Why We Still Do It

How It All Started

We never set out to build something big. We just wanted to play the music we love in a field with our friends and see what happened. Nothing more, nothing less.

More than ten years later, people still ask why we keep doing it. Why we put in the hours, sort the tents, handle last-minute problems and take on stress we don’t really need. Keeping it small actually makes it harder in some ways. More people means more budget, but we’ve always kept it tight on purpose.

We’re Matt, Dave and Craig. Good friends for over twenty years, all brought together by the same scene, the same music and a love for the moments that come with it.

This is how Beat Bunker grew, bit by bit. The nights that made it worth it, the headaches that nearly ended it, the stolen kit, the cancellations and why we’ve always found a way to keep going.

The First Field

In our twenties we ran plenty of club nights. By our early thirties we wanted more of the outdoors: the freedom, the camping, the feeling that for a few days nothing else mattered. Festivals like Glastonbury and others gave us some of the best weekends of our lives so far.

That feeling made us want to try something of our own. If no one was booking us to play, we’d just do it ourselves. No masterplan, just the best bits of what we loved about festivals but on a smaller scale for our mates.

In 2014 it all started when a friend of a friend mentioned they had a field near Reading. We thought, why not? We found a cheap geodome on eBay, borrowed some speakers and told a handful of our closest mates to come along. No flyers, nothing at stake financially, just show up and see what happened.

It worked because it was real. Everyone knew everyone and everyone mucked in.

Leveling Up

In 2015 we stepped it up a bit. We booked one of our favourite DJs at the time, Sean McCabe, who was really making a name for himself. We knew the old geodome wouldn’t cut it, so we scraped together enough for a proper black inflatable dome. The event was a success and the crowd doubled. It looked the part, the sound was better and we could see this might have more to give.

In 2016 we pushed it on again. We booked Atjazz and Julian Gomes, both rising fast in the house scene. Word spread further, people came from wider afield, but the vibe stayed the same: relaxed, welcoming, no egos.

The Break-In

In 2017 we turned up ready to build on what we’d started. We dropped the dome and all our gear on site and left it locked in a secure barn the weekend before the event. When we came back on the Wednesday to set up, the barns had been broken into. All our kit was gone: tools, ladders and worst of all, the inflatable dome and its custom aluminium truss. It felt like an inside job because so few people knew where it was kept.

We felt sick. We had to refund everyone. But the community pulled together. After a big social push, the tent turned up dumped back down the lane from the site, which in itself was suspicious. It was a one-off tent, so whoever took it probably realised they couldn’t use it openly. Maybe the guilt hit after seeing everyone’s comments. But by then the truss was gone, melted for scrap. It was too late to save the party. That was the last time we did anything in Reading.

Finding Malvern

It would have been easy to pack it in, but we still had the hunger. Once again, the community stepped up. One of the attendees put us onto a beautiful site in Malvern. It was perfect, with everything we needed already there and a giant geodome tent ready to go. We threw a party and it just worked.

In 2018 and 2019 we ran two really good events there, booking Malaki, Richard Earnshaw, Groove Assassin and Journey Men, who at the time were just breaking onto the scene. Familiar faces came back, new ones turned up, and we were back on the map.

Let’s Love Life

Then, for everyone, Covid hit hard in 2020 and everything stopped overnight.

When things finally started moving again in 2021, we didn’t have a venue of our own so we kept things simple just to keep the spark alive. We approached a local day festival called Let’s Love Life. We had DJ’d there before and the organiser already knew what Beat Bunker was about. He gave us our own stage because he saw the potential and wanted us to keep going. Let’s Love Life gave us the lift we needed and kept the spirit alive at exactly the right time.

Back to Our Roots

Even then, the itch for a proper weekender with camping never really left us.

So, a few years later by pure luck, we stumbled across another friend of a friend's field in East Sussex. That chance find is the only reason we were able to bring Beat Bunker back in 2024 for our tenth anniversary.

We decided to strip it right back. No headliners, no big promises, just a field, a sound system and whoever turned up, turned up. It was exactly what everyone needed and reminded us why we started all this in the first place.

Where We Are Now

And now, here we are in 2025. This time we thought we’d step it up again, so we booked Grant Nelson to open the next chapter and remind us that the story is still far from over.

How we carry on from here, we don’t really know yet. Whether we’ll do another party next year is too early to say. A lot can happen in a year.

Beat Bunker has never been a business. Our day jobs pay the bills. This is for the fun of it. When it stops being fun, we’ll stop. Simple as that.

One thing we’ve learned

You can plan it properly, set goals and scale it like a business. And that works if it’s your living. Or you can do it like us. Focus on creating the right feeling and the right people will find you, even if it takes time. When things go wrong, they usually have a way of showing you why later.