PROGRAMMING · EDITORIAL
A lineup is an argument about attention. Ours says: every room is the main room.
We’ve turned down six offers from booking agents this year who asked, politely, whether we’d consider putting one of their clients at the top of the poster. All six were people we admire. Two of them are performing anyway, sharing a stage slot with someone their label has never heard of. This is not an accident. It is, we think, the whole point.
When you book a festival by headliner, the rest of the programme becomes the space around the headliner — filler, warm-ups, bills padded out by people who won’t draw a crowd but will fill a gap. The crowd learns, within one edition, to hold their energy back for the big names. Every room that isn’t the main stage becomes a waiting area.
“We book artists the way a good editor commissions a magazine — on the basis that the reader will trust the running order.”
What we try to do, instead, is programme every room as if it mattered — because it does. The Chapel at 22:00 matters the same as the Main at 23:30. The Garden at sunrise is not a nightcap; it is a set, and we hope you treat it like one. The consequence of this is that people wander. They discover. They miss the thing everyone was talking about because they were somewhere else, listening to something they hadn’t heard of, which turns out to be the best thing of the weekend.
The editorial consequence, for us, is that we have to know every artist. We can’t book twenty acts we’ve never heard and hope the famous one sells it. We have to listen to the demo, the tape, the unreleased second album, and then make a case to each other about why this specific person belongs on this specific night in this specific room. If we can’t make that case, we don’t book them.
The commercial consequence is that we’re smaller. That’s fine. We’d rather be this, forever, than get bigger and lose it.