Where It All Began: A Festival That Wants To Save Live Music

Imagine a festival that doesn’t care about booking the hottest TikTok star who can barely strum a guitar but has three million followers. Picture a gathering that doesn’t need a corporate logo stamped on every portable toilet or a VIP lounge stocked with prosecco cans for influencers in sequins. Instead, think of a field in Cambridgeshire, a handful of independent organisers who are tired of watching grassroots venues go under, and a wild idea that pooling resources might actually keep live music alive. That’s the scene being sketched by a new non‑profit music collective, and the project has the slightly poetic name Where It All Began.

The story has all the ingredients of a folk tale told around a campfire: struggling musicians, endangered stages, a knight in cargo shorts called Si Chai, and a patch of farmland owned by Freddie Fellowes, the same chap who gave the world Secret Garden Party. The villains aren’t dragons but the soulless creep of corporate festival monopolies, the absurd climb of insurance costs, and energy bills that seem written by Kafka. Add to that the slow suffocation of small venues, and you’ve got the perfect setup for a grassroots rebellion.

This isn’t the first time British music lovers have fought for survival. Pubs once pulled out their jukeboxes and replaced them with sticky stages in back rooms. Punk kids built their own scenes when the industry ignored them. Rave culture threw a middle finger at licensing laws by turning fields and warehouses into all‑night parties. Every generation has had to invent new ways to keep music alive when the establishment looked away. Where It All Began just happens to be the latest version—except it’s wrapped in the slightly terrifying language of Community Benefit Societies.

That phrase doesn’t sound romantic, but it’s exactly what it says on the tin: a legal structure where the community, rather than shareholders, gets the benefit. In practice, it means this festival won’t be run by a faceless board but by people who actually love music. Attendees can become members, chip in money, and even shape the line‑up. It’s democracy in wellies, complete with mud, questionable catering, and the occasional out‑of‑tune guitar solo.

The concept is absurdly simple but somehow revolutionary: independent promoters and small festival teams pool their resources. They share databases so they’re not spamming the same audience ten different times. They swap equipment, cut transport costs, and slash production expenses by up to forty percent. In an industry where margins are about as thin as the tent fabric you forgot to waterproof, that sort of saving isn’t just handy—it’s life‑saving. Nine collectives have already joined, with more expected to pile in. It’s less competition, more co‑operation, a radical shift in a business that normally rewards whoever can shout the loudest.

There’s a strong sense of irony that this festival will unfold on farmland. Music, like crops, is cyclical. You plant seeds in dive bars and village halls, watch them sprout into artists who might one day headline Glastonbury, and then those headliners scatter new seeds for the next wave. Without soil, without the small, unglamorous venues, nothing grows. Right now, that soil is crumbling. Seventy‑eight UK festivals disappeared in 2024, more than double the number from the year before. If the trend continues, we won’t just lose nights out—we’ll lose the very ecosystem that births new music. A festival that rebuilds the soil makes poetic sense.

Music Venue Trust, the scrappy charity that has been fighting this war for over a decade, is backing the project. These are the folks who turned grassroots venues into something like national heritage sites. They launched Music Venue Properties to literally buy up pubs and clubs so developers couldn’t bulldoze them. With them involved, Where It All Began isn’t just a whimsical weekend in a field; it’s part of a longer battle plan. They’ve done the boring legal legwork so the bands can keep playing.

There’s something charmingly anarchic about the whole vision. Picture it: one barn strung with fairy lights becomes a folk stage, a disused tractor shed morphs into a techno bunker, and a hay bale pyramid acts as the perfect DJ booth. No overpriced VIP wristbands, no app that charges you to find the toilets. Just messy, glorious music. The festival becomes a statement: music belongs to everyone, not just the boardrooms.

Of course, nothing like this happens without risk. Crowdfunding will roll out later this year, inviting fans to chip in and become co‑owners. There’s always the danger that the public would rather spend their cash on a fast‑fashion haul or a new streaming subscription. But if enough people see the bigger picture—that this is about saving the breeding grounds of music, not just another weekend jolly—the model could work. Imagine a generation saying proudly, “I didn’t just attend a festival, I co‑programmed it.” That’s bragging rights far more interesting than a photo of glitter face paint.

It’s also worth noting the sly sense of humour in the festival’s name. Where It All Began could be read as nostalgic—back to fields, back to grassroots, back to the moment music mattered more than ticket tiers. But it could also be prophetic. Maybe this is where the live music industry learns to stop chasing scale and start chasing meaning again. It might be less about headliners and more about headspace—creating conditions where creativity can survive without being strangled by profit margins.

Industry people are calling it pioneering and game‑changing. Those words are usually marketing fluff, but in this case they might actually stick. Because if the model proves sustainable, it could spread. Cambridgeshire this spring, Yorkshire next year, a national network of community‑run festivals the year after. Small venues could be revived, new artists given stages, and audiences reminded that live music isn’t a commodity but a relationship. It’s messy, unpredictable, sweaty, and beautiful—the exact opposite of an algorithm‑curated playlist.

There’s a temptation to romanticise too much, of course. Festivals, even the grassroots ones, require toilets, medical tents, and safety measures. Volunteers can only stretch so far before burnout hits. And let’s not forget the British weather, which delights in turning fields into soup just when the headliner walks on stage. But that’s part of the charm. You suffer together, laugh together, and create memories stronger than any perfectly polished stadium gig.

The whole thing feels like a love letter to live music written in biro rather than gold ink. It’s smudged, heartfelt, maybe a little naïve, but necessary. Because what’s the alternative? A landscape where only mega‑festivals survive, charging four hundred quid a ticket to see the same handful of acts? A future where new bands have nowhere to cut their teeth, and local communities lose their cultural heartbeats? That’s a dystopia not even the most avant‑garde techno producer would want to soundtrack.

So as the plans unfold and the crowdfunding gears up, the festival will become more than an event. It will be a test case, a manifesto, a stubborn refusal to let grassroots music die quietly. It’s one of those moments where the irony burns brighter than the stage lights: in an industry obsessed with scale, salvation might come from going small and collective. Instead of selling out, it’s about buying in. Instead of competition, it’s co‑operation. Instead of despair, it’s defiance.

Where It All Began might end up muddy, chaotic, and a logistical headache. But it will also carry the spirit of every tiny venue that ever hosted a band on its way up, every promoter who maxed out their credit card to book an act they believed in, every punter who fell in love in the front row. It’s the stuff that makes music worth saving in the first place. And if you listen closely, you can already hear it: the rumble of bass from a makeshift stage, the cheer of a crowd that knows they’re not just spectators but part of something larger. A beginning, not an ending.