A Quick Q&A With Fair Play Festival

Sep 25

Sep 25 A Quick Q&A With Fair Play Festival

Manchester’s best festival never to happen, Fair Play Festival, are gearing up for their April 2021 scheduled weekender in the famous Northern Quarter. After coronavirus halted this year’s addition, the team have undergone a complete rebrand, tearing up last year’s bill, returning with an invigorating new line-up and announcing a special, Speedy Wunderground-curated stage. As the Fair Play team look to affirm themselves as tastemakers-elect of the Manchester music scene, we’re getting on board for the ride. We chatted to Kalum, Hannah and Jacob in the same week as we announce our ongoing media partnership. Dig in…

What is your name and what is your role?

I’m Hannah Tinker, a founder of Fair Play alongside Kalum Winters and Jacob Brailsford. We’re a small core team but all the ideas and decisions go through the three of us, we loop in with each other regularly and make sure everything’s running smoothly. It’s a collaborative process and has been since its inception.

How did the festival begin, and can you talk us through the early days?

Over the past few years, I felt like I was seeing the same, similar inter-city festival line-ups and set-ups in Manchester that lacked diversity in so many ways, be it genre, demographic of musicians or status of musicians. In May 2019 I decided that there should be a festival that’s almost a communal event, that’s ticketed cheaper than the others available, that’s fairer and open to all musicians, that welcomes musicians that are dubbed ‘alternative’ or whose genres aren’t as celebrated in Manchester than others. It felt like too big a job to do alone and having more people on board fitted in better with the idea behind the festival – the ability to bounce ideas around and get people’s input first-hand. Plus, the only thing I’d done like this was a small not-for-profit festival in Leeds a few years ago so wanted people with gig booking experience stronger than my own with broader knowledge than me. I set-up a meeting with Jacob and Kalum as they were both friends of mine, as well as gig promoters, whose taste and direction was similar to what I was going for – and they both liked the idea. They came onboard and it went from there really.

Who came up with the name ‘Fair Play Festival’ or was it a group decision?

In the first meeting we were throwing ideas for the name around that was based around ‘fair’, ‘open’, ‘equal’ etc that went to ‘fair game’ then I mentioned ‘fair play’, we all spoke about it for a bit and that was the main one from the meeting, then it stuck. It does encompass everything we’re going for.

Does the name have a particular meaning behind it?

Yes, it links up with the idea of the festival being fair and equal. It’s fair between us, we work together and decide everything together, accessible to artists by being open and customers because it’s affordable for what you get – it’s all fair game.

Can you talk us through the average day-in-the-life of a festival organiser?

It hugely depends where we’re at with the upcoming festival. With the next one being in April 2021, at this stage we’re tying the line-up together and planning how we go about announcing each bit and how to promote the event. So, at this point it’s still an open, ‘ideas’ phase but also this year in particular it’s a bit tricky because there is still a pandemic on and we’ve got that extra step, that we need to be prepared for anything to happen between now and April. Day-to-day it’s not really something you can forget about, you need to be aware of what’s going on in music, with your acts and right now, in particular, with what venues are able to do. As you get closer to the festival it becomes a lot more stressful, making sure that the finer details are sorted, and everyone knows what’s happening on the day. We’d almost got to that point with the first one, it was supposed to be at the end of March but of course, the lockdown started in March, so we had to cancel.

Fair Play Festival 2020 was cancelled due to ‘that’ pandemic, what should we expect from FPF2021?

For 2021 we wanted to go bigger and more exaggerated than the 2020 version. This time, we’re taking over Manchester’s Northern Quarter over the Easter Bank Holiday Saturday and into the wee hours of Sunday. With more stages and space, we can host a wider line-up with more musicians who we want to give that platform to. It now feels like 2020 was our trial run ahead of a more confident afterbirth.