“A mermaid combs her hair while people put things under her chest”: discover small secret festivals that rival Glasto in sentiment | Music festivals

pPicture the scene: It’s July 2025 and I’m DJing at a festival called Loveshack. I don’t worry about losing the audience at a different stage because there isn’t one: we’re in a barn in rural Wales. The clothing theme is 90s icons, and underneath is Joanna Lumley talking to Andre Agassi while a cop from the Beastie Boys Sabotage video looks on. People’s belongings are strewn everywhere but no one seems to be concerned, as the audience consists of only 60 members of my extended friendship group, and everyone is having probably the best festival experience imaginable.

In the world of expensive and overpriced mainstream festivals, small events like this are becoming more common. It’s true that big festival tickets are still flying in: with Glastonbury having a quiet year, 200,000 punters hungrily looked elsewhere, leading to festivals like Mighty Hoopla and Green Man selling out in one day. But there is a clear feeling that the festivals are starting to lose their independent and rebellious spirit. Queues look the same, and although ticket prices are high, there are a frustrating number of on-site “brand activations”, where a bus covered in a new smartphone livery, for example, makes you feel like you’re walking through a 3D advert. “Not everyone wants to go to a festival and see a tent activated by Dyson,” says John Rostron, who runs the Association of Independent Festivals.

A counterpoint to kindness is emerging. Let’s call them secret festivals. They usually work like this: A group of like-minded colleagues organize a fun weekend away. The site could be a campsite, a plot of land owned by friendly farmers, or even a small house. Most often they are held in stale wedding venues that allow for overnight camping and fooling around. Attendees bond appropriately over the weekend – so much so that events evolve from a one-time party into an annual festival. The numbers range from 50 to 200 and are usually friends or friends of the organizer. These events are generally not ticketed, and are not open to the general public.

Not until they grow up, anyway. “The green man started with Joe [Bartlett] And Danny [Hagan] “Moving to Wales and throwing a party to get some friends together,” says Rostron. “He now hosts 25,000 people.” He also points to Gemfest in Wiltshire: “It’s now an 8,000-person festival but it started as a 21st birthday party for someone called Gemma.”

Many underground festivals are run by people who came of age during the “boutique festival” era of the late 20th century: Bestival, Glade, Big Chill and Secret Garden Party were part of a wave that highlighted silliness, encouraged dress-up and eccentricity. Dulce Horne, whose creative studio Chuffed works on many festivals, sees these comparisons: “The magic in those small festivals came from the people pouring their blood, sweat and tears into the collective experience. They realized that the thing that ultimately makes a festival truly magical is the people.” Secret festivals take this sense of collective community even further.

A good example of this is the Killer Wales concert in Swansea, which is attended by around 70 people each year, many of whom are meeting for the first time. While British parties typically deal with the anxiety of meeting new people by taking large amounts of drugs, according to organizer Alex, the atmosphere at Killer Wells “is about deliberately downplaying it. If you have a lot of people who don’t know each other, they resort to hedonism. We don’t mind what people do, but we also provide a more positive and interactive way of meeting people.”

Festival-goers are divided into groups with distinct costume themes, disrupting any established social groups, and a lot of gaming ensues. Daytime games included trying to pin a willing participant to laundry using only pegs, or ridiculous sumo wrestling on a nearby beach, with competitors wearing Easter baskets on their heads. “You lose when all the eggs fall,” says Alex’s partner, Yas.

The place of pride is the annual talent show, in which everyone displays a skill – the sillier the better. “One year, someone did a very sexy skit wearing a baseball cap, then took it off and put it back on very sexy,” Yas says. “The mermaid sat combing her hair while two people placed increasingly larger objects under her chest. One person’s skill was to smile really big.”

The secret festival called Come Bye also has a talent show. “The winner becomes the most popular person on the whole site,” says organizer Max Hagenbach, who has run the event on a permaculture farm near Abergavenny for eight years. “At a normal festival, you’re just there to consume. Here, we give people an invitation to do something they’ve always wanted to do — to write a play or make an art sculpture. Someone threw an immersive party one year.”

People exchange items for free at Come Bye, as they do at the poignant Burning Man festival. But, in contrast to the American principle of participation, the “Come Bye” event is not an eye for an eye. “You just bring nice things and share them with whoever you meet,” Hagenbach says. “You could bake some brownies and give them to the first 20 people you met. People gave away ornaments, poems, or opened a watermelon and handed it out.”

