Wide awake festival
Bringing together notes from the underground, Wide Awake, is a festival for music fans looking for something different. Expect leftfield Indie, Post Punk, Electronica, Techno, Jazz and more from an array of artists you won’t find anywhere else at a festival in London.
Wide Awake grew out of Test Pressing Festival and is brought to you by Bad Vibrations, LNZRT and SC&P, some of the original Field Day and Dimensions festivals founders and the people behind MOTH Club, The Shacklewell Arms, The Waiting Room and Peckham Audio, Wide Awake’s a party for people who care… about music and more.
"Bringing together notes from the underground"
"a line up hotter than a scotch bonnet."
- Rough Trade
Crack Cloud at Moth Club by April Arabella for So Young Magazine in 2018
Rough Trade chat to Wide Awake’s organisers
Shame by Vito Valentinetti
Wide Awake's Keith Miller, Tash Cutts and Jamal Guthrie chat music, diversity, equality and the positive initiatives they are embracing to drive conversation and action.
There's a new kid on the festival block this Summer, with a line up hotter than a scotch bonnet. Wide Awake lands in Brixton's Brockwell Park on Friday the 5th June, billed as 'a festival for music fans looking for something different' and 'bringing together notes from the underground.'
Born out of Test Pressing Festival, Wide Awake has a bunch of excellent names behind it, including some of the original Field Day and Dimensions festivals founders as well as the good people at MOTH Club, The Shacklewell Arms, The Waiting Room and Peckham Audio. Unsurprising then that it's shaping up to be one of the hottest tickets in town.
Over on their website Wide Awake states that it's 'a party for people who care… about music and more'. Impressed by the proactive approach the festival has adopted straight off the bat and in anticipation of International Women's Day, we wanted to delve a little deeper...
Keith, Tash and Jamal, first up, massive congratulations on curating an incredible new festival for this year. It's the kind of line-up where if you'd asked us to offer up our dream list of artists to come together in a park for 2020, it would be near enough identical. It has Counter Culture all over it and we couldn't be more excited to celebrate with you this June!
When the idea for Wide Awake was first put on the table, what made it stand apart from other festivals that came before it?
Keith Miller: I mostly felt excited about starting a festival from scratch. All we had in place was the park and the date. It was a totally blank canvas. It meant we could sit down, mostly in the pub, and chat about as many ideas as we could for what we wanted the festival to be like, what causes we wanted to highlight, who we wanted to play and who we thought would come.
Then we had to come up with a name.
I get up super early to take my kid to school and stay up pretty late working at shows. During a particularly gruelling period of late nights, there was a shower gel in my bathroom taunting me with the words WIDE AWAKE during the time we were hunting for a name. And of course Parquet Courts are one of my favourite acts and we all loved that record and track. So, it felt like a natural fit vs some of the more eccentric ideas that were being thrown at the wall.
We have had so many of the acts we’ve booked playing at our venues (Moth Club, Shacklewell Arms, Waiting Room, Peckham Audio, Studio 9294) we decided to stay as true to our programming as we could and book the bands we’ve been championing since the days of The Lock Tavern Festival. Basically, everything you’ll see on the day is stuff we’ve been banging on about and doing for the last 8 or 9 years, but in a field and not in a small venue. It’s basically our office day out.
Refreshingly, the gender split in the line-up doesn't reveal the very ugly imbalance akin to some other festivals announced for this year. How important was gender and diversity to you when booking artists and do you feel sad that it's seemingly not a consideration in some parts of the wider industry?
Tash Cutts: For a festival in 2020, there are no excuses for a line-up that makes no effort to present a range of both male and female identifying acts. As a brand new festival, we were able to launch Wide Awake with a blueprint for booking that will dictate the way we move forward with events, and we hope it will encourage other festivals (and the wider industry as a whole) to view 50/50 gender split lineups as the norm. A gender equal billing should not be a cause for celebration, it should just be considered the baseline.
Read the full interview here