I'd be up for it or tolerate it if residents had better access and money was clearly going to transparently good use.
It only adds to the community if it's free or very cheap, otherwise majority of the community are not there.
Not as counter to your point but to add my own perspective, music and the music scene is hugely important to me, and is a core reason why I stayed living in Brixton when things went tits up and I nearly had to move away. In some ways I compromised things like finances and ease of living in order to stay here, and being close to the Academy, the Hoot, the Windmill and other venues, and the fact that lots of bands practice at Brixton Hill Studios, all that was definitely a heavy factor on the stay-in-Brixton side of the scales.
Brixton is like the mother-lode when it comes to music. You hear all sorts of music just walking around, we have a strong independent radio scene here, we used to have loads of record shops and still have some really good ones. Live music in the street, people playing their tunes out of open windows and people gathering on the doorsteps to share it, cars that pour music out their windows as they go about. There’s a really good regular block party just over the road where I live, and over the back, on the estate, a Portuguese family often have fantastic music evenings with friends and family. Really impressive underground music being made on the estates. Whenever I’ve had a party and spoken with neighbours they’ve always been helpful and supportive, even bringing chairs around and sending their kids over to help, never complained, always say how good it is to hear people enjoying themselves. Loads of people in bands or who were in bands or aspiring to be in bands living here, with a really fertile cross-pollination thing going on. That’s just a brief outline of the music stuff we have here, there’s loads more I could say. For me, it’s a hugely important part of the community I choose to live in.
The festivals in the park are part of that whole picture. It feels good to me that folks come to Brixton for good music. I’m proud of that. Last year’s Wide Awake was one of the best festivals I’ve ever been to, partly because it was the first time we were all together after the pandemic, but largely because the bill was stuffed full of really excellent music. It was so exciting to be torn between several options of who to go see next! I think that’s in large part because people
want to play in Brixton, and getting so many good interesting bands on the bill in turn enhances our reputation for producing good music.
I agree fully and totally that the financial issues should be dealt with better and that ticket allocation for locals should be more generous. But that’s capitalism, which infects everything anyway. And I’m not sure how the festival itself can be - or should be - more Brixton focussed. Once you're inside, you may as well be in Wales for all the connection it has to the outside world, and in many ways that’s a good thing. It’s a space removed from normal place, a time isolated from normal life. Festivals are like a side room from our normal life, where we can forget everything else and just enjoy what’s immediately there. The fact that loads of my own local friends are either on stage or in the crowd is an added pleasure of course, but tbh that happens to some extent at every festival I go to, because we tend to go to festivals that reflect our cultural community and loves, and our roots, whatever those may be.
Plus, one of the very best things about festivals is that you get to see bands you otherwise might never see or even know about. I feel really lucky that I can see Tropical Fuckstorm, Dream Wife and Primal Scream all in one afternoon, then wander home via the Windmill and pop in for late night indie karaoke and a nightcap before going home to my own bed, all by foot.
While I do see the drawbacks (for instance damage to the park, litter in the streets, blocked of roads as well as the ££ stuff) on balance, for me, it’s definitely worth it.
for the right moment. Hard to put a finger on exactly why everything sometimes just aligns ...
