www.musicweek.com PREVIEWTHEGREAT ESCAPE
27.04.12 MusicWeek 23
THE GREATEST ESCAPE The world of music descends on Brighton on May 10–12
INTERVIEW BY TOM PAKINKIS
I
t lays claim to a wealth of ‘before they were famous’ performances in its seven-year history, including Adele, Ed Sheeran and Bon Iver,
and this year music fans and industry execs will be flocking to The Great Escape in Brighton to witness the latest batch of global up and coming talent. Great Escape operations manager Kat Morris
talks to Music Week about how the three-day event is bigger and better than ever and how the pairing of live music with a jam-packed convention schedule makes the weekend of May 10 a hot spot on the calendars of business bods and punters alike...
How have you built on last year? In terms of the actual size of the event we’re working with roughly the same number of venues but this is the seventh year that the event is happening and we’ve got even more daytime shows and more events post-11pm. Over the years we’ve found that people just want music from dawn till dusk and so we’ve packed our programming out
with live performances from 12pm till 3am most days, which is awesome. We’ve got three big bands playing at the Dome
this year including Maximo Park on Thursday, The Temper Trap on Friday and Africa Express Sound System on the Saturday. Africa Express is something we’re particularly excited about, it’s a meeting of African and western musicians and DJs coming together for a one-off collaboration on stage. It’s particularly exciting because it will be bespoke for The Great Escape itself. That’s due to our Arts Council support who encourage us to programme more diversely overall.
ABOVE
Clockwise from top left: Kat Morris (Great Escape operations manager), Maximo Park, Alabama Shakes, Beth Houghton & The Hooves Of Destiny and Dry The River
We also have our main festival hub, which is at
Jubilee Square - an open area for people to meet and grab a drink. There’s a stage there, which will have live music all day from around 11am to 10pm. The schedule at Jubilee Square was a bit more sporadic last year. This year opens up even more opportunities for bands to play and for people to see their new favourite band, hopefully. Working again with The Arts Council there’s
going to be an interactive video installation at Jubilee Square, which will allow festival-goers to upload content and show their experience of the event. There’ll be other people capturing content as well, which will be remixed and uploaded onto these screens.
Tell us about the spotlight partner this year… We have a spotlight international partner every year and this year it’s Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. We work with loads of different countries to
profile the best up and coming artists and every year we put a spotlight on one of them over and above the rest to give them the opportunity to truly break through into the UK and European market. We chose Catalan Sounds as our partner because we’re especially excited about some of the music
YET
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