Electric Picnic is a key part of the upkeep plan for the 220-hectare estate of Thomas Cosby and clan. The landlord plots the rise of the festival with Tony Clayton-Lea
At 37, Thomas Cosby is too young to have been around for Woodstock, but over the past five or so years he has slowly turned into Ireland’s answer to Michael Eavis, the farmer who founded Glastonbury, by allowing Electric Picnic to be held on a portion of his vast tracts of land at Stradbally, Co Laois.
“I was looking for some sort of event that would have value,” he says, “and so eventually myself and [nightclub owner and music promoter] John Reynolds started talking, and the idea morphed from that point onwards into Electric Picnic.”
Cosby, who is in charge of the 240-hectare Stradbally estate, says he gave the go-ahead for the festival not because he’s an avid music fan – he appreciates music but isn’t obsessed – but because he needed money to maintain the whole property which includes the ancestral home, Stradbally Hall, a 3,700sq m mansion that requires a steady stream of revenue to pay for maintenance to keep it from falling into disrepair.
“I was born here, so I don’t know any different,” says Cosby, when asked what it’s like to own something as grand-sounding as an ancestral home. He can, with some precision, trace his family tree back to 1510.
“There is an awful lot of upkeep, and all the income from Electric Picnic goes into maintaining the place. That’s the reason you’re doing it. It has been possible, for instance, to do a lot of work in and around the house for the last number of years, and that’s been possible only due to the festival. But living here? There are good sides and bad sides.”
Aside from the financial aspect, did he feel there had to be some meeting of heritage, culture and entertainment through the festival? It developed that way, says Cosby, but it was a steep learning curve. Though it was helped by the fact that Electric Picnic was a small event initially.
“We had been doing smaller events of various types over the years. And you have to remember that Electric Picnic started off with about 12,000- 15,000 people, which isn’t an awful lot bigger in numbers than the Steam Rally we hold every year. Indeed, the first year of Electric Picnic had a smaller footprint than the Steam Rally, so the event wasn’t a total shock to the system.”
Cosby and Reynolds signed a 10-year contract in 2004. For the past several years, Cosby and his small team have worked with Reynolds’s Pod organisation and British promoter Festival Republic, which purchased a majority shareholding in 2009, to make the site a lot more accessible for the growing number of people and vehicles.
All the infrastructural work is now in place, says Cosby, “which means it’s a lot easier for everybody – not just from a landowner’s point of view, but also from the artists’ and the audience’s. Everyone can move in and out of the venue a lot more easily and a lot more quickly. Last year and the year before went extremely well. It’s a learning curve for everyone, but once you hit a certain level, and provided you learn from previous mistakes, it’s just a matter of improving it every year.”
The event has been a very positive step for the locality. “I’d say that more than 90-95 per cent of the people around here support it, and a lot come to the eventl. It certainly isn’t an alien concept to them.”
When it comes to the actual event and the line-up of acts, Cosby does not get involved unlike, say, Lord Henry Mountcharles at Slane Castle.
“That’s very much the promoter’s responsibilities. Would I like to be involved? No, I prefer to keep a distance, to be honest. You don’t want to be on both sides of the fence.”
(That noted, he asks me to plug the performance by one Phil Cosby, a cousin who’s playing on the Cosby Stage.)
Outside the bill of events, what does he most look forward to each year? Seeing the last of more than 30,000 people leaving the site perhaps?
“Ha! Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the whole thing being over and then getting into the clean-up operation.
“Obviously, you’re waiting for the last lorry to leave and the gate to close, but that’s natural. From a personal perspective, I suppose you would enjoy it a whole heap more if it was on someone else’s property. Because it’s your own, you’re on tenterhooks, so to speak.”
It’s all good, though, he says. The festival is oriented towards adults and families, so there are no deep-rooted concerns.
Electric Picnic is developing in a way that satisfies him greatly. “It has been incredible, really. Ultimately, it’s the imagination of John Reynolds and, to a degree, Avril Stanley , who have created a perfect festival. John has an astute mind as to what appeals, and there are very few events like it, certainly in Europe. It has been a wondrous thing to see how it has evolved over the years, and also to wonder at what they will get up to next year.”
