Fiona Stewart hadn’t always worked in the music industry. Being a single mum, she had to crack on with whatever work she could find. Bar work, waitressing, admin – she wasn’t fussy. But all of that would come in handy later. “I was very hardworking and I was prepared to just be useful,” she tells me over video call, explaining that working in the music industry is very much about your reputation. “So I would just try to do whatever anyone asked of me, and then eventually people sort of heard about me and then they would recommend me to somebody.”

Now 66, Stewart is the owner and managing director of Green Man, one of the UK’s last-remaining truly independent festivals and the only independent festival in the UK owned by a woman. When I speak to her a couple of weeks out from this year’s festival opening on 20 August, Stewart seems relaxed, jonesing to get onsite.

Green Man is an enormous success. Nestled in the Brecon Beacons, now known as Bannau Brycheiniog, the festival, founded in 2003, sells out within an hour every year, months before any of the line-up is released. Though many festivals have had to rely on Live Nation takeovers and corporate sponsorship to survive in a decimated cultural climate, punters still like the freer, more independent feel. And it’s the punters that matter to Stewart. “I love the fact of like-minded people coming together and creating something. It’s a kind of magical thing,” Stewart says.

After working for Glastonbury for several years, she was asked to run The Big Chill in Dorset. “I’m not good at lots of things – an awful lot of things, actually,” says Stewart. “But it just clicked with me. I was just able to run the festival. It was very natural.” But when it “started to get a bit more corporate, a bit more sponsory”, she wanted something she owned – and in 2006 took over Green Man. “I wanted to own something that I could protect,” she tells me. “I’d seen events change and develop – some good, some bad – for much more financial reasons. People maybe losing interest or respect for the audience because it’s more financially driven. I didn’t want that to happen.”

I wonder how being female in a famously male-dominated industry has influenced her approach. “When I first started, there were no women in the industry at all,” Stewart says. “I’d go to meetings, conferences, and there were literally no women there.” Festivals, which combine music with trades like construction, seemed to be a particularly male environment. “The big thing was getting contractors to trust you, really, because they were nervous. You know that thing where some men just don’t know how to deal with you?”

Stewart tells me she maintained a “charade” with a big-top contractor for seven years in which he would ask her, “where’s your boss”, and she would go to the phone and pretend to call him to answer the contractor’s questions. Eventually he sussed her out: “You are the boss, aren’t you?” (The person in question, Stewart explains, was also a former lion tamer: one night around the campfire, “he lifted up his shirt and showed me this hole where his ribcage should be”.)

Stewart is naturally conscious of the gender split – “there are many, many more women who work at Green Man than men”, she says – but also more generally of maintaining a “flat structure”. “I see Green Man as something that’s owned by everyone who’s involved,” she says. “We totally expect you to be brilliant at what you do, but I need you to understand what other people do, and you don’t get in the way of that. There’s no hierarchy. The steward is just as important to the festival as someone who manages big touring acts.”

So far, so utopian – but since taking over Green Man 20 years ago, it’s been far from an easy ride. From “biblical bad weather” to the ravages of Brexit (“It’s like… it’s hard enough to do this anyway. Why are we dealing with this?”), Stewart has had her fair share of strife. “I have literally lost every penny I have, and money I don’t have, four times since I started working at Green Man,” she says matter-of-factly. “I lost nearly three-quarters of a million pounds in Covid because we’d sold out earlier, so I bought all the production for that year, and then it didn’t happen.”

Financial precarity seems to be part of the package of owning a festival. “You can’t get a loan, because there’s no asset,” Stewart explains. “You don’t have land. You don’t have a company. All you have is your trademark.” One year during the financial crisis, the global underwriter went under, so their ticket income didn’t come through until much later. Her contractors bailed her out. “They made the decision at Glastonbury,” she says. “I said, ‘Look, guys, I’m buggered. I don’t have anything.’ And they all got together and gave me credit. So, horrible situation, but what a wonderful, kind thing to do.”

A House of Commons committee reported earlier this year that Live Nation, which controls more than a quarter of the UK’s 5,000-plus capacity festivals, had created a “climate of fear” in the live music industry due to its market dominance, pointing to “deep concerns about whether competition in the industry is now working fairly for fans, artists, venues and independent promoters”. I ask Stewart what she would want to say to them. “Live Nation has to achieve profit for their shareholders,” Stewart says. “What’s wrong is that the government is allowing them to behave like that.

“The independent market needs to be protected. Ultimately we’re the people developing the artists who will be on [Live Nation’s] stages in a few years’ time.” She goes on: “As a business, we are polar opposites. This word ‘festival’ – it’s ridiculous. It’s like having McDonald’s and a little bistro on the corner and expecting them to be the same.”

Stewart has naturally been courted many times by corporations, but has batted them away. “Nowadays, festivals either go under, or they reach a certain level and you make your money through investment,” she explains. “Someone like me at one time could create a very, very large festival. You can’t do large festivals now because that sector is owned by global corporations. So it’s a choice.”

And Green Man is completely different. It has run its own charity since 2014, for arts development, community support and climate crisis work. The festival works with local businesses and remains staunchly Welsh. “I think the value of what we do is not just a monetary thing. Something like Green Man really has a role to play in bringing people together. Developing the arts, supporting people in their early careers, generating money for small businesses and rural communities. There’s a multitude of benefits,” says Stewart.

“Why would I give that up? That’s the richness, isn’t it?”