Focus: T is the spark

The concert is now as much a fixture in the Scottish cultural landscape as the Edinburgh Tattoo or the Glorious Twelfth. In a nation criticised for its political ineptitude and dreary social ills, T in the Park shines as a Scottish success story, an emblem of a vibrant popular culture that is admired across the world. Moreover, it thrives commercially while other more traditional cultural totems need government subsidies to survive.

The Economist last month published a withering denunciation of Scotland’s many failings, the honourable exception being the country’s artistic and cultural life. Scotland has cachet in things young people around the world care about. Bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol sell CDs across the globe, and Scotland is in the international top rank for youth-orientated industries such as video gaming. So what is it about T in the Park that exemplifies the best of how Scotland sees itself and sells itself in the 21st century? Three miles down the road from Kinross, Douglas Alexander, who owns the land on which T in the Park takes place, is surveying the site of what will be the 13th festival and the 10th in Kinross-shire. The event moved from Strathclyde Country Park in 1997. In the course of the next three weeks, a small city will be erected on 150 acres of a disused second world war airfield at Balado. It will accommodate a population bigger than Perth and dispense 816 pints of lager every minute, necessitating, among other amenities, 990 portable toilets and a tented hospital. There is no permanent infrastructure and today the site’s only feature is a small, bleak concrete tower.

Alexander is as incredulous as anybody at the phenomenon T in the Park has become and at the way the community has embraced it. When he decided to diversify out of farming in the early 1990s, he did not envisage having Pete Townshend, Paul Weller and Gwen Stefani hanging out in his back yard. “There were anxieties,” he says. “The spectre of screaming, drunken, drug-engorged hooligans coming to wreak havoc loomed large. If it had gone pear-shaped there would have been one head on the church steeple — mine. I spent much of that period going round Kinross looking for the gallows because I was convinced they were building them.”

The secret of the event’s harmonious coexistence with its gentrified neighbours in this age of nimbyism is involving the community from the start, says Alexander. The local Rotary Club receives a donation each year. A steady trickle of benevolence emanates from the event in the form of benches in the gardens of residential homes, floral displays for the town and small grants to local clubs. In Glasgow, fans queued for tickets for up to 18 hours this year but an allocation is always made available in Kinross. In the first year, the neighbouring farmer, who would have been most inconvenienced, was sent on an all-expenses-paid holiday.

“Everybody benefits in one way or another. It’s brought a lot of kudos to Kinross,” says Alexander. “And it’s the same team that has been involved from the start. For an industry that is ego-influenced, there are no egos on the production side. It’s highly professional.”

Kinross is the nearest thing Scotland has to the Home Counties. In 1963 it returned Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Tory prime minister, to Westminster. Its willingness to embrace one of Britain’s top music festivals — T in the Park beat Glastonbury to win best big festival in the UK Festival awards last year — is the apotheosis of a phenomenon that has seen festivals evolve from countercultural expressions of anti-establishment sentiment in the 1960s and 1970s to multi-million-pound drivers of economic growth in the 21st century. With a ticket price of £97.50 a day, T in the Park raises £10m in entrance fees alone.

A recently published economic impact assessment claims the festival contributes £7.3m to the Scottish economy. For the sponsors, Tennent’s, it has been a smart marketing move. More than 3m pints of lager have been sold at T over the years but it is sobering to contemplate just how rapidly music festivals have evolved from impromptu gatherings to big-business enterprises. In 1970, Glastonbury attracted 1,500 revellers to a single field for a laid-back weekend of folk and blues. The admission price of £1 included free milk.

Snoop Dogg might sing at Balado about “pimping and hoeing, drink pouring and weed blowing” and the Eels may advocate “Novocaine for the soul” but when Jack McConnell made an appearance in 2003, he announced that the festival was “very valuable to the Scottish economy” and symbolised “the modern Scotland we want to portray”. The times clearly are a-changing.

Geoff Ellis, chief executive of DF Concerts, which runs T in the Park, is a former Marxist. He now sits on a cross-party parliamentary group at Holyrood and is consulted by the Westminster culture secretary Tessa Jowell.