At another secret festival, Mansionface, someone built an entire escape room experience. “It was a version of the board game process,” says Tom Lee, the organizer. “When you make a mistake, the whole room fills with smoke.” Lee says these festivals have become an outlet for people who don’t want to make DJing or production design a career. “A lot of us are creative, but not in our day jobs. None of us exactly play Fabric [nightclub] next week. So we always wanted it to be a creative space for our friends who do music as a hobby. Many people did their first DJ sets at Mansionface.

Alex Podger runs an Oddfolk restaurant in Cornwall for about 100 people a year, and sees a parallel between our partying habits and pagan rituals. “In the pagan calendar, there are usually four big events each year, such as the harvest, and four smaller events to check in with your community. I find that in an Oddfolk group, it happens almost naturally.” The fact that they are not associated with divination or runes but with WhatsApp does not make it any less important.

“From the beginning, Oddfolk wasn’t something you could buy a ticket for,” Bodger says. “You have to get involved and help. The first year, we made an Excel spreadsheet — it’s getting really weird — and we put people into teams, like the Daily Cooking Team or the Recycling Team nicknamed the ‘Residual Waste Brotherhood’. Doing it this way makes you an active participant, not just a consumer. If you see litter or notice you’re out of toilet paper, you do something about it.” The organizers ask for a financial contribution, which has always been less than £100. “This pays for the audio equipment and food to feed everyone. It only works because 30% of the audience is involved in making the food at some point.”

Bodger likens it to anarcho-syndicalism, where there is at least a modicum of control over independent teams. “I’m terrified of burnout. If we let everyone party until 8am the first night, people won’t eat when the catering team prepares lunch the next day, and no one will attend the 4pm show that someone spent time making because they’re trying to eat a lunch that doesn’t exist. And in the end, they’ll go home for six hours without sleep. Suddenly the whole delicate balance falls apart. So someone has to be responsible.”

While informal, non-prohibited BYOB gatherings like these are generally not subject to the same licensing and health and safety legislation as formal festivals (or may fall under the jurisdiction of the venue being rented), protection is still a major concern. “We all look out for each other, but there have been times where I’ve had to spend the night with someone because – unrelated to the party – they might be having a hard time,” says Alex from Killer Wales.

A lot of people will miss being at Glastonbury this year. But despite their grandeur, it’s worth keeping in mind that the size of some of today’s mega-festivals may be preventing what many of us crave most: meaningful experiences with other human beings that go beyond just saying “I love your huge flag” and then leaving.

As Horne points out: “The sheer size and amount of programming means I suffer from constant FOMO at Glastonbury. Whereas at a small festival, I use less energy and have time for frequent interactions with people. I went to a small festival that just had a waterslide and some tunes in the sun all day. Incredible sights.”

Advice for anyone who wants to organize their own secret festival

Hold your event on the same location as an existing festival
Once a site or venue is suitable for festivals, they will likely be excited about more events over the summer, says John Rostron, a member of the Association of Independent Festivals: “The site used for Nozstock [in Herefordshire] It is rented for small festivals, for example. Farmers are often festival-goers and have a keen interest in the community, so they’re more willing to have this conversation than you might think.

Don’t be afraid of Excel spreadsheets and tough decisions
“Maybe ask your mates to hand over a few hundred pounds each,” says Mansionface’s Tom Lee. “So it’s important to get the budget right. Our biggest problems came when we thought the numbers were locked in, and then people started pulling out. We had to have a strict appointment policy to ensure their money was returned from the budget surplus.”

Make the crew happy while they work
“We try to do everything together, including meals, but there are times when we need everyone’s help moving things around and putting things away,” says Killer Wales’ Yas. “So, we play around with things as much as we can – we even hand out stickers to arrange them. People go crazy for the stickers!”

Resolve disputes quickly
While small festivals are great environments to spread ownership of many different aspects, “having a simple structure and setting and agreeing some principles is still really important,” says Alex Podger of Oddfolk. He adds that with the potential for so many different creative disagreements between teams, “basically agreeing to always work respectfully and resolve conflicts quickly goes a long way.”

Never forget the lessons of the Fire Festival
On such a small scale, it only takes one mistake to ruin your entire weekend. So, as Come Bye’s Max Hagenbach recommends: “Get advice from anyone who’s done this kind of thing before. If you’re hiring for generators, marquees, and sound systems, you need to know what to do if something goes wrong—or if you screw up!”