Amid the brushes of Herefordshire’s countryside lies Nozstock: The Hidden Valley. 

Rowden Paddocks, Bromyard, Herefordshire, HR7 4LS Fri 27th to Sun 29th July 2012 

Founded by local residents during the hazy, optimistic and halcyon days at the turn of the millennium, it’s an event built from a curious amalgamation of performance, art, electronic supersounds and good old-fashioned guitar-strumming and drum-bashing. Now an established, leading family event in its 14th year, Nozstock is a sonic escape boasting eight main stages of entertainment with surprising sights and intimate, secluded areas of theatre and discovery to be unearthed.

Ella How was the festival started? 

It starts 14 years ago which is hard to believe, it was literally a decision to have a barbeque. There was a local artist called Will Killeen who used to play around our town called Bromyard and my Dad was a real fan of him and said “oh wouldn’t it be nice to have a party/barbeque and we can ask Will to play at the farm".

We thought yes that would be a really lovely idea and we had a great time, just a few friends came over and we thought lets do that again. Joe Killeen called it Nozstock because we were having the barbeque every year and it just got a little bit bigger every time. Then it was shall we have a few more bands? and why don’t we have that as well until it got to the point where it was an all day event.

We realised oh we’re actually holding a festival here without even realising what we were doing and thought we’re enjoying it so we’ll carry on. We did and eventually it got to the point where we realised we had a thousand people on the farm and thought we’ve either got to stop now or get a licence. So we thought lets try to arrange it properly and we got a licence and haven’t looked back since, so it literally was a barbeque that got out of hand. 

So it’s the whole family? 

Yes my dad’s the MD, I book the bands, my brother’s the site manager, my mum deals with tickets. I think we’ve roped in every member of our family and every friend we’ve ever had really. 

You have 8 stages this year? 

Yes we have, it’s not just music we’ve got a comedy stage which is really starting to come into its own now. We had Russell Howard do a secret guest spot there a couple of years ago. 

There’s the theatre stage, we have Burlesque which goes down really well, the kids area and the cinema as well and the music stages. We are quite eclectic, I know there is a lot of dance music at the festival but there’s also a lot of Ska, and a lot of world music. 

When we were programming it we were thinking that we wanted to make sure there were bands that each of us would like as a family and we all have different musical tastes. So it naturally ended up that there were a few rock bands, a few ska bands and I think a few people found that unusual for a festival because there’s not one market to cater for.

Ultimately I think its part of the festivals charm as there’s so much going on you could bring the whole family and everybody would find something that they enjoyed, and that’s important. My parents used to take me to Glastonbury when I was a kid and we all found different things to like and I think that’s kind of the bar that we set for the festival really. 

How do you source you’re food and drink and how delicious are the fruit brandies? 

Well we have a workshop manager and a trade manager called Rosie and she finds a selection for us and we have a board meeting and choose which ones we really like. 

When it comes to food stalls, we try and make sure there’s something a little bit different. Obviously we are a small festival but we like to make sure that the people have a range to choose from. So Rosie will do the research, people will apply if they’ve got a stall and she’ll let us know the pick of the crew. 

We do try where possible to get more local stalls in when we can and we do prioritise more environmentally friendly stalls if possible just so we feel like we’re doing our bit. 

Fruit brandies are unbelievable, they’re really very very nice if I do get a chance to have one over the weekend. I must say I quite like our cider though and we have some really good cocktails I do try and have at least one of those over the weekend! 

On your website you seem really quite passionate about your green ethos? 

Yes that’s something that we’re developing, I will be the first to hold up my hand and say we’re probably not doing absolutely everything we can because we’re also learning about it as well. 

But it’s very important; basically we are putting on a festival and it’s like building a city over a weekend. Having run the festival and having seen the rubbish that’s left behind, the tents that are left up it’s brought it home to us. 

It’s important just to do what you can and it’s true to say that every little thing makes a difference. Ultimately the farm is also our home and the cattle still live here so we’ve got to keep it nice, we’ve got to be quite careful with the hedgerows and what’s been left on the farm. We don’t want glass around, we don’t want to hurt the cows or anyone else but we’re doing what we can. 

We took a massive step up last year, we updated our green policy quite a lot, everything is recycled it’s taken off site to be recycled. We are doing what we can, we have celebrity tree planting this year just to help try and educate people a little bit because I think people are becoming more interested in our green initiatives. 

Tell us about the Nozstock cycle challenge 

It’s just something that we do because ideally we’d rather you didn’t bring a car. I know some people are going to no matter what but we thought, how can we encourage people to cycle because it is in a rural area. So we thought why don’t we offer free entry if you cycle to the festival. 

If a group of 8 or more cycle more than 15 miles to the event, the 2 people who organised the crew that cycled get 2 free tickets and the whole crew will get an array of goodies some merchandise and some free drinks. 

It’s just something we do that’s a bit of fun. A lot more people could cycle but people just don’t seem to think about it as a possibility but it went really well last year. Last year was the first year we arranged it and we are running it again this year and there’s been a lot of interest. 

How do you make your disabled access as accessible as possible as it’s a rural farm? 

You hit the nail on the head when you said it is a rural farm, it is difficult for disabled visitors or someone who has mobility problems. Not the entire site is easy to get across but ultimately my Nan comes to the festival and my cousin and my aunt and they’re all disabled. They are all in wheelchairs so right from the beginning it was like “well you know, Nan’s got to get here” so it was something that we were quite passionate about from the beginning. 

