The Main Event: The Wickerman Festival

GIVEN that it has been in existence for ten years, most Scots music fans should know by now that Dumfries and Galloway's annual Wickerman music festival ends with the burning of a massive wicker effigy. This spectacular gimmick is a tribute to the cult 1972 folk horror movie The Wicker Man, filmed in the surrounding area. It isn't, despite initial protestations from certain quarters, laced with any religious significance at all.

"The guy who builds our wickerman only lives about three miles from the site," says Wickerman's organiser Sid Ambrose. "His name's Trevor Leat, he makes wicker constructs for a living. When we first approached him and asked if he could make it look exactly like the one from the movie, he said, 'I wouldn't build you one as bad as that!'?"

The influence of the film has fed back the other way of late, with The Wicker Man's director Robin Hardy engaging the services of Leat to work on his new film The Wicker Tree, again filmed in Dumfries and Galloway. "I've met Robin a couple of times as he's been promoting the film," says Ambrose. "He's 81 now and a very interesting character. I was patiently trying to explain the music and the festival to him, probably being a bit patronising, and he started telling me about being friends with T-Rex when he was younger and working with the Rolling Stones when they were just unknowns. He knows a great deal about music, I realised."

The tinderbox figure looming on the horizon for the duration of the festival isn't its only unique element. Wickerman sprang from Ambrose's previous job with the local council in youth work and community regeneration. "The kids I worked with invented the event," he says. "They called it Coffee on the Law, it was a one-day gig featuring local bands. I suppose in their youthful arrogance, though, the kids would always ask if we could do something bigger and better."

Ambrose figured they could, and so the first Wickerman emerged a decade ago. "It was a bit small," he reflects. "Basic and ramshackle." Still, 1,800 people bought tickets and turned up, and reasonably sized old punks Stiff Little Fingers and Spear of Destiny headlined.

The festival has come a long way since, with more than 15,000 people expected this year. "We could probably expand up to 30,000 if we want," says Ambrose. "The plan is to expand gradually, though, and see where the cut-off point is. It might only be 18,000 or 20,000, but we'll get there naturally." Wickerman – as he recognises – has nowhere near the resources to compete with T in the Park, but its two main advantages are the fact that it covers a piece of geographical territory distant from any other festival event, and that its programme is aimed at all ages.

This year's main stage will be balanced between big names with a mainstream indie slant (James, Feeder, the Coral, Noisettes, the Pigeon Detectives) and more classic rock acts with a broad appeal (Echo & the Bunnymen, GUN, the Bluebells, Craig Charles' funk and soul DJ set), while secondary tented stages will be divided by genre and often implicitly by age group. The Scooter Tent, for example, will concentrate on punk acts including headliners the Damned and Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler's From The Jam project, while the Bass Camp will concentrate on a range of dance artists including Riva Starr and Utah Saints.

There will also be a reggae tent, an acoustic village and two stages (including one sponsored by the goNorth festival) dedicated to high-quality local bands. Being of the correct generation to have enjoyed them, Ambrose is most looking forward to Echo & the Bunnymen, although he cites his highlight of the festival's history as hearing Utah Saints remix Paul Giovanni's soundtrack to the original movie on the main stage after the wickerman was burned a few years ago: that, and getting married there three years ago.

"The main benefit of doing this is cold hard cash," he says. "We reckon it brings in around 2 million a year to the local economy, which is a huge midsummer boost to a small, rural economy like ours. The other thing is a sense of pride in the area. Dumfries and Galloway is somewhere older people move into and young people move out of, so we're quite proud we've managed to build a reputation for a youth-cultural event like this.

"That wickerman is instantly recognisable though," he concludes. "Put it this way, if we'd called it the Dundrennan Music Festival I don't think we'd still be going."

• The Wickerman festival is at East Kirkcarswell, Dundrennan, near Kirkcudbright, on Friday and Saturday www.thewickermanfestival.co.uk. This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday on 17 July 2011