power, Ricky Ross, and Country Joe MacDonald, who had played at Woodstock in 1969. The gulf between the two Tartan Hearts in terms of scale and ambition is noticeable, to say the least.

“Once we’d proved to the council that we absolutely took on board the health and safety issues - and also there had been no disasters that first year - they said, ‘Okay, fine, you can have more people there'," Gibbs says.

“We were restricted to 2,000 that first year but I was rather amazed to find that it sold out quite well in advance, which is something we were not to do again for a few years. I even had people knocking on my door, trying to get tickets. The increased capacity for the second year meant that we could increase what we could afford to pay a line-up. And the agents were a bit happier to allow us to book bands. Alabama 3 already had quite a following in the Highlands, so it wasn’t too difficult to persuade them to come. It all grew on that basis.”

Indeed it has. In the years since, many top-selling acts have made their way to Belladrum. James, Echo & the Bunnymen, Julian Cope, Lloyd Cole, Biffy Clyro, Arlo Guthrie, Jefferson Starship, The Waterboys, Editors, Ocean Colour Scene, Texas, Deacon Blue, Teddy Thompson, The Staves, Feeder, Amy Macdonald, Twin Atlantic, Travis, The Buzzcocks, Rachel Sermanni, Kaiser Chiefs, Manic Street Preachers, Tom Jones, Razorlight, Franz Ferdinand, Madness, The Pretenders, Ed Sheeran … It is, by any measure, an impressive array of acts.

Even before each year’s festival has taken place, Gibbs is already thinking ahead to the following year’s. The 2018 event doesn’t take place until August but Gibbs says he is giving thought “to what we would like to feature, musically, next year".

“In terms of music we try to be as fresh as possible. We try to bring in as much as possible that’s new. With the exception of a few staple favourites who seem to have carved out a niche for themselves here, like the Dangleberries, and Colonel Mustard & the Dijon 5 - we try to do something new every year."

Aside from the old favourites and the big stars, the festival focuses a lot on what's bleeding edge cool in music. “It’s very eclectic, the line-up. It’s basically formed of some of new, up-and-coming acts, for which we have people scouting around all the time. We have a company called Kilimanjaro Live, who we’ve worked with for many years and who help to book headliners and a lot of the acts on the three main stages. And we have a number of local bookers who have expertise in the Celtic scene, the local rock scene and that kind of thing.”

This headliners this year are Paloma Faith, Primal Scream and Amy Macdonald, and the bill also includes Frightened Rabbit, The Charlatans, Beth Orton, Roseanne Cash, Adam Holmes & the Embers. (There's a ‘Special Secret Guest’, too: guesses made by fans on the festival’s Facebook page as to who it range from Paolo Nutini to Biffy Clyro). Gibbs says it’s not essential for the headliners to have new albums to promote. “For us, it’s more a case of getting someone who hasn’t played here before - or, if they have, it’s not been too recently.

“In the entire life of the festival I think we’ve only ever repeated three headliners: James, Amy, and the Proclaimers, and two of these are obviously very popular with Scottish fans. It’s good to see how James are still topping bills in Scotland [the Manchester group was formed in 1982].”

Belladrum only insists on exclusivity negotiations for headliners. “We don’t do what some of the bigger festivals do, which is to insist on exclusivity right down the running-order, so that even young bands on the bill are not allowed to perform, or be announced for, other festivals.

“We’ve had one or two battles like that recently, and it has got worse and worse over the years. It used to be just the headliners who were excluded, and maybe the top two or three stages’ headliners, but gradually it has got further and further down the order, to the point where, even if you can get them, you can’t announce them until after they’ve appeared at the other festival. That’s not good for music. It’s not good for the fans, it’s not good for the bands. It's not good for anyone.

“In terms of Belladrum we’re always trying to balance things for different tastes and ages, different types of audience and genres,” he continues. “It’s a real balancing act. It’s a bit like being a top chef who has to create something new every year with a whole lot of ingredients and keeping them all balanced.”

Fresh, too, we imagine. “Absolutely. These days, with more and more musical events taking place, people will not go to events where there isn’t some form of novelty for them. They get the chance to see so many different artists, live, that you need to offer them something that they haven’t seen recently.”

Are there any acts he would love to bring to Belladrum? “I’m still trying to get Pink Floyd,” he says, immediately. He laughs. “That would be an impossibility for any festival. There are one or two people I’d love to bring here, but we just can’t afford the top guys who’ll play the bigger headlines. If we don’t catch them on the way up, we have to wait a long time to get them, when they’re sort of slowing down.

“But we have had lots of fantastic artists here, such as Ed Sheeran, who played here when they were on their way up. Twin Atlantic and Editors both started off in our unsigned tent and ended up as headliners.”

Last year’s long Belladrum weekend - the one with Franz Ferdinand, The Pretenders and Twin Atlantic - attracted some 21,000 people. Eighteen thousand of them were members of the public, and between 60% and 70% of them were from the Highlands. The rest came from across other parts of Scotland. Some 3,500 children under 12 got in free.

Back in 1979 Gibbs saw for himself how beneficial it can be to have kids at a festival site. The occasion was Glastonbury’s ‘year of the child’: “There was a dedicated children’s area and it had an amazing effect on the atmosphere," he says. "The presence of children is a great way of defusing any potential tension in the atmosphere, and gave the festival a lovely, rounded feeling. I was struck by that and always thought that if I was going to do a festival it would be a family one.

“Belladrum is so integrated into the community up here,” he adds. “Not only do we get music fans of all ages but we’ve had people getting married in our family chapels in the grounds. I think we’ve also had more than a few conceptions here, judging by the number of babies called Bella.

“I remember a guy telling me a few years ago that he and his family had been coming here since the start, pitching their tent in the family area. That year, his son had just turned 18. He helped his parents pitch their tent but then he shook his father’s hand and said, ‘So long, dad, I’m going over the hill to the general camping area’. The dad had a tear in his eye as he told me that. He and his son met up later for drinks but for me it was a strangely moving little story. It was almost like a rite of passage for the son.”

Gibbs himself doesn't get a lot of time - "sadly" - to see artists playing the Belladrum stages, but those he does meet, with few exceptions, have been a delight. In the second year that James headlined, the family liked [lead singer] Tim Booth so much that they suggested he ease his tour fatigue away from the crowds by resting on a bed at their home. "He rested so well, in fact, that we had to despatch a daughter to wake him up," Gibbs recalls with a smile. "He was in danger of missing his set."

*** Belladrum Festival takes place between August 2 and 4. tartanheartfestival.co.uk