We have got roads that lead from the top of the festival site where you come in all the way down to the bottom and you can get over the land. What we have done on wet years when it does become muddy is put wood chippings down and it’s been ok. We still need to improve on it, we’ve got the disabled toilets we have a disabled viewing platform, we would like to do more if the budget permits really. 

But yes we have had people in the past who have come with mobility scooters and we’ll charge them. We have disabled camping which is where you come into the event and we are small but we are doing what we can. 

If people see something and think it would be really good if Nozstock did that we would encourage them to just drop us a line. Let us know what they’ve seen or what they think would help out because ultimately it is important to us that it stays a family festival and everyone within the family can come and we don’t want anyone to be left out. 

How do you go about booking such a diverse array of acts? 

We have got a good team, I mean its grown organically it started as one stage and we didn’t decide one day we were going to put on a festival with 8 stages. It’s grown a little bit every year so it’s never got out of control which has helped but ultimately I book the main stage and I have help from a someone who also books for Secret Garden Party. 

We have got a good family friend who books the garden stage for us who check's back to me for my input and it’s the same with all the stages actually. We have a manager who listens to acts and will send them to me and I will send them over if I think it would work for another stage. We do all work together and as a committee we’re all quite passionate about music. 

We are all festival goers so quite often you will get another member of the committee who’s not even involved in music who will say I saw this band here last night and they were unbelievable. It's a collaborative effort, a lot of us are musicians as well, we all have different tastes and that’s reflected because I don’t think there’s any genre that would fit at Nozstock. We have got such a committed team, they are absolutely unbelievable and we are all doing it for the love of it.    

Musicborn? 

They are promoters from London, but they also have a website musicborn.com and it’s a music directory and that’s what kind of interested us in them really. They advertise gigs and you can advertise your band, and it’s a way of connecting bands with promoters and it’s totally free. There are no charges so it’s kind of like a MySpace for bands and promoters and it’s growing from strength to strength.

They have lots of bands signed up to them now and we liked what they we’re doing. We wanted to promote new talent and thought let’s get them involved. 2010 was good, 2011 was brilliant, they raised the bar and some of the acts that they brought were really great and we would not have heard of them without them. 

We will definitely be using them again 2013 so I think they have already added something to the festival, something really unusual and diverse. It’s important to me; I want to make sure that we’re keeping our Nozstock roots. The headline bands sell tickets but it’s important to me that we are giving new bands a chance, that we are supporting local talent. New bands need the platform to push themselves up on, and I think a lot of the time the new young bands are so pleased to be there that they put on a great show. A lot of Nozstocks best moments are from unsigned bands who just put on such a stage show it goes down in Nozstock’s history.  

What features do you have for the children? 

There’s a lot for the children, we’ve got a children’s area that is called “little wonderland kids area” and they have workshops. There’s story time and gaffa tape road workshop’s where they make roads, that went down really well last year. 

We are making willow dragons, we have a UV disco, they can make UV instruments at the workshop in the day and we have a UV disco for them in the evening. They have a parade through the site so they all have their instruments and they walk through site and it's really nice. There’s sandpits, clowns, facepainting, a balloons artist and bubble artist as well. We had sock wrestling last year which was hilarious, probably the funniest thing I’ve ever seen it was brilliant. 

We have a campsite competition as well which wasn’t just about the kids but you’d be surprised just how they got into it. It was actually a green initiative, we had people going around judging messy campers if their campsite was a mess and giving out awards if their campsite was really nice and the children loved it. We have a circus troop that comes, kiddy yoga and tree planting, making wicker baskets and I would encourage children for that workshop because that’s more green education for them. 

Looking at the hours you run you could come to the festival and not sleep couldn’t you? 

Yes you could! Well that was important to us as well because my first festival memory is Glastonbury which never stops does it, it just goes on all night.

Then when I was a bit more grown up I went to Reading and Leeds which was a totally different experience finishing at 11’o’clock and you’re out of the arena and that’s it.

To me that was alien after Glastonbury so when we were planning Nozstock, we modelled ourselves on Glastonbury because we knew what we liked in a festival. We wound’t like to finish at 11’o’clock, we are still having fun. You want to keep going and I think it’s worked well because ultimately the daytime is very much the family event and then at night time the people have a brilliant party, and it works well. 

Anything else? 

Dad say’s the crowd say that Nozstock is totally unique and I’d agree with that. I think our unique selling point is its small and intimate which is brilliant. A lot of people have said that it feel's like their secret festival, but I think it’s very homemade as well. There’s a lot of things going on that are not at other festivals. We try to do everything in house when possible because we want people to feel it's completely unique. That’s what makes us work hard, but it’s made the festival more special. 

The dance tents are in our barns, you can still see chickens wandering around the farm it definitely feels like you’ve been invited to the family home for the weekend. I think people do like that homemade feeling. It all adds to the event, the fact that everyone has come together to put it on. It’s volunteers, it’s friends, friends of the family, nothings corporate we are putting on a festival because we really like festivals and we think we put on a pretty good one.

Tickets can be purchased via the website

Nozstock 2011 from Mallard Productions on Vimeo.