DF Concerts’ Geoff Ellis: 40 years in music

In the decade since IQ last profiled Geoff Ellis, there have been some monumental moments in the Scottish live music business.

As part of that 2015 celebration of his 30th anniversary in music, Ellis spoke about his desire to launch more DF festivals, while taking its flagship event, T in the Park, to even greater heights as it trundled toward its 25th edition.

Unfortunately, fate – and frustrating bureaucracy – intervened, and T in the Park held its swansong 23rd gathering in 2016. But for the other half of his wish list, Ellis and his DF team can be
justifiably proud, establishing a number of successful outdoor extravaganzas that companies twice the size would be happy to boast.

“Our festival portfolio has grown significantly over the past decade,” says Ellis, naming TRNSMT, Connect Festival, Country to Country Glasgow, and Summer Sessions in the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dundee, among a slew of annual outdoor escapades.

As for T in the Park, Ellis remains sanguine about the festival’s legacy and the hugely successful event it went on to inspire. “T in the Park became one of the biggest festivals in the world,” he states. “We had a period where we could have sold out the capacity without announcing the lineup, but instead, we’d sell half the tickets up front and then do the second release once we announced the lineup. That way, we could be sure that we were getting the fans of the bands, as well as the fans of the festival.

“But everything has a shelf life, and the latter years of T were tough. But out of those lessons came TRNSMT, and a host of other new events, so we can all look back on T in the Park gratefully.”

“T in the Park became one of the biggest festivals in the world”

Early Years
Born in Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester, England, Ellis was raised in nearby Romiley by parents who had met in Scotland during the war. The youngest of four children, Geoff’s formative years were punctuated by the death of his older brother, Anthony, who was just 24 when he died while travelling in Australia, and his father leaving the family around the same time.

“Dad was a stone mason, and because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a career, working in construction seemed like a good option, so, aged 16, I enrolled at Stockport College to
do a diploma in building. That then led to a move to Coventry, where the plan was to complete a degree in building at Lanchester Polytechnic.

“I hated it,” states Ellis. “I definitely wasn’t meant to be a builder, and Coventry was a backwater at that time when it came to music.” But those depressing circumstances were to provide a
sea-change for the 19-year-old, who decided that a career involving the arts (with any luck, music) would be much more suited to his personality.

Middlesex Poly, on the outskirts of London, was to prove the turning point. Ellis began studying for a humanities degree, and while playing football one day, a classmate mentioned a job
working on the door at the students’ union.

“That’s where it all started,” recalls Ellis. “It wasn’t long before I was pasting up all the union’s posters around campus. Then I started writing gig reviews for the polytechnic newspaper and generally helping out when we had bands coming to the venue.”

“I turned a loss-making entertainment department into a profitable venture – probably because we couldn’t do a lot of gigs”

That hard work and willingness to muck in paid off when, in 1986, the Student Union entertainments manager departed and recommended that Ellis be his temporary replacement. But he liked the gig so much that he applied for the job and spent the remainder of his four years in Middlesex running a successful entertainments programme.

“I turned a loss-making entertainment department into a profitable venture – probably because we couldn’t do a lot of gigs,” he recalls. However, such tenacity hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Steve Parker and Ben Winchester at Miracle Artists contacted Ellis about a position at legendary London venue The Marquee. “Miracle had just taken on the booking contract, so I became booker for The Marquee,” he says.

But the remit had certain caveats. “The venue refused to do any promotion on the acts, and they never paid guarantees – only percentages,” reports Ellis. Working within such limited parameters was never going to be a long-term prospect, but Ellis used his time at The Marquee wisely, building a network of contacts that have served him well in the decades since departing London.

“I worked a lot of rock acts that I hadn’t done before, and I got to know agents like Rod MacSween, John Jackson, Paul Bolton, and Jeff Craft really well,” he says. Stepping away from The Marquee, he promoted house and indie club nights in London with Rob Ballantine, before hitting the road as a promoter’s rep for SJM with acts like The Mock Turtles, The Charlatans, and The Farm, to add another string to his bow.

“I think it’s because I got on so well with [Stuart’s] dogs that I landed the job [at DF Concerts]”

Heading North
Determined to find a full-time job in music, Ellis was on the lookout for something where he could properly demonstrate his skills, and when he spotted a Music Week job advert to run a venue in Glasgow, the planets came into alignment.

