Somewhere in the depths of Hell, a demon is hard at work crafting nightmares just for you. If you’re a Broadway actor, he’ll send you a terrible vision of forgetting your lines on opening night. If you’re a Parisian waiter, you’ll be tormented by the dream of spilling oily bouillabaisse over the linen trousers of an angry billionaire. And if you’re a regular attendee of 

 festival, you’ll be trapped in a horrifying scene: under a roasting sun among a writhing crowd of strangers, miles away from your friends, no battery on your phone, hungry, thirsty, sweaty, and — as the ground rapidly approaches your face — questioning the wisdom of ingesting contraband substances.

This is the kind of nightmare that many festival-goers have awoken from, resolving to create their own events with space to breathe, no queues, and where everyone you bump into is a friend of a friend instead of a sunburned stranger looking for trouble. Thus was born the private festival —a decidedly more chilled affair than its raucous big brother.

After all, Glasto has blown up from a gentle overnight camping trip first held in 1970, when entry cost £1 and guests were entitled to a performance by T. Rex and as much milk as they could drink from the dairy farm. It is now a five-day endurance event for 200,000 people and 2,800 performances. A 900-acre area in sleepy Somerset transforms into one of the largest cities in the south of England and has become so intense that luxury services have set up to cater to guests who pay handsomely so they can spend less time at the festival. You can book a helicopter to one of two local helipads (£10,000 for a round trip in a six-seater chopper from London Battersea heliport to Glasto), re-energise at a spa (£15,000 to stay at Camp Kerala, which has 24-hour service offering massages, facials and a hair salon) and sleep in a luxury yurt outside the main grounds (£25,000 for a ten-person “tenthouse suite” at the Pop-Up Hotel, which has hot tubs, a pool and a restaurant run by Tim Maddams, former head chef of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage).

If an event is so manic that you can only tolerate it in brief spells, you may start thinking about setting up your own more low-key bash. The mini-festival has flourished as revellers start to wonder if the mud and the blood and the sweat and the tears of larger events is really worth it. By all appearances these mini festivals are thoroughly civilised affairs — a few hundred festival-goers raving in a picturesque field or in the grounds of a country estate.

The now defunct Virgo, a gathering of 1,200, was held for five years on the estate of Francis Fulford, star of 

 reality show. A tip for landowners considering their own events lies within the planning application for Virgo’s music licence — late-night beats had to be quiet enough that they could not be heard from the bedrooms of the grade-I listed manor house.

Fulford is in fine company when it comes to landowners hosting festivals. Burton Agnes Hall, a stately home in Yorkshire, has a 1,000-strong jazz and blues festival. Among the larger events, Boomtown is at Matterley Estate in Hampshire and Camp Bestival is on Lulworth Estate in Devon.

Brainchild, a three-day event started by a group of university friends, has a 3,000-person capacity in East Sussex in the grounds of the Bentley Wildfowl and Motor Museum. “No VIP areas on site,” says the event description, promising an arty weekend of festival magic.

Headroom festival is a more private affair on a permaculture farm in Abergavenny, Wales. Just 250 people can attend and like all serious private clubs, guests must be referred by members. Mini festivals, such as Freerotation and Mistress Mary (born out of Secret Garden Party, which grew from 1,000 in its first year to 30,000 by its last), are likely to become more popular.

Lake Day is another such event, set up by Londoner Freddy Taylor, as a touching way to commemorate the death of his father. “The role of it is to make the saddest day of the year the happiest — gathering my friends and talented party planners to get it together,” he says. “I want to keep it a niche thing that is special and that if you know about it you can come. It’s about keeping it the right size so there’s never a queue for the loo or a parking nightmare.”

Planning a festival is not for the faint of heart. It takes Taylor around four months to put together the event, held on a friend’s farm in Lechlade in Oxfordshire, next to a gorgeous lake. Friends pitch in to source giant marquees, build the stage and bartend in cocktail huts on the night itself.

“It’s easily the best day of the year,” he says. “It gets really good at around dusk — we take a big group photo just before the sun sets and the party steps up a gear. It’s a bit like a wedding without a bride. If you’ve got the land – a grandparent’s field or a friend of a friend with the space — it can be pretty rewarding.” 100 friends attended Lake Day in 2019, but the guest list will double when the festival returns in 2021, post-virus.

Lev Harris, Taylor’s right-hand man and senior programmer at Boiler Room, says smaller events can appeal to music aficionados looking for a less frenetic experience. “If I was to find a small secret tent at Glastonbury I would prefer to spend my time there instead of at the Pyramid Stage waiting for Beyoncé,” he says. “Your music taste informs that. If you want to listen to more commercial stuff, you’ll gravitate towards bigger events. There might be a bit of elitism that comes with that and wanting to feel exclusive. But when you’re in a smaller place there tend to be fewer dickheads, which come with big scale events. It’s impossible to weed those people out.”

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