Deep in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, under the shadow of a Norman castle and within spitting distance of the best beaches in Wales, there’s a music festival with grand plans. Westival – an underground music and arts festival in Manorbier – will attract 2,000 festival goers this summer expecting ambient chillout zones, daytime activities, boat parties around the idyllic coastline and even surfing and paddle board lessons.
Organisers Joe Worley and Jack Lear firmly believe it has the potential to become one of the best boutique festivals in the UK. And it seems they’re not the only ones. What started off as a private party for around 150 people in 2017 is now renowned for offering one of the most intimate up-and-coming festivals in Wales. After that first party, Joe decided to try and take Westival up a notch and partnered with childhood friend Jack to turn what began as a three-day carry on for mates into a fully-fledged festival in 2018.
Jack runs a business exporting fancy dress costumes all around Europe so had the business knowledge alongside a love of music. While Joe – an engineering graduate with a great music knowledge – had a vision for what Westival could be.
“I would love to see it get to 5,000 people,” he said, speaking ahead of the 2024 event. “It has a party atmosphere that we pride ourselves in. We could still run it at that size and keep that vibe.”
The 2024 event – beginning on Thursday – promises an exciting lineup and is today a masterly produced project with stages and sound systems to rival that of larger, more established festivals. Every one of the six stages has its own identity: from the domed greenhouse, ‘Botanica’, with its foliage and trippy art installation, to the rave-centric ‘Grid’, lit up by neon green lights, and the homely ‘Rendezvous’, complete with carpets and eclectic knick knacks.
Attracting the likes of Marcellus Pitman, Peach and CC:DISCO right from the off, it took a bit more to convince Pembrokeshire County Council: “The person in charge of noise pollution at the council wanted us to finish at 10pm,” said Joe. “We were pushing for 2am and they said, ‘This is ridiculous, we seldom have an event in the area that goes beyond 10pm’.”
Joe, 29, already has a new site in mind or 2025 to allow the event to grow. But not at the expense of what is at the heart of Westival: “A community intimate vibe which still feels like a big house party and a family like no other”. It attracts artists who’ve never played in Wales before and the beauty of Pembrokeshire is at the “forefront of marketing”.
Joe added: “You don’t get many festivals on the beach, and not just any beach but Tenby and Manorbier.”
Half of the tickets are snapped up by people in London, while locals are very much part of the scene too.
“I know how good it is for the area,” Joe continued. “It’s a big thing for people in the calendar, it’s a place for up and coming artists, we are going in the right direction. The festival is growing every year.”
Even so, in September 2023, Westival raised more than £20,000 via crowdfunding to secure its future and to continue to grow and develop this young festival.
Joe added: “We’ve got really exciting plans for the future but we just needed a bit of support to get there.”
Festivals are facing an uncertain future, thanks in part to Brexit, the Covid legacy and the cost-of-living crisis. According to Joe, the independent festivals are suffering the most with somewhere between 30 and 40 having cancelled for 2024.
“They simply can’t sell enough tickets to cover the cost of the event,” he explained. “People are very much of the mindset of buying tickets last minute.”
It’s partly a hangover from Covid still – festivals flourished as the country came out of lockdown and people celebrated their freedom. But now, people are being more selective.
“It’s still so hard,” Joe continued. “We’re hoping this year will be the best event to date.”
But even when festivals are selling out, they are risking losing money because of the spiralling costs of operations.
It’s an experience felt by Tim Rees, founder and organiser of Unearthed Festival, in Solva. He made the difficult decision to pause his festival – Unearthed – in 2024.
“We didn’t want to take the risk of not covering our costs,” he explained. “If we fail in our financial sustainability then it’s the end of the festival forever. This would’ve been our 10th festival.”
He will return in 2025. Taking place in St Davids, the festival is set against some of the country’s most breath-taking scenery and in 2023 featured everything from reggae to sea shanties, comedy to cacao ceremonies and psychedelic session orchestras to family folk duos. Not only that, there was a whole host of wellness, good vibes and high quality and locally sourced food and drink thrown in for good measure, making Unearthed the “antidote to stress and the essence of a good time”.
Tim continued: “It’s really hard to make money financially, and that’s been massively compounded by the consequences of Covid.”
The 2020 festival didn’t go ahead due to the pandemic restrictions and it wasn’t until 2022 that it finally returned. But tickets had been priced at 2019 prices and in those three years, there’d been “huge inflation”.
“Costs had gone up but the revenue was fixed,” Tim explained. “There were around 30% more dance festivals after Covid and infrastructure costs went through the roof.”
He survived the challenge of 2022 costs at 2019 prices but 2023 saw a culture shift.
“It became which festival to go to,” Tim said. “And in 2024, it’s ‘Do I even go to a festival’. You don’t see people walking around with 50 bands on their arms, like a badge of honour. It’s become far less affordable.”
He added: “It’s death by a thousand cuts. From our point of view it’s a thousand small and medium costs gone up.”
It leaves many events with a tiny profit margin, if it’s even there. The likes of Reading, Glastonbury and Boomtown have low margins in the “single digit figures” Tim said.
