Meet the people behind London’s best festivals

Festivals have long been a staple of the great British summer. Is your year really complete without getting smacked in the face by a pint of Strongbow while watching someone remove a moon cup in public? I would suggest not.

For those who would rather not weather the inevitable indignities of a week long festival the exponential growth of one-day London festivals offers the perfect compromise. A day and night of debauchery, live music and and not a tent in sight at the end of it. 

Contrary to what you may think, festival organisers have not been resting on their laurels sampling gourmet burgers for half a year, with the surge in new festivals, expectations and competition for acts is high and takes ample preparation.

We have hand-picked some of the people responsible for this year’s most innovative London festivals to find out exactly what it takes to put on a field party. 

Lovebox and Citadel, Rob Silver – Festival Director 

We started Lovebox 17 years ago, the idea was to recreate the Glastonbury experience in a London setting. With Citadel we wanted to celebrate Sunday in all its glory, it always felt like a forgotten day of the weekend. It’s a little bit more laid back than Lovebox, which is more hedonistic.

The most difficult aspect of any festival is bringing your line up together – you’ve got to work around the artist’s schedule, tour commitments, whether they’re been in the country at the time. Also, artists are making more money from performing live than they are recording music generally speaking nowadays and that’s driven an explosion in live music and the festival industry, so you get a load more competition for a relatively small amount of headline acts. Any festival organiser that says otherwise is probably not being honest.

You can’t legislate for artists or what they might do. I remember in 2012 we lined up Donna Summers as the headline act, but a few days before we were about to announce it we got a call saying she was very unwell and she actually died shortly after. Anything can happen when you’re organising a festival and you have to learn to be flexible, but not before you panic for a bit and think “what the f**k are we going do?” We got Grace Jones instead of Donna Summer so it worked out.

The artists are the lifeblood of who we are and what we do, but you do get some weird requests, there was one artist who specified that they wanted us to find them a hotel but then put in brackets “must not be haunted”. We had a poor intern phoning round all the hotels in London asking if they had any ghosts. You always get some quite whacky requests, we had another artist, who shall remain nameless, who asked for a pack of extra large condoms on his rider. And so off the intern went to Boots again…

Being based in London, we’re lucky that we’re culturally at the forefront of what’s going on in the UK and around the world. Food has become way more important in the festival experience, there’s so much competition out there and people are being far more choosy about what tickets they buy and the food offering plays a big part in that decision. Festivals have become a lot more sophisticated about the food, drinks they’re offering – at Citadel we have Prosecco on tap and bloody Marys are our most popular drink.

Over the years, our headliners have definitely adjusted to reflect changing tastes, these days we have a big emphasis on grime and hip hop acts, young people are less interested in the traditional ageing rockers we used to always see at festivals. We’re also placing a lot more emphasis on collaborations this year. We have a safe space for LGBTQ members that’s run by Pussy Palace, we’re doing various merch collaborations. You’ve got to move with the times.

Lovebox Festival, 12-13 July, Gunnersbury Park, buy tickets here. Citadel festival, Sunday 14 July, Gunnersbury Park, buy tickets here. 

GALA Festival, Giles Napier – Co-Founder

The idea for GALA, in its most infant form, was Jonny’s (co-founder, Jonathan Edwards). We’d worked together throwing parties up in Newcastle as students for a number of years and once we were both living in south London we quickly realised we wanted to continue doing big events down here. Jonny approached Lambeth Council about doing a south London-focussed music and food event in Brockwell Park before we first sat down together and, thankfully, they were receptive. We then knocked heads for a number of months in late 2015 – refined the concept, eventually decided on a name, made some strong partnerships and GALA was born. 

There are so many hurdles, but I think finding a suitable site is right up there. Sound is such a key part to a festival’s success that you want it to be absolutely perfect but it’s almost impossible do that if you’re in London with residential areas around. We had a bit of a nightmare with our bars in our first year and ran out of spirits at about 5pm. I had to jump in my Mum’s VW Polo, which was parked close to site, drive to every Sainsbury’s local and Tesco express within a two-mile radius of the park and frantically clear out every last bottle in their cupboards. I had never heard so many “someone’s having a party” comments during a shopping trip.

It’s all worth it in the end though. Looking out at a sea of happy faces in the crowd, enjoying an experience you’ve worked on all year to deliver, is a pretty life-affirming feeling. In the downtime during summer I will be visiting and scoping out festivals across Europe, so that’s definitely one of the perks of the job!

This year we’ve got London radio station Worldwide FM hosting a brand-new stage mainly consisting of live music, which promises to bring a fresh dimension to the festival. In terms of surprises – legendary US house producer and DJ Maurice Fulton just joined the line-up. He’s one of my all-time favourite DJs, and it’ll be his first time playing on the main stage, so I’m incredibly excited for it.

GALA festival, Sunday 26 May, Peckham Rye Park, buy tickets here.

All Points East, Jim King – Events Director 

We’d always loved coming to shows in Victoria Park. It’s such a great part of London with so many amazing and independent music, food and bar venues, and that was a lot of the inspiration for what we wanted to make All Points East about. 

We really wanted to deliver an event that reflected a diverse and broad base of quality music with passionately booked line-ups. But even if you have the passion and a great idea then you still need the confidence to go for it.  You have to take people, whether they want to come or not, on this magical ride with you, – it becomes a force of will to make it happen.  

I love the planning side of major events. Putting the creative together and curating the bill. It’s incredibly exciting and rewarding to work within a creative team who share your own passions. There’s nothing better than seeing it all come together on the day with your favourite band on that stage.  

You have to flexible with artists to make sure great moments can happen while keeping everything on track.  Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds headlined the last night for our first year in 2018 and were phenomenal.  As they are going on stage we quickly realised it wasn’t just the band with them – it was Kate Moss, Cara Delevingne, Liv Tyler and more. Kylie Minogue stepped up to sing with Nick during the set. And then, at the end of the show, Nick invited the audience on stage and we had more than a hundred of them up there too. It’s about having the experience and professional staff to handle that, with ease and intelligence, without the artist having to miss a beat in what they want to do. It was a brilliant live show. A wonderful, emotional moment and it’s why we do this.

All Points East will be here for as long as Tower Hamlets invite us to their park. As for me, I’ll always do this job in some capacity. It’s the only thing I’ve really ever done. 

All Points East takes place over two weekends, 25 May – 2 June, Victoria Park, buy tickets here.