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Running a festival is not for the faint-hearted. The list of potential weekend-derailers is dauntingly long – licensing issues, awol bands, freak weather events to name but a few – and one misstep could prove disastrous, particularly for those smaller non-conglomerate festivals where every last penny and punter counts. Thirty six UK festivals have been cancelled so far in 2026 – and if a festival is cancelled one year, it makes returning for the next one vastly more challenging.

The heartening news is that’s the lowest annual figure for cancelled fests since Covid (though admittedly with still some of the season to run), and less than half the number of festivals that were cancelled in 2024. All things considered, the UK and Ireland’s independent festival scene is – like its able-to-survive-in-a-tent-for-four-days-without-a-shower-or-sleep attenders – remarkably hardy. There are success stories all over the place, from Sea Power’s Krankenhaus event in Cumbria, to the mighty End of the Road festival in Wiltshire, which celebrates its 20th instalment this month.

Festival promoter James Scarlett is behind two other festival success stories: rock, punk and emo fest 2000 Trees, which enjoyed its 19th outing last month, and the metal, prog and post-rock-tinged ArcTanGent, whose fully sold out 12th edition takes place next week. Because he doesn’t have enough on, James also, along with fellow festival promoter Gavin McInally, hosts Two Promoters One Pod, a podcast entertainingly sharing the challenges of putting on massive great musical shindigs.

Last year, to get a sense of those challenges, we asked James to do some festival firefighting and solve some major theoretical doomsday scenarios, and we enjoyed it so much we’ve booked him again this year for an encore set. He’s already ticked off one potential nightmare this year, with 2000 Trees landing in the middle of our never-ending summer heatwave (the forecast for ArcTanGent is looking thankfully cooler, touch wood), but here are five others:

Festival disaster #1 | Your costly Friday night headlining band, a huge draw for punters, comes up to you 15 minutes before they are due to go onstage, and say that their fee is insufficient, and they want another 10% on top. What do you do?

I think you try to talk to them about how you’re independent and basically a bunch of friends and family running a festival and pulling this sort of thing isn’t going to look good. I do know a festival that this happened to, which I can’t name: they literally got their banking app out and showed the band how much money the festival had to its name. And the band are like, “Oh, OK, we’ll play.” Otherwise, it’s a shitty thing in the extreme to ask that.

Festival disaster #2 | Norovirus sweeps through the site, causing mass nausea, vomiting and other unpleasantness. What do you do? [NB. this actually happened at German electronic festival Whole earlier this summer]

How can we stop it spreading? Education! To be honest, I’d probably literally be Googling “how do you avoid transmitting norovirus?” These sorts of things, where you’ve never had them happen before, you kind of wing it. We’ve got an onsite app, so can put up notifications, as well as on social media and put signs up about hand-washing and personal contact. Don’t touch anyone! And we’d make sure hand-washing facilities are up to date. We’d be trying to figure out the source, where the outbreak has come from. Is it from inside the festival? The people who you really can’t let get ill are the bands, so maybe quarantining some of them would be needed too.

Festival disaster #3 | Two days into your four-day festival, your supplier runs out of beer. What do you do?

You usually know if you’re going to run out half a day before. At that point you’re on the phone to the brewery and they’re hopefully bringing more beer to you. But because we want to work with independent businesses, instead of big corporates, there is a limit to how much beer they’ve got. If your brewery runs out, you’ve got a very difficult decision to make as to whether you try to source some other beer. I mean, you could literally drive to a cash and carry, and buy some cans of Carling. But we have a deal in place with our brewery, so we’ve never done that. Last year at 2000 Trees we ran out on Saturday evening, which was really frustrating because you’re leaving money in people’s pockets, without wanting to sound like a corporate beast! But equally you’re like, “well we’ve sold everything so we must have had a good year!”

Festival disaster #4 | An activist group begin a mass sit-in in front your main stage and refuse to leave until the festival is finished. What do you do?

My unofficial answer is that I’d be down there with my mates trying to get these people out of the way because at the end of the day, you’ve got 15,000 people there for a festival. I’m all about the right to protest but if you’re disrupting my ability to put food on the table for my family and pay my mortgage, I start to feel a bit different about things. We’ve had something like this happen at 2000 Trees, when we booked Drag Queen Story Hour. Some far-right zealots must have search terms set up, so when the words “drag queen” come up on Facebook they get alerted and go and protest it. They started sending us loads of hate messages, saying that they were going to come in buses, and blockade the road. But those people are cowards. They’re just 45-year-old men sat behind the computer in their mum’s spare room. They’ve got a lot of hate, but nothing to back it up. So it never went anywhere – and we put on Drag Queen Story Hour the following year too.

Festival disaster #5 | A huge storm on the first night of the festival causes major disruption, with standing water in much of the campsite and on several of the stages. What do you do?

We’ve sucked puddles out before. I mean, how much water you can suck out, is debateable, but don’t forget, you’ve got a toilet contractor on site who is sucking waste out of toilets all weekend. So they have suckers! It would depend how much water there was. Water creates a drowning risk and doesn’t go well with electricity. You have to make sure there’s no power anywhere near it. I think it’s important to get a site with good drainage. Here at ArcTanGent, the site’s on limestone cliffs. So actually, the water does have somewhere to go, because limestone is porous. But on other sites the water doesn’t have anywhere to go. I remember seeing a video of Creamfields one year. And it was like a flash flood in the campsite and there was a raging river going through the campsite. I mean, that’s a life and death thing. You’ve got to be really careful.

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