The venue was King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, which had been launched in 1990 by DF Concerts founders Stuart and Judith Clumpas to great acclaim, providing an important stage for emerging talent eager to find fanbases to support their dreams.

“At my interview, Stuart had his two Labradors with him, and I think it’s because I got on so well with the dogs that I landed the job,” says Ellis. “To begin with, I worked out of the King Tut’s production office, which was more of a cupboard than an office, and I shared that with Texas tour manager Graham Cochrane, who was a chain-smoker. When people tell me that they need a bigger production office, I tell them that story.”

But the Clumpas ethos of looking after both the talent and the audience inspired Ellis, and he’s tried to evoke and improve that philosophy ever since across anything that DF has been involved with. “That nurturing spirit was the simple key to making King Tut’s such an internationally recognised club. And, to this day, everyone in the DF team has carried that on throughout everything the company does.”

Indeed, it was under the stewardship of Ellis that Tut’s became a venue of folklore, with Creation Records boss Alan McGee famously signing Oasis on the back of witnessing their performance at the club in May 1993.

“We put together a lineup with three or four acts who we knew would sell tickets, rather than one big headliner”

T-Time
It’s perhaps as his role of promoter of T in the Park that Ellis first came to prominence in Scotland. It began in 1993, a year after he first arrived in Glasgow, when Ellis found himself involved in talks about a major new festival, as DF Concerts sought to cement its claim to being Scotland’s leading live events promoter. “We had meetings with Tennent’s brewery, and we looked at a bunch of potential sites before deciding to launch T in the Park festival, in July 1994, at Strathclyde Park,” Ellis recalls.

The move was embraced by the music industry at large because, at the time, the UK only really had Glastonbury and Reading festivals as annual events. “We were working with agents from our generation who we knew already, and we put together a lineup with three or four acts who we knew would sell tickets, rather than one big headliner,” Ellis explains of the original lineup, which included Rage Against The Machine, Primal Scream, Blur, Crowded House, Björk, Oasis, and Cypress Hill.

Despite pulling in just 35,000 visitors across the two days – and losing money – T in the Park caught the imagination of Scottish music fans, as well as giving the nation’s youth that rite-of-passage gathering that had been missing for so many generations.

By year three, T in the Park was sold out and profitable, and the DF hierarchy made the decision to move the event north to Balado Airfield – a relocation exercise that cemented the brand as a festival for Scotland, rather than a Glasgow event. T revelled in its Balado home for 17 editions, until the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) objected to its licence because of an oil and gas pipeline that ran beneath the site.

“The HSE’s argument was, ‘It’s less safe if you do it again.’ My response was that, by their theory, if I keep asking Claudia Schiffer to dinner, eventually she will say yes. But they didn’t understand. What they said was that there was a one in a four-and-a-half-million-year risk that the pipeline would rupture and explode. What I was saying was that the risk remains the same each year – it does not increase on a yearly basis.

“Also, the same pipeline runs beneath Aberdeen Airport, and also has a school on it – and there are obviously people in that school and the airport every day – but HSE hasn’t shut down the school or the airport, so you have to ask why? The HSE issue was that the magnitude of the risk was unthinkable, rather than the risk being remotely possible. So the HSE had made up its mind and would not budge on Balado.”

“T had its time, and we knew we needed to make a decision”

Beak Spot
With the HSE intransigent in its approach, T in the Park’s organisers were determined to sign off from their beloved long-term home with a bang. The 2014 headliners were Arctic Monkeys, Biffy Clyro, and Calvin Harris, while other acts on the bill included Pixies, Ed Sheeran, Paolo Nutini, Paul Weller, The Human League, Pharrell Williams, Ellie Goulding, Tinie Tempah, Franz Ferdinand, Elbow, and James.

“The last year at Balado, we did such a great job, marketing-wise, to say goodbye to the site – and we had an 85,000-capacity sell-out.” But T’s relocation to Strathallan Castle was the beginning of the end, with rare birds of prey proving to be an unexpected obstacle.

“The move was significant – it was really challenging,” says Ellis. “Localised traffic issues and licence conditions that were put on us, because of the osprey, were enormous. And ironically, the osprey flourished when the festival was on – both years, they had chicks, and that doesn’t happen all the time. But the exclusion zone around the birds made it difficult to run the festival because it restricted some areas of movement. For instance, we had to do pick-ups and drop-offs for fans and campers farther away than we wanted, and it became a really hard event for people to go to.

