Interview: Geoff Ellis, founder of T in the Park

There are innumerable anecdotes from Geoff Ellis’s two decades at the helm of the Scottish music industry which would aptly demonstrate his dedication and love for his profession – not least the occasion he turned chef, rustling up soup and baked potatoes for a fledgling support act at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut who went by the name of Radiohead.

Perhaps the most convincing testimony, however, is the fact he pursued a career in the industry at all, given his rather pointed introduction to the often raucous realm of live performance.

Ellis was still in short trousers when he descended on Manchester Apollo to see Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. Giddy at attending his maiden concert, he rushed to the stage door in the forlorn hope that a roadie might gift him the fleet-fingered rocker’s guitar, but ended up getting stabbed in the buttock in the melee. “I didn’t put that down to the people who go to gigs, I just put it down to Manchester,” he recalls, grinning widely. “It was quite rough around the Apollo at that time.”

The chief executive of DF Concerts & Events toyed with other possible diversions. A career in the building trade, for instance, or the chance to follow in his father’s footsteps by enlisting in the Royal Engineers. Music, however, won through. “I love every day I do this job,” he says. “I live and breathe it.”

This month he is celebrating 20 years with DF, the powerhouse behind Scotland’s most successful festival, T in the Park. The 44-year-old would be forgiven for using the anniversary to reminisce, but when I meet him at his headquarters in Glasgow’s St Vincent Street – located above the company’s iconic live venue, King Tuts – his focus is on the future.

Wearing a black shirt, tie, and jumper, topped off with a dark green flat cap, I find him bashing out an email while conducting a telephone conversation in his rasping, Mancunian burr using a hands-free set. It is a voice capable of stripping wallpaper, but fortunately his modestly proportioned office is already peppered with signed guitars, posters and NME covers. In one corner sits a framed photograph of his meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, which serves to bookend the dizzying journey enjoyed by a promoter whose first major coup was a gig by East Coast hip hop duo, Gang Starr (sample lyrics: “Our firepower will devour, bitch you’ll chew on dust”).

A native of Ashton-under-Lyne, as a teenager, Ellis played drums in a band. “We would talk about what was happening in Nicaragua and how we could reflect that in our songwriting,” he remembers. “But we never did anything as a group.” What, I ask, would you say to your former self if he asked for a support slot at Tut’s? He lets rip a gravelly laugh. “I’d say learn how to play the drums!”

Instead, he took his first tentative steps as a promoter during a media studies course at Middlesex Polytechnic. Assuming the role of entertainments manger, he arranged for The Stone Roses to play in the institution’s canteen, and upon graduating, promoted events at London venues such as the Marquee and the Forum. “I didn’t have any promoters as a mentor, probably because I didn’t know I wanted to become a promoter,” he says. “I wrote to a couple of people asking for a job, but only got one reply. Now I realise people in the industry get loads of those letters every week.”

In late 1991, he noticed a small advert in Music Week, placed by Stuart Clumpas, the Dundonian founder of DF, who was looking for someone to lure bands north to Tut’s. Ellis secured the post, and upon his arrival in Glasgow, discovered a relatively barren musical environment.

“The scene probably was in bit of a lull. Everyone was trying to imitate Teenage Fanclub and BMX Bandits,” he reflects. “Glasgow seemed small after living in London, but somewhere like that’s a good breeding ground. I could see people were supportive of each other. One of the first people I met was Gerry Love from the Fannies [see pages 14-15]. I met Stephen Pastel soon afterwards and got to know people.”

His first gig at Tut’s was The Charlatans, followed soon after by acts who provided the soundtrack for a generation, Blur, Oasis, The Verve and Coldplay among them. He is proud of helping nurture a scene which is today the envy of cities throughout the rest of Britain. However, he speaks candidly about the aloof nature of certain aficionados in Glasgow: “Sometimes they can be too dismissive of people who get success, who they think are selling out because they’re selling records. There’s a negative side, and sometimes people can be a bit too sniffy.”

The status of Tut’s notwithstanding, the father-of-two is best known for helping cement the reputation of T in the Park, an event which is now worth around £40m to Scotland’s economy. This year, The Stone Roses will play the main stage at Balado – a far cry from Middlesex Polytechnic – for the festival’s 19th incarnation. Asked to sum up T in three words, Ellis fires back: “Community, belonging, and passion.” Planning is already under way for the 20th anniversary, and Ellis has ambitions to promote the Rolling Stones and Kraftwerk, as well as staging a festival in China.

He says he has survived in the industry by learning “not to take things personally. You get people telling you you’ve no respect for their artist. But it’s water off a duck’s back because you know they’re getting it in the neck. You can get frustrated too, over things like the ticket touts issue, and if a Labour government won’t help, a Tory government’s not going to. We’ve got to look at dynamic pricing models and ways of clawing money back from the secondary market.”

Significantly DF underwent a rebranding exercise this month to make clear it is an events company, not just a concert promoter (it was long known as DF Concerts), and Ellis is mindful of the need to diversify. “We’re in the middle of a very, very deep recession, and our shows are all selling well, but we’re probably doing people in smaller venues,” he says. “The festival is still strong but we’ve got to have some fee-paying work to get the balance, because if a lot of bands decide this autumn that they’re not going to tour or release a record, we’ll have a fallow period.”

DF’s role in Pope Benedict XVI’s open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park helped secure work from local authorities for smaller events, and Ellis talks fondly about the day, the logistics for which were “almost identical” to a rock concert. “We weren’t booking the Pope through an agent, but you could take every role from a rock’n’roll gig and there’d be an equivalent,” he says. “For example, there was a musical director from the Catholic Church, someone else dealing with the liturgical side of things, and we were making sure the headline artist got in and out safely.

“We salvaged it from the point where the Mass probably wouldn’t have happened. We took everything back to the bare bones. I designed the route for the Popemobile, a figure of eight around the park which meant the people furthest from the stage got to see the Pope.”

It is an anecdote which would easily grace the script of This Is Spinal Tap, but if you are to prosper, let alone survive, over the course of two decades in the music business, Geoff Ellis knows better than anyone to expect the unexpected.

• T in the Park runs from 6-8 July. www.tinthepark.com