News

FIrst Line Up Announcements For SWN Festival

• 28th Jul 2010

SWN Festival 2010 / Gwyl SWN 2010
Thursday 21st October – Saturday 23rd October / Hydref 21-23

SWN Festival returns for its fourth year as Wales’ premier new music festival. SWN Festival 2010 will take place across the evening of Thursday 21st October and then the days and nights of Friday 22nd October and Saturday 23rd October.

With attendances to SWN Festival growing year on year, and the festival now establishing itself as an annual event in the Welsh Capital, this year we are delighted to announce many new additions to the structure and programme of the Festival.

This year we add several stages dedicated to rock music as we expand the festival to represent the incredible success of the Welsh rock music scene. Several notable Welsh rock acts will guest curate these stages with their favourite emerging rock bands both from Wales and elsewhere.

In response to the growth of the festival we have now created a stroller area. Stroller wristbands, like previous years, get you free priority access to all the shows in what we’ve now named our Stroller Area. The stroller area will focus on new music and covers the stages at Barfly, Dempseys, Clwb Ifor Bach (upstairs and downstairs), Y Fuwch Goch, The Model Inn (upstairs and downstairs), The Goat Major, The City Arms and Chapter Arts Centre (there’s several stages here). As some of our venues are a little further out, or the bands are much bigger, we’ve ticketed them as you would a normal show. This way you’re guaranteed entry (subject to the usual conditions). We’ve worked on the feedback from last year – that in travelling out further to a show people wanted to be assured entry. So this change fixes that. It also means that if you only want to dip into SWN Festival for one of the bigger shows then you can, in the same way the day stroller wristbands allow people to come for just one day if they can’t make all three. There will be several ticketed shows, which will also allow SWN Festival to expand to bring in acts which maybe aren’t new but whom we want to bring to Wales. Today we unveil three of them. They include a the first UK performance from Michael Gira’s reformed SWANS on Saturday 23rd October at Millennium Music Hall, a solo show from The Housemartins and Beautiful South singer PAUL HEATON and a show from Welsh singer BRYN FON A’R BAND both at The Globe. The ticketed shows go on sale today, and Stroller Wristbands go on sale on 1st August.

We have created a dedicated 14-18 year old Welsh language event, DAN OED to allow access to live music for those under 18 and there will be increased access to shows, where licences allow, for all those aged 14-18. Dan Oed will take place at Millennium Music Hall.

Music seminars, talks and q&a’s will take place at Chapter Arts Centre, in partnership with Welsh companies The Welsh Music Foundation and Ignite and SWN Festival Sponsors PRS for Music Foundation amongst others. We are also working with Welsh film and music video Ewan Jones Morris to compile contemporary music videos of welsh bands or welsh directors to showcase at SWN Festival. Partnering with Chapter Arts Centre we will then screen these videos on a regular basis before suitable main features at Chapter, as well as at other SWN events, including our curation of Friday night at this weekend’s Cardiff Admiral Big Weekend. We hope that this will lead to more exposure for Welsh bands and welsh video makers.

At this year’s SWN Festival we will also be creating an exhibition of Welsh poster art with contributions from God Machine, Richey Beckett, Casey Raymond and Dan Lazenby amongst others. Our hope is the work will then feed into the British Underground’s British Poster Art Exhibition which recently showcased at SXSW and ensure Welsh poster artists get more exposure for their work.

Partnership is key for us at SWN. We are pleased to again be working with Welsh companies including Dizzyjam (who will provide all the SWN Volunteer t-shirts and SWN merchandise), Burning Red (who make our visual stings) and Musicbox (who provide backline at SWN Festival shows). As we expand to include rock music, GRAB promotions join with us to help manage the rock bookings and Longwave Recording Studio will join with us too. Across the events at SWN we have invited Welsh promoters and record labels to host events, including BBC Radio 1 In Wales, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru, Cardiff Live Music Society, Xpress Radio, Shape, Barely Regal, Lesson#1, Zoo Pop, flux=rad, Gwymon, Quench and NewSound Wales. From outside of Wales we welcome Domino Records, NME Radar Live, Big Scary Monsters, In The City, Ras Kwame Presents, Artrocker and Moshi Moshi amongst others.

