Interview: Sid Ambrose and Jamie Gilroy - Wickerman festival organisers

Published on Thursday 11 February 2010 08:42

THE main organisers of the Wickerman music festival make an incongruous pair. As with the previous eight years, the two-day event will be held on farmland belonging to sixtysomething Jamie Gilroy, the son of a Battle of Britain pilot, stock farmer and inveterate tweed wearer.

• Wickerman festival organisers Sid Ambrose and Jamie Gilroy. Picture: Gareth Easton

Jamie speaks his mind. Before launching Wickerman, he says that his response to an irritation would be "to sell it, kick it or cut its throat".

At his side is Sid Ambrose, the festival's Artistic Director. Sid is 40, a former punk, biker, rave organiser, local authority youth worker and enthusiastic advocate of tattoos. He doesn't wear tweed and notes that "for some reason, a lot of people in Dumfries and Galloway do like to dress like Sherlock Holmes". Jamie and Sid are not the most obvious of bedfellows.

Jamie was educated at Fettes. He lives on the farm with his wife, Patsy, a local Conservative councillor. Jamie jokes that his family "has lived and worked in the area for at least a hundred years but we are still considered newcomers as we weren't resident when Fergus, Lord of the Isles, ruled Galloway".

Jamie was brought up in a house that had 25 bedrooms. That wasn't Sid's experience, he is pretty sure that the house he grew up in had two bedrooms unless "there were a further 23 that I just didn't come across".

So far so sitcom. If you were to punt the idea at a TV producer, the elevator pitch would be: "It's The Odd Couple tries to organise Glastonbury with hilarious results." But in real life, this unlikely duo has created a thriving boutique festival near Dundrennan in Dumfries and Galloway.

Wickerman stands out from other Scottish festivals not just because of its comparatively remote setting, or even because it eschews the major commercial sponsorship which helps make many other festivals viable.

Its real point of difference is its blend of the alternative music scene and soft focus pagan elements. The Wickerman festival takes its title from the 1973 chiller thriller of the same name and, echoing the film's plot, the festival climaxes on Saturday night with the ritual burning of a 40ft wicker statue. The Wickerman festival may not have Glastonbury's ley lines but it does have its mystic moments. Sid, whose Twitter handle just happens to be sidpagan, got married on the site with the help of a marriage stone – a large block of granite with a hole in the middle. The ritual predates the Christian era.

Despite being a teen in the 1960s, Jamie, while not unsympathetic to such notions, has less truck with them these days. Long hair and kaftans passed him by, although he did make an unsuccessful attempt at the hippie concept of free love once in Tasmania. Concerned at what he saw as his son's overly relaxed attitude to life, Jamie's father had forcefully encouraged the youngster to emigrate to Australia as a Ten Pound Pom. In between working on sheep stations, down mines and for the Darwin government, Jamie did try to have his own Haight Ashbury moment at a Travel Inn in Hobart.

"We had what could be called an exploratory orgy," he explains. "A friend and I went on a jaunt to Tasmania to meet another friend. My Tasmanian friend provided the nurses and I provided the drugs. The drugs were smashed up aspirin which we smoked in a roll-your-own. The orgy lasted for, I suppose, nearly a quarter of an hour and then everyone was violently sick and went home. That was about the closest we got to Flower Power."

While Flower Power never featured large in Sid's adolescence, music did and his tastes ranged from ska and punk to metal and nosebleed techno.

While a Galloway man through and through, as a kid, Sid spent a year in south London just as the skinhead movement was taking flight. It wasn't just the music that seduced him, it was observing all the different tribes from the scooter boys to the black posses and their dub reggae to the NF thugs and their enemies the Sharpies or Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. The idea of musical tribes enchanted Sid then and the way that Wickerman brings several of them together still makes him smile.

"I did define myself by music,' he says. 'I've still got a picture of me at 19 with spiked hair and a jacket with millions of studs. I couldn't get into anything in a lukewarm way. I had to go the whole hog. It's like I couldn't get just one tattoo, I had to get pretty much my whole body covered. With my sleeve tattoos, I can go to a rave, a festival or a bike rally and look as though I should be there."

Sid is the first to acknowledge that he and Jamie come from different backgrounds but is just as quick to point out their similarities, especially when it comes to belonging to tribes.

