When 55,000 people arrive at Stradbally this weekend, they'll spend their time on land that's been classed as a construction site for the past four weeks, as a team prepared the site for Electric Picnic. There are car parks to build, traffic flow to consider, electricity to repair, stages to build, trees to be checked for potential falls and drainage to consider.
"We are like a rock'n'roll county council"
Most of this work falls under the remit of the site manager. For Electric Picnic for the past four years, that man is Pearse Doherty, who is generally the first person to arrive on-site to meet the landowner Thomas Cosby to hand over the land to Festival Republic, which currently runsthe festival. That meeting is the start of 40 days of work with a core team of 10 people on the site build.
“We are like a rock’n’roll county council,” says Doherty. “It’s a pop-up town of 55,000 people for the weekend who’ve got to eat, use sanitary facilities, have drinking water, showers, a place to camp. We’ve got to deliver all those services.”
With 5,000 extra people coming for the festival this year, Doherty’s main focus was improving the traffic flow in order to relieve the traffic coming into Stradbally town which have included new cark parks and bus parking.
“We had to rethink the whole idea of how traffic comes in and out of the festival. That started in February planning that with the Garda and the local community. We’ve been acquiring the fields, then we build temporary bridges to get cars in and out, a bus park, electricity was all off today in Stradbally as repair work was going on under pylons in conjunction with the ESB.”
From the Saw Doctors to Stradbally
Traffic management, gardaí consultations, electricity pylons? How did Doherty, who played with the Saw Doctors for 15 years, end up in this world?
It was simply a case of knowing lots of people, says Doherty. “I’m one of these lads who meets people and talks.”
After looking after a Bob Dylan concert in Galway and tour managing Tommy Tiernan, it was suggested to Doherty that he was well up for the job. He came down to the Picnic to work as crew boss when Aiken was involved with POD concerts. When Festival Republic took over, Doherty was made site manager.
“I had known Melvin [Benn, Festival Republic promoter] back since the Fleadh days, so they asked me to manage it, which I’ve been doing for the last four years.”
Having played with the Saw Doctors at the Fleadhs, and festivals such as Glastonbury, Doherty is uniquely placed to understand what the artists will appreciate and need from a festival.
“You have all these people with huge expectations, whether they’re coming to play the Picnic or for fun, like aerial acrobats and we’ve got to be sure we deliver their show in a way that ticks all their boxes. Troubleshooting is a big part of the job.”
A week out
When we speak, Doherty is a week out from the festival starting and there is temporary track around the festival to build, roads to connect stages and concessions and the ring road around the site that enables the likes of emergency services to react to incidents as quickly as possible.
“You can get to any place in five minutes here,” Doherty says, before referencing the recent incident at Boomtown Festival in the UK where 80 cars burned out in the car park.
“I have a 24-year-old daughter and if she can’t come with her three friends and feel safe, then we’ve failed.”
The mobile phone masts, now essential to any festival must go up. There are five on site this year.
“It’s a huge investment for mobile phone companies to offer that service, he says. “It’s kind of strange being from rural Ireland fighting to get broadband into a small village, and here I can set it up in two days.”
Doherty stays in an apartment nearby while the build is happening. Days usually start at 7:30am and finish at 10pm at night, but it’s really a 24-hour job as crew are arriving at all times.
“A lot of people arrive off the ferry late and the last thing they want to hear is you have to sleep in your car tonight. Funfair people can come at any time,” he laughs.
The scheduling of the large tents which house most of the stages are vital to this pre-planning operation.
“A lot of the tents are leap-frogging from festival to festival, so when a tent arrives, we have to be ready. There’s a stage to go in it, there’s the emergency exits, there’s the viewing platforms, the front-of-house, the PA and lights.
Babysitting the site
When it comes to the festival days themselves, Doherty describes his work and as "babysitting the site".
“We have a maintenance team so if a shower block goes down, if there’s toilets that need seeing to, if there’s generators going down, if fences come undone. We have two or three teams working 24 hours a day maintaining that.”
It is tradition that the team all get one night off during the festival. Doherty is planning on catching some of Lynched, visiting the Red Bull Tropical Garden (“it looks pretty tropical alright”) and seeing Rubberbandits’ Blindboy act as the Ceann Comhairle for the The Twenty One Sixteen Parliament in Mindfield.
For seasoned Picnic veterans, Doherty says the addition of the Anachronica stage in the woods is “going to be quite a spectacle” and the lake-swimming is expected to get big numbers.
I ask Doherty if he ever gets stressed with so much to look after.
“I’ve been on blood pressure tablets for the last two years. I used to get stressed but I don’t anymore. We’ve a great team here. A site manager is like a stress manager, helping people through their job.”