We were enormously pleased to see SWN Festival discussed in the recent Hargreaves report which reviewed the Creative Industries in Wales for the Welsh Assembly Government. Professor Ian Hargreaves wrote “There is also a case for well-judged public support to commercial popular music events in Wales, based upon the established success of festivals like the Green Man, Wakestock and Swn and their potential in terms of visitor numbers and other economic gains.” SWN Festival is an event which was created out of a passion for live music and a realization that there was no such event in the Welsh Capital nor in Wales. Last year we attended Oya Festival in Oslo, a capital city of a similar size in a country of a similar size – where a five day music festival, with attendances of 15,000 people a day, and a free evening fringe, manages to balance headline international acts with showcasing the best of the Norwegian music scene and industry. Oya started much like SWN Festival began, and it has been running for 12 years, which puts Wales over 8 years behind. Our intention is to find the financial support so that we can build an infrastructure at SWN to ensure Wales can catch up.

We are enormously pleased that for this year’s event we have support from the PRS for Music Foundation. After receiving grants from the organization in 2008 and 2009 we were invited to apply for a new grant model which would contribute £5000 to the festival each year for the next three years. We were successful and are the only event in Wales to receive the funding. We have also been successful in applying for a £3000 grant from Capital Regional Tourism, which will allow us to advertise the event outside of Wales as we increase visitors to our festival from over the border. We are hoping that our discussions with Wales Arts International, to develop an international programme similar to that of Oya Festival will result in support to help us improve links with international festivals both in bringing acts into Wales and promoting Welsh bands abroad. Key to SWN Festival’s future is the creation of the Major Events Fund. We believe SWN Festival is a future Major Event for Cardiff and for Wales. In our current structure we have the potential to put on three days of diverse live music and events across many existing and new venues in Cardiff, with a mix of headline bands and emerging new music. We are pleased that the Major Events Fund and Cardiff Council have recognized this too and have been in touch with us to help us in structuring an application.

For many people the key part of SWN Festival are the bands, and it’s often the unknown bands who can be most thrilling. In previous SWN Festivals you could have seen a then unknown Marina & The Diamonds play in Chapter Arts Centre, Yeasayer play one Sunday afternoon in Buffalo Bar, The Drums play upstairs in Dempseys, The Big Pink go first on in Clwb Ifor Bach, and Girls play a newly opened Y Fuwch Goch.

Over 100 acts will play SWN Festival 2010. Today we reveal the first 27….

AL LEWIS
ARABROT
BELLINI
BRYN FON A’R BAND
COLORAMA
CRASH. DISCO!
EVENING CHORUS
FICTION
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
HUW M
JOE WORRICKER
JOHN MOUSE
KUTOSIS
PAUL HEATON
PERFUME GENIUS (pictured above)
RIGHT HAND LEFT HAND
SPECTRALS
STANDARD FARE
SUN DRUMS
SWANS
T3ETH
THE EX
THE LAST REPUBLIC
VIOLAS
WE//ARE//ANIMAL
WICKES
Y NIWL

TICKET INFORMATION
STROLLER WRISTBANDS
3-DAY SWN FESTIVAL STROLLER WRISTBAND ADVANCE PRICE £45
SATURDAY SWN FESTIVAL STROLLER WRISTBAND ADVANCE PRICE £25
FRIDAY SWN FESTIVAL STROLLER WRISTBAND ADVANCE PRICE £15
THURSDAY SWN FESTIVAL STROLLER WRISTBAND ADVANCE PRICE £10
STROLLER WRISTBANDS AVAILABLE FROM 1st AUGUST FROM
www.sadwrn.com (no booking fee)
www.wegottickets.com
Spillers Records
Chapter Arts Centre
Catapult Records
Ticketline 029 20230 130
HMV Tickets
Cardiff Box Office link
Stroller wristbands grant you free priority access to shows in the stroller area subject to the individual capacity of each venue.
OTHER TICKETED SWN FESTIVAL SHOWS
on sale now

BRYN FON
AL LEWIS
The Globe, Albany Road
Fri 22nd Oct
7.30pm / 18+
£10 adv link
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SWANS / JAMES BLACKSHAW
Millennium Music Hall
Sat 23rd Oct
7.30pm / 18+
£20 adv link
SPECIAL SWANS BUNDLE :
3-DAY SWN FESTIVAL STROLLER WRISTBAND + SWANS TICKET ADVANCE PRICE £60 only from link (no booking fee) and link
SATURDAY SWN FESTIVAL STROLLER WRISTBAND + SWANS TICKET ADVANCE PRICE £40 only from link (no booking fee) and link
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PAUL HEATON
+ support
The Globe, Albany Road
Sat 23rd Oct
7.30pm / 18+
£15 adv link