I've birthed ideas that worked, ideas that didn't, and ideas whose consequences took years to understand. Through all of them — from Campfire Convention to the songs of This Is The Fire — I've kept coming back to the same fascination: what happens when people find common ground and decide to create something together?
Inside the book
Part one
From Leamington Spa to a Texas campfire
The story begins with my early years, the possibilities opened up by music and counterculture, and experiences that were much harder to understand: abuse at prep school, losing my mother at fifteen and, while still a teenager, having to help my father into psychiatric care after he tried to take his own life. Those experiences belong in this story because they shaped the person making the choices that followed.
Then there are the unlikely encounters that change everything. One night around a campfire in Texas, I recorded a then-unknown Michelle Shocked on a cassette machine. The Texas Campfire Tapes became an extraordinary starting point for Cooking Vinyl — a lesson in trusting your ears and your sense of adventure before you have a business plan, and proof that a simple field recording can sell a million copies.
Part two
How do you build a Big Chill?
In the early 1990s, my musical horizons widened beyond folk into the emerging dance culture. The Big Chill grew from a desire to bring music, art, landscape and people together in a different way.
The book goes behind the scenes: the excitement of making something new at a time when the very word "rave" had spread moral panic and suspicion, the struggles over licensing and the Criminal Justice Bill, the artists and friendships, and the practical realities of turning a gathering into a large festival that felt more like an extended family than a business.
I also write about what financial crisis felt like, facing bankruptcy, the circumstances of my departure, and the questions that remain when you leave something you helped create. Who are you without it? And what is it without its original guiding spirit?
Part three
What comes after?
Campfire Convention grew out of my continuing belief in the power of community. The later chapters explore personal development and social change — and how the first makes the second possible — along with the search for new ways of organising, the possibilities that emerge when we loosen our grip on having every answer, and learning to feel comfortable in liminal space.
They also bring the story into the present: finding my own singing voice, the inspiration behind This Is The Fire, my first album in 21 years, and meeting Lizi and asking her to marry me. There are new songs, new beginnings and Making Hay on the horizon.
Growing older has brought more questions, but also more wisdom, and a clearer sense of how the creative process can be set in motion. And, as seventy approaches, I'm still wondering what I'll do when I grow up.
Why now?
I've been writing this memoir for some years, alongside the music, the gatherings and everything else that kept turning up in my life — so it's spent a fair amount of time on the back burner. Now the manuscript is finished, and with my seventieth year around the sun arriving in 2027, there couldn't be a better time to bring it into the world.
I'm excited to be publishing it independently with Alice Sage and Wide Open Sea Press. Having spent much of my life helping records and gatherings take shape the DIY way, inviting people to help make the book happen feels like a natural next step.
