Scott Paterson was 14 when he begged his parents to be allowed to attend the first T in the Park. Ten years later he was back with his band, Sons and Daughters.

“I remember it being a big thing at the time because the nearest big festival was Reading,” he says. “But people didn’t think it was going to be a yearly thing. I thought it was just going to be an experiment and that, in typically Scottish fashion, we’d never get a music festival.”

Until 1994, rock music festivals were something that happened in Glastonbury. When Geoff Ellis announced his plan to hold one on Scottish soil, he was told it would never work.

“I do remember a distinct lack of enthusiasm from certain quarters,” recalls Ellis, head of DF Concerts. “People just didn’t think a festival in Scotland would work because it would be impossible to attract the bands or the crowds. It had been attempted before and come to nothing.”

Things were different back then. The world outside academia had yet to discover the internet and Primal Scream were the biggest Scottish band on the planet. The first T in the Park took place in Strathclyde Park in Motherwell in front of 17,000 people, most of whom had travelled from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Just 2,000 decided to spend the night beneath the stars between performances from the likes of the Manic Street Preachers, Oasis and Primal Scream. A little-known band called Glass Onion, later to become Travis, played what was then the Caledonia Stage and is now the T Break Stage for unsigned bands. Ellis pulled in a few favours from acts with whom DF Concerts had previously worked, including Cypress Hill, Rage Against the Machine and the eccentric Icelandic singer Björk, who, in 1994, was at the height of her fame.

“We didn’t sell out the first year and we didn’t get a great deal of media coverage in advance because people didn’t want to associate themselves with something that might be a flop,” says Ellis. “Not to mention the fact that people were sceptical that all these bands were even going to turn up to a field outside Glasgow.

“We were looking at a loss in the first year. There were no grants or council money available, the only help we had was from Tennent’s lager.”

Ellis was enthusiastic if not optimistic. He envisaged T in the Park as a cross between Glastonbury and Reading — fewer poetry readings and not quite as much rock music. But after just one year the future of the festival hung in the balance.

“I do remember somebody coming up to me and saying, ‘I think you could have the Scottish Glastonbury here,’ but I thought he was just flattering us. Now we’re not the Scottish version of anything — we’re just T in the Park.”

Tennent’s and DF Concerts originally planned to hold the festival on Arran in 1993, but were forced to abandon that idea when the financial impracticalities became apparent. T in the Park was the first festival to use a corporate logo — it was a risk to be seen flirting with corporate sponsorship, which was considered desperately unfashionable in rock and indie music circles.

“We needed the support of a major sponsor because we didn’t have a history and thus an audience that had grown with us over a number of years,” says Ellis. “And thankfully it’s turned out very well. There are very few sponsorship relationships that have lasted 15 years — and will continue to last. For Tennent’s it completely changed the position of their brand in Scotland.Before T in the Park they were seen as a bit of an old man’s beer — they didn’t have the cool, contemporary image that they have now.”

In 1997, the festival moved to its current home at Balado Airfield, near Kinross in Perthshire. Now more accessible to the hordes from the north, and more exotic to those coming from the central belt and further afield, it began to make a name for itself internationally. Over the years the number of festival-goers who choose to brave the elements and camp has risen to 75%. Economically, it’s gold. A study in 2006 revealed that T in the Park’s annual worth to the Scottish economy was £18m. An impressive 45% of ticket buyers travel from outside Scotland, making the event one of most profitable annual tourist attractions and turning Balado into the fifth biggest “town” in Scotland for three days in July. “It’s a rites-of-passage in the social and cultural life of young Scottish people — it’s part of what it means to be young in Scotland and what it means to be starting out on your adult life,” says Dr Gayle McPherson, who teaches cultural business at Glasgow Caledonian University.