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Picture the scene: it’s July 2025 and I’m DJing at a festival called Loveshack. I’m not fretting about losing the crowd to a different stage because there isn’t one: we’re in a barn in the Welsh countryside. The dress-up theme is 90s icons, and below me Joanna Lumley is talking to Andre Agassi while a cop from the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video looks on. People’s possessions are strewn around but no one seems worried, because the crowd is just 60 members of my extended friendship group and everyone is having possibly the best festival experience imaginable.

In a world of overpriced and overrated mainstream festivals, tiny events like this are becoming more common. It’s true that tickets still fly out for the big fests: with Glastonbury having a fallow year, its 200,000-odd punters have hungrily looked elsewhere, leading to festivals such as Mighty Hoopla and Green Man selling out in a day. But there is a definite sense that festivals have been losing their independent, renegade spirit. Lineups feel samey, and despite high ticket prices there are a depressing number of onsite “brand activations”, where a bus covered in the livery for a new smartphone, say, makes you feel like you’re walking around in a 3D advert. As John Rostron, who runs the Association of Independent Festivals, says: “Not everyone wants to go to a festival and see a Dyson-activated tent.”

A counterpoint to the blandness is emerging. Let’s call them secret festivals. They typically work like this: a group of like-minded mates organise a hedonistic weekend away. The location might be a campsite or piece of land owned by rave-friendly farmers, or even a down-at-heel mansion house. Most commonly they’re held at no-nonsense wedding venues that allow for camping and nocturnal tomfoolery. The attendees properly bond over the weekend – so much so that the events progress from one-off party to annual festival. Numbers range from 50 to 200 and are usually friends or friends-of-friends of the organiser. And these events are generally not ticketed, nor open to the general public.

Not until they get bigger, anyway. “Green Man started with Jo [Bartlett] and Danny [Hagan] moving to Wales and putting on a party to get some mates together,” notes Rostron. It now hosts 25,000. He also points to Gemfest in Wiltshire: “It’s now a sold-out 8,000-capacity festival but it started as a 21st birthday party for someone called Gemma.”

Many secret festivals are run by people who came of age during the late-00s era of the “boutique festival”: Bestival, Glade, the Big Chill and Secret Garden Party were part of a wave that put silliness in the spotlight, encouraging dress-up and immersive oddness. Dulcie Horn, whose creative studio Chuffed works across many festivals, sees the comparisons: “The magic in those boutique festivals came from people pouring their blood, sweat and tears into the collective experience. They realised the thing that ultimately makes a festival really magical is the people.” Secret festivals take that sense of collective community even further.

A good example is Swansea’s Killer Wales, attended by about 70 people every year, many meeting for the first time. While British partiers commonly deal with the anxiety of meeting new people by hoofing loads of drugs, according to organiser Alex, the vibe at Killer Wales is “quite intentionally to make it less about that. If you get a lot of people that 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 for people to meet.”

Festivalgoers are split into groups with distinct dress-up themes, to disrupt any established social cliques, and lots of play ensues. Daytime games have included trying to hang a willing participant from a washing line using just pegs, or silly sumo wrestling on a nearby beach, where the contenders wore Easter baskets on their heads. “A person loses when all the eggs fall out,” says Alex’s partner Yas.

Pride of place is the annual talent show, at which everyone showcases a skill – the sillier the better. “One year, someone did a very sexy burlesque with a baseball cap, just very sexily taking it off and on again,” says Yas. “A mermaid sat brushing her hair while two people put increasingly bigger objects under her boobs. One person’s skill was a really big smile.”

A secret festival named Come Bye also has a talent show. “The winner becomes the most famous person on the whole site,” says organiser 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 did an immersive wake one year.”

People exchange items for free at Come Bye, as they do at the influential Burning Man festival. But, unlike the US event’s principle of sharing, at Come Bye it’s not tit for tat. “You just bring nice things and share them with whoever you come across,” Hagenbach says. “You might bake some brownies and give them to the first 20 people you meet. People have gifted trinkets, poems, or just cracked open a watermelon and handed it round.”

