My greatest mistake: Pete Lawrence

Unlike most festivals, the Big Chill wasn't financed as a festival. It was started out of a flat in Finsbury Park; we had no capital behind it at all. We'd started in 1994 at the Union Chapel in north London, and it was described "as like a festival". Friends started saying, "If you can do a festival in a club, why not do one in a field?" That egged us on; we became festival promoters, in inverted commas. We did the first outdoor Big Chill in Wales in 1995. It was very spontaneous; it didn't even have a licence. I left the Big Chill in early 2008 but I should have got out earlier. As you get bigger, people see you as a chance to make money on every level. The demands of local authorities and police went up every year, even though it was roughly the same size. In the end I thought the festival was too entrenched, often literally in the mud. It's a rollercoaster because everything is focused into one weekend of the year and it's such a weird way of living, waiting for it to come along. And you're so subject to external forces. When you're sitting round a table thinking, "How the hell can we sell more tickets?" that's when you start surrendering some of your principles. My new online venture, Pic-Nic Village , is one of the things that came out of the Big Chill for me. It's about a different type of event and gathering, where people are designing and crafting the actual community. Brian Eno once said that festival line-ups could be a red herring; what people really want is to connect with like minds. The Big Chill had lost that intimacy for me. Pete Lawrence can now be found at picnicvillage.com