I’m sat in Joe’s living room, having just finished a fry up and talked art for half an hour. It turns out Joe recently wrote to Mark McGowan – the performance artist Global Cool interviewed last week – to express his admiration, as well as point out one or two areas of improvement.

And talking to Joe, it soon becomes clear that his precocious talent is as much down to insouciance as it is intellect. Simply stated, Joe possesses enough business acumen at the tender age of 23 to realise something many his age can only dream about from the snug confines of Facebook.

“As an art student I couldn’t get a job,” he jokes, laughing. “I wanted to create a collective. Some people were up for that, some people weren’t.”

Galvanising a movement with a team of three like-minded people at its heart, Joe set out into the world of parties – a world he knew to be tremendously wasteful from his time at university.

“We launched on 15th January with the world’s first carbon neutral student gig, which was a good beginning,” Joe tells me. “When it comes to the environment, I’ve always given a shit, basically. So I wanted to do something that merged the skills I had with the beliefs I had – and that kind of came together quite nicely. And being in a position to create my own situation, I could make it how I wanted to.”

Joe was way ahead of the game on eco-events, but it was only once he’d started down the road of greening parties that he realised just how unique his enterprise was.

“Once I’d done it, I then actually looked at the market – I wasn’t pre-empting the market – and no-one else was doing it, or some people were doing it badly, or on a different scale,” he explains. “I thought it was very strange, but it’s also quite liberating because there isn’t a precedent. You have to make it yourself, you have to define your own integrity and that’s a very interesting way to work. It’s almost like you’re creating the boundaries – you always have to keep on pushing.”

With no guide to what they were doing, and only a smattering of similar entities emerging over the last six months, the difficulty of the task soon became obvious.

“I had to do my own green procurement code, do a remit for an event, what a venue needs to have to be green,” Joe explains. “And I had to work with all the people who specialise in specific aspects of these things – so, the cider guy, who knows all about cider, but he doesn’t know about the rest of it. You have to get all their best information. Then there’s the guy who does catering, or you know, cutlery bollocks! There isn’t someone who goes, ‘Look, there’s a package, do you wanna sell it?’ – like in a franchise. You have to find each aspect. And it’s a lot of work.”

So if you want to green your entertainment event, how can BASH help? As Joe explains, there are three levels.

“One would be advice, audit, where we’d say, ‘This is what you do, this is what you’re doing wrong, this is how you can make it better’ – without actually doing it,” he says. “Then there’s implementation, where we’d implement as much as we can. And then there’s the total, the crème de la crème of the green event, and we’ve done four of those this year. And effectively, you go into an event and you have a party and you leave, and there’s obviously impact but there’s as little impact as possible. The drinks are all locally sourced, organically grown, all the energy is audited, your travel there is audited and offset, the musicians are brought there in electric cars. That’s the total bubble, and that’s what people should aspire to.”

BASH is currently working with catering giant Mitchells & Butlers, in partnership with Jokhova and Gasparic, on a series of green art exhibitions. And with plans to help the launch of eco-fashion label Butcher Couture, a job managing a Fine Art gallery and numerous other activities all demanding his attention, it’s surprising Joe has enough time in the day to fit it all in.

Unfazed, however, it’s the tremendous success he’s achieved so far that seems to be driving him forwards.

“Nothing can take away what I’ve already done,” he explains. “If I stopped now, at least I’ve made an impact and I’ve done something no-one else has done. But I don’t intend to stop. It’s going too well!”

For more on BASH, click here and here.

For more on Mark McGowan, click here.