What Peter did next

His birthday may be cryptic but Scotland's events impresario's future is clear, writes Tim Cornwell

EVENTS supremo Peter Irvine celebrated his birthday in the woods above Tyninghame Beach at the weekend. The invitations said simply A Summer Party, with no indication of whose, and the discreet signs to the East Lothian beach path read, cryptically, 21:48. That was the time at which the August full moon rose.

There was a studied casualness to the affair. Burning torches lit the beach path, but it was bring-your-own-bottle, with chairs arranged around marquees and a dance tent.

"It seemed a bit impromptu," said Irvine, "but it was planned meticulously." There were buses to and from Edinburgh, gourmet sausages and strawberries and a cast of DJs that included Allan Campbell, once a legendary figure at Edinburgh's Hoochie Koochie club and now a BBC producer.

"We were celebrating the passing of time," said Irvine, who when asked which birthday, settled for a professional age of 40. As ever in Scotland, he was nervously watching the elements.

"The weather last week was so ghastly," said Irvine, who has seen several of the Scottish events he has organised wiped out by high winds or heavy rain, including, most famously, Edinburgh's Hogmanay. "It was 'here we go again', hoping the weather would be all right."

Pete Irvine, music promoter, events organiser and author of Scotland the Best! got his start running gigs at Tiffanys in Edinburgh in the early 1980s. After organising The Big Day in Glasgow, he took on several major events when Glasgow was made European Capital of Culture in 1990. In 1993, he took on Edinburgh's Hogmanay, which he largely made into the international celebration it has become today.

"He single-handedly invented the event industry in Scotland, and the popular festival industry," says the film and documentary producer Leslie Hills. She has known Irvine for 30 years and worked with him for 14.

Irvine's Unique Events has a core staff of just six, but there are about 20 producers who work closely with him, while the number of stewards for a major event or festival can reach 1,200.

His summer party may mark a life and career watershed. At a time when uncertainty has hung over his Scottish operations, Unique is branching out into England for the first time, launching the Freedom Festival in Hull later this month.

Last year, the £400,000 contract for the Burns an' a' that festival in Ayrshire, which Unique created in 2005, was handed to an English company, bringing sputterings of anger from Burns groups and an expression of disappointment from Irvine.

In Edinburgh, Unique has effectively secured the contract for the Hogmanay celebrations for Edinburgh City Council for the next three to five years, after 30 companies expressed interest. But the council has signalled its aim of scaling back the event to save £300,000 after some 10,000 tickets and passes went unsold last year.

On 30 August, his real birthday, Irvine launches the Freedom Festival, a one-day affair tied to the centenary of the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, one of Hull's favourite historical figures.

Entertainment ranges from a British-Asian dance and music show, Bollywood Steps, to a production of Silent Disco, where individuals don wireless headphones to dance en masse to music only they can hear.

Two years ago, Irvine was approached by Hull council with a request as to whether a proposed new festival would work. Such reports, where cities are looking at a major investment of public money, are a growing part of his business. (Irvine's firm recently carried out another for a planned Trossachs festival, celebrating the centenary of the publication of Sir Walter Scott's classic the Lady in the Lake.)

Though England's North-East is often the butt of cultural jokes, Irvine concluded that a Hull festival could move forward on a clear path in a "dynamic city". This year – at very short notice – the city has invited Unique to present it.

Irvine has written of how Britain is "clogged" with festivals vying for acts and audiences. But amid growing competition, he is adamant that Unique is not about to head south. "It's not a strategy," he said. "I'm not going to be opening offices in London."

He was head-hunted for, but turned down, the job of running Liverpool's European Capital of Culture this year. "We are Scottish, we have stayed in Scotland. We are a Scottish company going to create a festival in England, one of the few companies that can do that."