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...

As I write this, it's exactly two weeks until the 2012 Camden Crawl kicks of in what I hope to be all its glory. We have been working extremely hard to finalise every artist contract and every last second of the schedule, and there's still an awful lot to do...

"A long period of stress which has not been adequately dealt with": a decent working definition of the cause of a nervous breakdown. People living with the range of mental health problems associated with breakdowns might experience depression, disconnection from reality, and severe exhaustion. They might cry a lot, get...

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. The lot of a festival organiser is constantly to be faced by yet more music festival...

If I've been doing my job right, the one message that would have come out of this series of blogs so far would be loud and clear: if you're running a festival, expect to work hard.

In part, this is because what you'll be doing can be difficult: co-ordinating your...

This blog risks giving the impression that the festival manager is responsible for everything, co-ordinating every detail and straining every sinew. While this is exactly what festival management sometimes feels like, in truth running an event like this is more about collaboration, delegation and compromise.

Take our artwork for example....

A great line-up is all very well, but ultimately your festival is only as good as the crowd it attracts: if you have fantastic bands but only four people to watch them, you don't have a festival. You have a house show.

That's where all that extra work...

This week was what it's all about: bands, DJs, solo artists and more bands. Running a music festival can sometimes seem about everything except music - the form-filling, the meetings, the co-ordination, people management, marketing, budgets, promotions and millions of emails. Ultimately, though, the hard work you put into these...

Next week, we make the first proper live music line-up announcement for this year's Camden Crawl. Just to avoid the illusion that this blog is designed purely as a promotional tool, however (as if!), I wanted to talk about something completely different. I wanted to talk about Dublin.

The city...

I am in the midst of some of the busiest weeks of the entire year, and write this blog post with barely enough time to write my shopping list. I blogged last week about our curators, and the process we use to select acts and artists to appear at the...

I wrote last week about two concepts at the heart of our festival which I think are very closely linked: the Crawl's central purpose is to offer an exciting, eclectic line-up that allows people to see the next big things alongside established alternative acts; and, as I mentioned briefly, we...

Sometimes it seems like yesterday. Sometimes it seems way, way longer.

I'm approaching 20 years of involvement in the Camden Crawl, the metropolitan music and arts festival in London I helped set up in the mid-Nineties. We had a lengthy hiatus from the end of the 1990s until 2005,...