At another secret festival, Mansionface, someone once constructed a whole escape room experience. “It was a version of the board game Operation,” organiser Tom Lee says. “When you made a mistake, the whole room filled with smoke.” Lee says these festivals become an outlet for people who wouldn’t make DJing or production design a career. “Lots of us are creative, but not in our day jobs. None of us are exactly playing Fabric [nightclub] next week. So we always wanted it to be a creative space for our friends who make music as a hobby. Many people did their first DJ sets at Mansionface.”

Alex Podger runs Oddfolk in Cornwall for about 100 people every year, and sees a similarity between our partying habits and pagan rituals. “In the pagan calendar, there are usually four big events every year, like harvests, and four smaller events to check in with your community. I find that in the Oddfolk collective, it almost organically happens.” The fact that they aren’t bound by divination or runes but by WhatsApp doesn’t make it any less meaningful.

“From the start, Oddfolk hasn’t been something you buy a ticket for,” Podger says. “You have to participate and help. In the first year we designed an Excel spreadsheet – it got very nerdy – and put people into teams, like a day’s cooking team or the recycling team nicknamed the Sisterhood of Left Waste. Doing it this way makes you an active participant, not just a consumer. If you see litter or notice the toilet roll has run out, you do something about it.” Organisers ask for a financial contribution, which has always been under £100. “That pays for sound equipment and food to feed everyone. It only works because 30% of the audience are involved in making the food at some point.”

Podger likens it to anarcho-syndicalism, where there’s at least a smattering of control above the autonomous teams. “I’m terrified about fatigue. If we let everyone party until 8am on the first night, people won’t eat when the food team has made lunch the next day, and nobody will be at the performance at 4pm that someone has spent time preparing because they’re trying to eat lunch that isn’t there. By the end, they’re driving home for six hours with no sleep. Suddenly the whole delicate balance falls apart. So someone has to be responsible.”

While informal, unticketed, BYOB gatherings like these generally aren’t subject to the same legislation around licensing and health and safety as official festivals (or it may fall under the jurisdiction of the venue being hired), safeguarding is still very much a concern. “We all look after each other, but there have been times when I’ve had to spend the night with someone because – unconnected to the party – they might be having a difficult time,” says Alex of Killer Wales.

Many people will miss being at Glastonbury this year. But for all its greatness, it’s worth considering that perhaps the scale of some huge festivals today prohibits what a lot of us crave most: meaningful experiences with other humans that go beyond saying “I like your massive flag” and walking off.

As Horn points out: “The sheer size and amount of programming means I have constant Fomo at Glastonbury. Whereas at a tiny festival, I’m using less energy and have time for repeated interactions with people. I went to one small festival that just had a waterslide and some tunes in the sun all day. Incredible scenes.”

Advice for anyone wanting to organise their own secret festival

Hold your event on the same site as an existing festival
Once a site or venue becomes festival-friendly, chances are they’ll be eager for more events during the summer, says the Association of Independent Festivals’ John Rostron: “The site used for Nozstock [in Herefordshire] is hired out to micro festivals, for example. Farmers are often festivalgoers and quite community-minded, so are more up for having that conversation than you think.”

Don’t be scared of Excel spreadsheets and tough decisions
“You might be asking your mates to hand over a couple of hundred quid each,” says Tom Lee from Mansionface. “So it’s important to get the budget right. Our biggest problems came when we thought we had the numbers locked and then people started dropping out. We had to have a strict policy of setting a date for guaranteeing returning their money from the budget surplus.”

Keep the crew happy when they’re working
“We try to do everything together, including meals, but there are times when we’ll need everyone to help move things and tidy up,” says Yas from Killer Wales. “So we gamify things as much as possible – we even hand out stickers for tidying up. People go mad for stickers!”

Resolve conflicts quickly
While small festivals are great environments to spread ownership of lots of different aspects, “having a little structure and setting some principles and agreeing to them is still really important”, says Oddfolk’s Alex Podger. With the potential for lots of different creative disagreements between teams, “fundamentally agreeing to always operate with respect and to resolve conflict quickly goes a long way”, he adds.

Never forget the lessons of Fyre festival
On such a small scale, it only takes one thing to go wrong to scupper the whole weekend. So, as Max Hagenbach from Come Bye recommends: “Get advice from anyone who has done this sort of thing before. If you’re hiring in generators, marquees and sound systems, you need to know what to do if something goes wrong – or you’re screwed!”