“When it costs £50-100m to put on these big events, people are taking huge risks and they’re not doing it for financial gain,” he said. “There’s this idea that they are huge money spinners but the truth is they are not.”
Tim isn’t in it for the money. Unearthed is a festival celebrating the “expansion of consciousness” through music and arts, talks and workshops, vegetarian food and community spirit. It’s been a platform for musicians such as Macka B, Kiko Bun, and Natty and talks range from topics such as lucid dreaming, sustainable construction, science and spirituality, and birthing. Various forms of yoga, meditation and chant as well as, film, comedy, kids activities, jamming around the fire, sauna and paddling pool, performing arts, and massage all feature too.
“It fundamentally started with a mission to introduce new ideas to people,” Tim said.
After travelling the world and returning to his home of Pembrokeshire, he noticed talking about karma,energy and vegetarianism was virtually non-existent.
“The more we understand about ourselves the more we understand about each other,” he said.
Having spent many years in London, Tim saw that the level of ambition and self confidence was much higher in the capital: “The level of what they could achieve in life was set higher,” he said. “Something was going on in the way they set what they could achieve. I felt I could make a positive dent in that locally.”
Such is the strength of the feeling among the Unearthed community, there will be a smaller, more informal gathering around the summer solstice to fill the void of the festival’s absence.
“There’s a lot of people who still want to gather,” Tim said. “This year we’ve toned down our production. We still want to be able to gather and to be true to our values.” Like many festival organisers, it’s about the “culture and the love of creativity”. He added: “It’s meeting new friends, having pride in our work and a genuine love for it. The majority of us do it for the love.”
But love alone isn’t enough: “I think we are at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the British public understanding the state of festivals,” Tim continued. “We saw a wave of festivals cancelled in January and February and there will be more – probably towards the end of June. My top tip is buy your ticket early. These organisers have big deposits to pay, they need to know they can afford it.”
Many pin their hopes of making the ticket sales.
In Manorbier, Westival is now less than a week out and has sold nearly all its tickets.
“Production and operations are the biggest costs,” Joe said. “And staff costs for the set up and dismantling. Everything is so much more expensive this year.”
The Crowdfunder has proved critical and in its sixth year, Joe hopes the festival will finally turn a profit, which will be put straight back into the event for next year.
The experiences of Westival and Unearthed are not unique. At the start of 2024 John Rostron, chief executive of the Association of Independent Festivals’ (AIF), called for urgent government intervention to assist events hit by rising supply chain costs, debts incurred during the Covid pandemic and slower ticket sales, stymied further by the cost-of-living crisis.
He told the Guardian: “It’s been three or four years of losing money and debt. Some [events] were keeling over last year; this year we’re only in February and festivals are falling over. They can’t even make it to the summer.”
The AIF says 36 festivals either folded completely or were postponed last year, adding to the 100 events that have disappeared since the peak in 2019, when there were 600 live music festivals in the UK. Many events that have gone were small and still maturing, but this year more established festivals such as Standon Calling, Bluedot (which is having a “fallow” year) and Nozstock have succumbed to rising costs.
The cost of hosting the 5,000-capacity Nozstock event soared by 40% since the pandemic with the build price of one event, meaning assembling stages, bars etc, rising from £400,000 in 2019 to £900,000 in 2023. It’s a “perfect storm” of increased artist fees, lack of marquees because they were still being used as makeshift Covid testing centres, eye-watering costs for shower hire, skilled staff leaving the outdoor events industry, Brexit prompting staff to leave and increasing logistical costs.
In Wales, promoters of Swansea’s Escape Festival – held for the last three years at its home in Singleton Park – issued a statement announcing that this year’s event will now not go ahead, citing the cost-of-living crisis and increases in supplier and artist costs behind the decision. Escape into the Park launched in July 1995 bringing some of the biggest names in dance music to Singleton Park in Swansea and appeared in many forms over the decades. But like many, that’s not enough. It’s a situation that some say could lead to the end of “rite of passage” live music events, which have become the staple of British summer’s cultural offering – leaving only the biggest festivals, such as Glastonbury, remaining.
But the likes of Westival and Unearthed are a testimony to how incredible smaller festivals can be.
Tim said: “When you lose festivals you lose a pipeline of artists coming together. It’s a place we can gather and commune. Where do you commune together? Where can we talk about spirituality, sexuality, and relationships? We are not afraid to grab a taboo and break it down.”
Festivals are places to achieve “human contentment”, Tim added.
“I’m not trying to fearmonger,” he said about the parlous state of the festival scene. “But highlight what we could lose in terms of art and culture. One of the most beautiful things about Unearthed is meeting beautiful and inspirational characters. And it’s these people who can nudge the direction of our lives towards a better future. We would be at risk of not being able to continue that.”
It’s not about the money he added: “We love it and love being part of it. It’s our contribution to culture.”
Visit www.unearthedfestival.co.uk for more details about Unearthed 2025 and www.westival.wales for tickets for Westival.
