I started Wired Festival way back in September 2007 – I ran two floors of entertainment at the Cross Kings – and have been running it yearly ever since.

This will be the smallest festival, and I’m mostly running it as an excuse to catch up and hang out with some of my favourite musicians that I used to play shows with. It’s FREE ENTRY, with the most reasonably priced ale in Finsbury Park, and a damn good Sunday kitchen too.

Featuring music from:

Antonio Lulic
David Goo
Edward Bell
Edward Sheeran
Fiona Bevan
Jonny Taylor
Kal Lavelle
Kevin Molloy
Lindsay West
and
Stephen Long

With more acts to be announced in just a little bit. If you’re free, pop on down!

It was a huge learning curve, and a huge amount of fun – people remember it fondly even now, and I’d like to think it was a part of bringing together some people who still remain good friends now.

In any case, when my parents mentioned that they’d really enjoyed the IKTOMS gigs I used to run in London, and would have loved to have one on in Cornwall (where they live), I quickly found myself working out a way to get down there and do it. And we’ll be doing exactly that this weekend… myself, Fiona Bevan, Kal Lavelle and Stephen Long are hopping into a rental van and driving to the South-West, where the intention is to sun ourselves in some Cornish coves, write some new songs, and to play a concert on the Saturday night at Wringford Down. I really can’t wait! It’s been a long time since I allowed myself a weekend of free-spirited creativity, so very much looking forward to it.

If you’re not in or around Cornwall this weekend (and I suppose the likelihood is that you’re not) then all four of us will be bringing the show back to Kal’s own night, WE LOVE SUNDAYS, at the World’s End pub in Finsbury Park (not the one in Camden!) on the 9th May, so join us there! If you live further afield then we’re just going to have to up our game… and I’m feeling up for occasional challenges – name your city, town or hamlet and we’ll plan a new IKTOMS tour…

I’ll attempt to post some songs up here when we get back – we’ll be recording the show.

Over and out…

Then, over the same weekend in September 2008, we ran the festival again, this time with the noticeably strong hand of a good team of people behind it. It was ambitious – two floors again – but this time across TWO DAYS. Both days were great, but we felt the pressure of it all, and ended up making a bit of a loss. That year we put on over 100 acts.

All of which brings us to this year, on Sunday 27th September: the latest iteration of the festival. I couldn’t be more excited. We’re sticking with the age old mantra “if it works, definitely change it round, utterly and completely”. We’ve got quite a few changes in store, and two in particular that change the way the whole festival will work. I thought it might be interesting to talk about them – quite a few people have asked me about the festival and how it all works, and I think it demonstrates what made (and makes) IKTOMS so different to everything else that went (and goes) on in the London acoustic scene…

(1) FREE ENTRY – this year we’ve opted for free entry. In honesty, the only reason we ever charged money was (a) so that we could pay the bands, and (b) so that we could do cool things like make t-shirts and CDs, if we made a profit. We’ll miss the IKTOMS CDs and t-shirts, but I think it’s misleading to always charge money. Let’s say we charge 100 people £10 each for the day. Even if we have no costs at all, that means there’s £1000 to split between 50 bands. That’s £20 per band. That’s about £5 per person. And that depends on making 100 people think it’s a good idea to part with £10 for a load of bands they’ve never even probably heard of.

Compare this with a free entry festival. Everybody that shows up is, in a sense, £10 better off than they would have been if we’d charged. We don’t have to pay a door person for the day. And rather than playing to 100 people, the acts could well be playing to 200 music loving members of the audience. Not only are the band playing to a packed out audience, but their chances of selling a CD are doubled, and the atmosphere of the whole event becomes more carnival, more celebratory.

(2) VENUE AND LENGTH – The Cross Kings served us well for two years, but this year we’ve opted for a change in the venue, to the Vortex Jazz Club. It’s for a few reasons, but the main amongst them is that we wanted a venue with a touch of prestige, that idea of getting the great acts we know and love from our little scene into a wider limelight, simply by moving up the venue tree. Also the Vortex has a jazz piano – I can’t wait to see some of the bands playing on that! We’re also sticking to a day this time, to keep the crowd more concentrated, and keep our energies up. It’s hard to get people in London out to a venue twice in two days.

This isn’t to say I’m a staunch advocate of the model in any and all situations. I ran UNPLUGGED as a pay-for-entry night once a week, every week for 2 years, and it was a better event for it: the acts got paid, and the door fee gave a kind of exclusivity to the nights. They were gigs with *quality* acts, it seemed to say.

This time round, though, what we really wanted was a celebration, a coming-together, a creative free-for-all (puns intended). The feedback we’ve had from all our ventures (UNPLUGGED, Wired, the IKTOMS Tour of 2008, the IKTOMS CD and the festivals) has been that it’s great to have a confluence of a good number of the many talented acts that make up our ‘scene’, somewhere both curated and yet ‘open’, that felt as if it had some significance and an actual relationship to the peopl involved.

Some of this is also a backlash to the nights that have sullied the reputations of honest ‘door tax’ nights. Every upstart London musician has played the night where they’re told to bring 20 people all paying £5, and receive 50p per person if they bring more than 25. It’s good to show what you can do for free. If musicians make the choice and can control the ‘free’ ways in which fans can interact with them, then they’re ten steps closer to profiting from rather than being exploited by things like online music piracy. Perhaps we need a musician- or fan- approved status for nights, granting them a ‘fair-trade’ seal of approval (this is something I’ve discussed doing with Siobhan from the Green Note Open Mic a few times – please make a go of it if you can think of a good way to make it happen!).

So it’s a festival with a few weighty decisions at its core. But they all belie one simple thing: we want this festival to be amazing, great fun, and free. Click on through to check out the lineup and location and suchlike, and come and support some great music. You can use the imaginary £10 you save to buy a couple of CDs that might just make you a convert to the next big thing, or a fan of a deserving and talented unknown musician in our midst.