Glastonbury Festival Of Contemporary Performing Arts - Areas - Blog

Wed 27 April, 2011

We’re out there! The line-up is public and it’s nothing short of spectacular. Cee Lo Green? Janelle Monae? Kool & the Gang? We’re all getting very excited over here at West Holts, and it’s finally time for me to take it a bit easy.

It’s been a crazy busy six months. Booking 25 acts isn’t hard, but it’s certainly time consuming. I begin with a long list of artists that I want and then start to contact their booking agents. The agent’s job of putting together a whole summer schedule for a big artist is way more complex than mine so it can become a very drawn out process. To give you one example, it took seven months from putting an offer in for Cee-Lo before his agent could finally say yes. When it finally happened there was massive relief on all sides. We got Cee-Lo and this poor man doesn’t have me nagging him on a daily basis anymore.

Then there are submissions from artists and their agents which come in at a rate of 60 to 70 a day in the busiest months. As West Holts is known to have a fairly global reach I get emails and CD’s from absolutely everywhere. This year I was particularly inundated with Eastern European heavy metal for some reason…

This is the second year I’ve done the job after having taken a long break. As the programmer for this stage I’m the artistic custodian of a tradition that goes back over 25 years but the stage has to progress and adapt – not just to the wider music scene but also to how other areas and stages develop within the festival. Part of the reason for changing the name from Jazz World to West Holts was to be less prescriptive and free us up for the future.

Although I think we’ll always have a very international and groove-orientated line-up I don’t think I could ever define what a ‘West Holts’ band is exactly. The Glastonbury faithful have certain expectations of what we’re about and hopefully one of those is that they’re going to be in for some surprises. We’re very lucky in that West Holts has relative freedom from commercial restraints that you maybe don’t get elsewhere. This not only means that we can host some weird and wonderful stuff but I also get to programme the stage to take people on a musical journey rather than just assembling the hottest bands of the moment. Hopefully people trust us enough to know that it will always be worth checking out some of the acts they haven’t heard of before.

There have been a few high points this year, but one that stands out was when, just before Christmas, some friends recommended that I check this mix from Nicolas Jaar. I fell in love with it and downloaded every DJ mix by him I could find. I assumed he was a very talented DJ and producer – which he is – but when I discovered that he was only playing out with a fully live band – that was it, I had to book him.

The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble (pictured) also became a labour of love. Their agent, Tasha introduced them to me via their video for ‘Bop’ which features a whole troupe of ballet dancers. Normally BBF go out as a trio but when she told me that they also perform with a full ensemble orchestra, I thought ‘we’ve got to do this with the full works including the dancers’. Amazingly, we’ve managed to realise this insanely expensive idea – but only with a whole load of support from Tasha, Tess and the K7 team – so many thanks to them.

When I did the job first time around there was no Youtube. It’s a great help for spotting new talent but it’s no substitute for seeing a band in the flesh. I go to loads of gigs so I can savour the audience reaction as much as anything else because the real magic of a live performance is the chemistry between the stage and the crowd. My highlight of this booking period was going to see Janelle Monae play at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. I’ve got no time for shoegazers, I want a show Goddamn it, and this band had it all! Everyone looked really cool and could play brilliantly but while I was expecting a super-slick choreographed-to-perfection future soul review what we actually got was something far more anarchic and much more fun. Her show is going to be something quite special this year.

Getting assigned a sizable budget by Mr Eavis and being told to go off and spend it on your favourite bands is pretty cool but the best part of my job is still to come. Every year at the festival there is a moment. It’s that point where there’s a certain confluence of music and punters, sunshine and cider, whatever it may be that makes a moment just – right. Last year it was watching Jerry Dammer’s Spacial AKA Orchestra playing a Sun Ra tune and I turned round and realised that we had over 10,000 people dancing to free jazz on a Saturday night at Glastonbury.  That was my moment last year; I’ve got no idea when it will come this year, but I know I’m going to have one.

Steve Symons, West Holts Stage Programmer