“We’re finding we have to talk the same language as politicians,” he says. “In the last year I’ve been to Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street and Holyrood — and I think of myself as a bit of a rock’n’roll rebel. The politicians are supporting the music industry and not just in a cynical New Labour spin of getting everyone to Downing Street for a big rock’n’roll love-in. There’s been recognition that the live music industry is very important culturally as well as economically. The rock’n’roll generation has moved into the corridors of power. Frank McAveety (the MSP and former culture minister) has a record collection second only to John Peel’s.”

McAveety’s proximity to the corridors of power may be debatable but the commercialisation of music festivals is not. It’s not just the toilets at T in the Park that are highly sanitised. Is there a danger that rock’n’roll, which has traditionally acted as a lightning rod for dissent and political unrest, is becoming smothered by the establishment’s embrace? “I wouldn’t say it’s more sanitised but it is more professional,” says Ellis. “Artists now sip lemon tea before going on stage rather than Jack Daniel’s.”

That intergenerational shift is key not only to the success of events such as T in the Park but to the longevity of the bands themselves. The Who will be playing to an audience young enough to be their grandchildren. Charlie Reid of the Proclaimers believes it was playing T in the Park in 2001 that helped reignite the band’s career after a lull in the late 1990s. “We were in the tent and officially it was meant to be 8,000 but it was just jam-packed and it was the youngest audience we’d played to since about 1988,” says Reid. “Most of them would have been three or four when the records came out. It really helped cement the comeback we had in 2001. It introduced us to an audience who were preschool when we were originally doing gigs.”

Ellis is keen to open up the event to other art forms such as opera, ballet and traditional Scottish music. These companies could utilise the venue before the official event begins. He envisages campers waking on the Saturday morning to a Gaelic singer in an atmospheric show inspired by Angus Farquhar’s environmental art project on Skye last year. “That would be the reveille and the signal that the gates would open in 15 minutes,” says Ellis. “Then we could have Angus lighting up the trees and Scottish Ballet coming out of the trees to entertain people as they walked up to the arena. We could have a pipe band marching the people in and lots of unofficial things happening on the sides, opera, dance — other art forms.”

Already Scottish Ballet and Scottish Opera have said they would be keen to explore the idea. “It would get them an audience of 75,000 people a day, many of whom have never been to a Scottish Opera event,” says Ellis.

T in the Park makes a tidy profit, but Ellis believes that with some government help it could grow into a far more important phenomenon at the heart of Scotland’s cultural life. He is looking for “several hundred thousand pounds” of public funding to expand the event into other areas of culture and to invest in the site, allowing it to be used for other events throughout the year. One he envisages as a possibility is a giant, modernised, family-orientated version of a traditional Highland Games.

It irks him that T in the Park could more easily access public funding if it were a failure rather than a success. “If T in the Park were in Berwick and wanted to relocate, the money would be available but because we are a home-grown success, it’s not.”

Reid believes it could be good for Scotland. “Geoff Ellis understands the cultural significance of T in the Park to Scotland,” he says. “He has a wider cultural vision and I do like a mix of serious culture and pop culture. It gives it broader appeal. The audiences have more in common than people imagine.”

Ellis says the event is now bigger than the headlining bands. “As the bands have got bigger, we’ve become less reliant on them. People are coming for the event. Most bought tickets this year before they knew who was playing. It doesn’t start until lunchtime on Saturday but by 5pm on the Friday the campsite will be 90% full. You get these audible Mexican waves ricocheting round the field as people pitch their tents and let out a cheer. It’s fantastic. The first time I heard it, I thought a riot had broken out.”

If the customers in the Kinross grocery store are anything to go by, the locals will almost certainly buy into Ellis’s expanded vision. For them, T in the Park can do no wrong and is now as Perthshire as tea and Petticoat Tails.

Alexander recalls being approached by one middle-aged, well-heeled local. Bracing himself for a complaint, he went to meet her. “She turned to me and said, ‘T in the Park is the best thing that’s happened to Kinross since Mary Queen of Scots.’ Then as she was walking away, she added, ‘And it’s the only bloody thing’.”

T in the Park runs July 8 and 9. Details of BBC radio and television coverage at www.bbc.co.uk