About us

The Story Behind Underground Fayre

Underground Fayre brings together an experienced team from across the live music and festival industry, including two former festival organisers, one current festival organiser, and a long-established festival manager and director.

Between us, we’ve spent decades creating, building and delivering independent music festivals. What’s interesting is that the events we’ve been involved with couldn’t be more different, from their musical identities and audiences to their atmosphere and approach.

On paper, some of our ideas might even contradict each other, but that’s part of what makes this exciting. We’re bringing together different perspectives, challenging each other’s thinking and taking the best of what we’ve learned to create something none of us would necessarily have come up with individually.

Despite those differences, we share the same beliefs about what makes a great festival: independence, creativity, community, great music and putting the audience experience first.

We’re proud of the festivals we’ve created and helped build, including award-winning events that developed loyal communities and strong reputations within the industry. Many continue to thrive today, and we’re delighted to see them doing well. We’re certainly not looking to recreate any of them. Underground Fayre is about doing something different, with its own identity and character.

Over the years, we’ve learned that some of the most memorable festival experiences aren’t necessarily the biggest or most expensive. Often, they’re the intimate stages, quirky entertainment, independent traders, unexpected performances and little corners that develop a character and following of their own.

They’re the places where people stop, stay, talk and make memories.

Keeping Underground Fayre affordable is equally important to us.

One of the reasons we chose Cotswold Airport is its existing infrastructure. Having so much already in place means we don’t need to build everything from scratch, helping us reduce production costs and pass those advantages on through more accessible ticket prices.

We know the costs of staging a festival can change considerably from year to year, so we can’t make promises about future prices. What we can say is that affordability and genuine value for money will always be important considerations in how we plan and deliver Underground Fayre.

That approach extends beyond tickets. We want reasonably priced bars, affordable food and independent traders offering genuine value. We also believe people should be able to bring their own food and drink rather than having it confiscated at the gates. We’d much rather people chose to support our bars and traders because of the high quality of what’s on offer and sensible pricing, rather than because they had no alternative.

Ultimately, we want people to enjoy the weekend without feeling that everything comes with an additional expense.

Being genuinely independent gives us the freedom to shape Underground Fayre around those principles, rather than following an established formula.

Great live music will always be at its heart, but we want much more than a series of bands on stages. Expect performance, art, independent traders, family activities, unusual entertainment and plenty of unexpected discoveries along the way.

Cotswold Airport gives us an extraordinary setting to work with. Rather than simply putting a festival inside it, we want to make the surroundings part of the experience, creating different areas and atmospheres to explore throughout the weekend.

And we’re deliberately keeping things small.

We’ve experienced the journey of growing festivals and know that bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Our ambition isn’t to see how many people we can fit through the gates, but to create something with real character, where the atmosphere, experience and sense of community matter just as much as the line-up.

We’re taking everything we’ve learned from our very different journeys and bringing it together on a blank canvas.

Not to recreate what we’ve done before, but to see what we can achieve together.

Independent. Unconventional. Affordable. Built on experience. A festival with a character all of its own.