Music festivals are everywhere these days - it feels like there's one everywhere you turn. This fact now seems to extend even to the pages of the Observer on a Sunday morning.

We're entering the final furlong at Crawl HQ - the Crawl begins on 4 May. This means every job is now completed at a frenzied sprint, and this is without factoring in what's shaping up to be an equally exciting - and therefore equally demanding - festival over in Dublin.

Many of the acts who have featured on our bills have gone on to big things: when Mogwai played the 1996 Crawl, they weren't the post-rock darlings they later became; in 2007, Adele wasn't even dreaming of the success of 21; likewise, 2008's Florence and the Machine and Mumford and Sons are now mainstream acts in their own right.

One of the quirks of a festival manager's lot is that the workload is so intense, and your schedule so busy, that the least real thing about your job can be the actual festival. As many times as you do this, and as many years as you find the event itself jumping out at you far sooner than you had expected, the big day always surprises you.