“With hindsight, I think the council were scared of upsetting the objectors, who were very small in number but very vocal. Otherwise, the community in general was very supportive of the
event, but it just became so difficult that it was untenable. Also, I think also people over the age of 20 no longer wanted a camping festival as much as they had done previously in Scotland. So, T had its time, and we knew we needed to make a decision.”

As a result, T in the Park’s final edition was held in 2016, leaving Scotland bereft of a major summer festival. But not for long…

“With TRNSMT, there’s a healthy influx of people – some of whom might go to a nightclub afterwards or a late drink somewhere”

New Focus
Rather than leave a gaping hole in the calendar, Ellis decided that a new festival format was required for 2017. “We had to reinvent what we did, and we knew we had Glasgow Green sitting there – the biggest metropolitan site in the country, which is easily accessible with public transport. And the advantage of that is that you no longer need a campsite.”

In January 2017, DF Concerts launched TRNSMT, alerting fans that it would be staged over three days in July in the city centre park, and Radiohead being the first act to confirm. “It’s great for Glasgow – where the majority of the T in the Park fans came from – but we’ve found that people from all over come to TRNSMT, too,” observes Ellis. “If you’re coming from Newcastle or Preston or Aberdeen, you get off the train in either Central Station or Queen Street Station, and it’s pretty much a ten-minute walk to the main stage.”

And the event has the support of the city’s commercial sector, too. “All the businesses in Glasgow used to moan about the T in the Park weekend because there was such a migration out of the city. Whereas with TRNSMT, there’s a healthy influx of people – some of whom might go to a nightclub afterwards or a late drink somewhere. But people are staying in hotels, Airbnbs,
or whatever, so there’s a real economic boost.

“And we’ve made it flexible, rather than forcing everyone to commit to all three days. The result is that sometimes the Friday and Sunday combined ticket sells more than Friday and Saturday, depending on the lineup.”

“We resurrected Connect Festival, which we paused last year mainly because of headliner availability”

More Festivals
As for Geoff’s 2015 ambition to extend the reach of DF Concerts in the festival business, despite the loss of T in the Park, that mission has been well and truly accomplished. “We resurrected Connect Festival, which we paused last year mainly because of headliner availability,” he tells IQ.

“We had two years of Connect at the Royal Highland Showgrounds in Edinburgh, and by that second year, the numbers had increased quite a bit. We built it with the TRNSMT kind of model in mind – embracing the original Connect Festival ethos.

“So, when it returns, we’ll probably do the same thing over two or three days, depending on if there are acts available that fit the Connect kind of vibe. Like TRNSMT, it’s not a camping festival, albeit we did do boutique camping for about 1,000 people with yurts and huts and stuff.”

Another successful expansion to DF Concerts’ outdoor portfolio also uses that Royal Highland Showgrounds location – the Edinburgh Summer Sessions series of gigs. “We lost our original site at Princes Street Gardens because the potential rock fall from beneath the castle meant that we were prevented from using trucks to do the load-in. Of course, if we were able to secure the rock, it would have been a different story. So, we were forced to give up using that site. But the opportunity to use the Royal Highland Showgrounds meant we could cater for 27,000 people, rather than the 6,000 that we could do in Princes Street Gardens, so that allows us to do bigger acts – Paulo Nutini and The Killers in 2023, for instance.”

“We’ve not announced Edinburgh Summer Sessions, but we’ve got some heavy hitters in the pipeline for this year”

As for 2025’s Edinburgh Summer Sessions, he says, “We’ve not announced the programme, but we’ve got some heavy hitters in the pipeline for this year. And the site works so well because it’s got a lot of infrastructure already there – there’s lots of roads going through, there are permanent toilets and shower blocks.”

The Summer Sessions also set up shop in the likes of Dundee, Stirling, and Glasgow. Of the latter, Ellis comments, “It just made sense to consolidate more shows into Bellahouston Park for
Glasgow Summer Sessions. Last year, it was just one show with Green Day, whereas in 2025, we’re on sale with four shows: Punk All Dayer, Sting, Simple Minds, and Stereophonics.”

And always bearing carbon footprint in mind, Ellis has worked diligently to make sure that certain production equipment can be used for both Summer Sessions and TRNSMT. “We can use the same stage on both sites to make both events more sustainable. The events cannot overlap, but by scheduling them close together, we get the benefit of the stage being in Scotland, and it’s not a big mileage – it’s five miles – to transport between sites, which also means you can use the same crews, more or less, in both places.”

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