"Jamie opened my eyes to a different world. I don't think I was naive before but my world was full of ravers, Satan's Slaves and Blue Angels bikers, people on the edges, on the fringes of society. Colourful characters.

"The people Jamie is involved with may have more money, but they also seem to be on the fringes of society. They don't tend to fit in that well themselves. They are like a music tribe, in some senses. They all know each other, went to same schools, they dress and they speak in a certain fashion and they are just as tribal as anyone else."

The Wickerman Festival came about through happy coincidence. Sid thought that Galloway needed and deserved a music festival. Jamie wanted to diversify his farm's activities. Patsy introduced them and, although Jamie may be more Massey Ferguson than Harley Davidson, an unusual but fruitful partnership followed.

Pointing to his time in Australia and the opportunities it gave to meet people from every background, Jamie protests mildly at being labelled an archetypal farmer. Rather than being frightened of Sid and his unfamiliar body art, he saw him as a breath of fresh air. He recognised that they both had what he calls a "slight f*** you attitude".

"Mine has come about in a hard way," he says. "My only son was killed in a car accident when he was 21. That brought me up short and made me realise that a lot of people spend a lot of time worrying about trivia.

I'm not somebody who suffers small mindedness and small attitudes. The festival has been a bit of a mountain to climb and that can-do attitude that you need, the bugger-everyone-else attitude, are characteristics that Sid has as well.

"He's not put back by someone saying no. His immediate question is, why not? If the festival is a success then it is largely down to Sid's quirky ideas and me saying, 'Yes let's give it a go' when other people might say, 'No, I couldnae possibly do that. What would the neighbours think?' "

Possibly less prone to colourful outbursts, Sid simply comments that "Jamie is probably the most subversive conservative you will ever meet."

Winding up the two interviews with Sid and Jamie, it transpires that Sid's next appointment is with his tattoo artist to have some work inked on his legs. Jamie is off – I'm not making this up – to a luncheon with the Queen where, I like to imagine, that conversation will revolve around whether the Buzzcock's Orgasm Addict was a better single than My Perfect Cousin by The Undertones. Both are playing Wickerman this year, alongside cutting edge acts such as Withered Hand and Unicorn Kid.

As the ninth Wickerman gets ready to light the blue touchpaper, Jamie has had plenty of opportunity to reflect on how hosting the festival has altered his views.

"It has opened my eyes into how many different people there are," he reckons. "It has made me much more aware of the danger of categorising people by how they look. The stranger a person looks, the nicer they probably are. It's the people in suits that I'm suspicious of now, rather than the people with the mohicans."

Where twin sets and crowns fit in is anybody's guess.

THE ALTERNATIVE WAY

WHEN the Wickerman festival started, it was almost defiantly alternative. As well as the pagan burning of the wicker figure and a rolling programme of yoga classes, drum workshops and children's activities, the festival set itself apart by a music policy which tended to favour punk and ska heritage acts, crusty scene veterans such as The Levellers, inset, and vintage dance acts like Dreadzone. In the main, the programme shied away from mainstream genres and big name, chart-topping bands who were correspondingly expensive to book.

Over recent years, that has slowly changed. The iconic acts from the past are still there but they are less likely to be on the main stage.

This year, bands like The Charlatans, Ocean Colour Scene and Teenage Fanclub have, to a degree, shifted the emphasis from the 1970s and 1980s to the 1990s.

But what organisers have not done is to try to build the festival around one or two massive names. As Sid puts it, they didn't want to produce "big slick events where someone decided to put on the biggest money earners available, get the biggest audience possible and charge them as much as possible. We wanted to be the exact opposite of that."

Another aspect of their softly alternative stance is to not seek out major sponsorship.

"I think it's important to steer away from being too overtly commercial," says Jamie. "We have had one or two approaches from people asking, would we call ourselves the Brand Name Wickerman. I've always said no. The way the economic climate has turned out, I'm really pleased that we are not dependent on one or two big sponsors because then you don't get that letter that says, 'we are not going to renew sponsorship this year' and, (if you have become reliant on that] then it makes it almost impossible to carry on."

• The Wickerman Festival takes place tomorrow and Saturday near Dundrennan in Dumfries & Galloway.

www.thewickermanfestival.co.uk