Backstage at the Henley Festival

WE all know performers can be tricky and Jo Bausor knows it better than most.

The boss of the Henley Festival has had to field a variety of starry demands in her 10 years there, including a request for oxygen and the services of an ear, nose and throat consultant.

Would you care to guess who from last year’s line-up asked for an extravagant 12 dozen red roses? Jo isn’t saying, although she insists they were turned down.

“A lot of them have specific needs — some want lots of alcohol, others none at all,” she says.

“I do remember one particular request was for only the white parts of vegetables for their food.

“Although we do our best to accommodate all requests, we sometimes have to remind performers that we are a charity.”

As the recently appointed chief executive, Jo will be in charge next month when the 40th festival opens for its glittering five-night run with a line-up topped by living legend Sir Tom Jones.

Not bad for the Brummie girl from Kings Heath who moved here with husband Daniel in 1999 and took her first festival footsteps after answering an advert in the Henley Standard.

The festival was looking for a head of marketing and Jo knew that her London advertising agency and marketing consultancy experience would give her a good chance of the job.

“I just knew I had to have it,” she says. “My children (Tabitha, now 21, and Esther, 17) were relatively young and, as you might imagine, there was a high number of applications yet somehow I persuaded them that they needed me and that I was the best.

“I knew I had the right experience and background and that it was the dream job for me. It was as if the stars had aligned.”

She got no argument from Daniel, who is now chairman of the Make Henley Shine project, which aims to install lighting on Henley Bridge.

Jo says of her husband, whom she met through a mutual university friend at a Paris bus station: “We are a great team and support each other. He’s always encouraged me to go for it.”

And go for it she did. After nine years as head of marketing, she was made interim chief executive in October 2020 when her predecessor resigned after that year’s festival was cancelled during the pandemic.

Her appointment was made permanent last January.

So from July 6 to 10 Jo will be overseeing one of Henley’s biggest events of the year with up to 6,000 visitors each night and will be going home to Bix only to sleep.

Tickets have been selling well with the Friday and Saturday nights sold out weeks ago.

“The hardest part is planning for the unplanned, such as the weather or a pandemic,” she says.

“One year we had to re-route Lionel Ritchie’s private jet because the motorway was blocked.

“We have a programming team with experts in each genre to programme the jazz. The Bedouin tent and visual art and the floating stage and comedy are programmed in-house using the many years of experience that we’ve gained, both in dealing with agents and in knowing our audience.

“There are 11 of us in the office but only two of us are full-time, though this increases to hundreds of staff for the 60 hours of the festival’s duration. And everything is timed as the whole event is choreographed in five-minute blocks.

“The Henley Festival team are the absolute best at what they do, so I’m always pretty confident that things will go well, although I do wake up in the night with my head buzzing.”

Afterwards, Jo will be taking a well-earned holiday in Turkey where she plans to “flop for a couple of weeks before it all starts again”.

No doubt Daniel will be on hand to support her during those five heady nights in July?

“I think he’ll probably have one night off,” she laughs.