How does the Open House Festival get going?
The Cathedral Quarter had just been announced as the new cultural quarter of Belfast and there were small grants available from Laganside Corporation. The Cathedral Quarter was perfect, politically neutral, in the city centre so it was close to transport links. There was very little there other than artists’ studios and warehouses. We got a small grant to start the first Open House Festival in 1999, 25 years ago. We grew that festival from a small festival with a handful of gigs to a full-time career; a life vocation for both of us.
How did you develop the festival? How does it grow?
At the very beginning we focused on traditional music, mostly Irish traditional music, occasionally Scottish and English traditional music and increasingly we added American traditional music. We would schedule Irish traditional music in St Anne’s Cathedral, bringing together people who would maybe not normally have shared a space together.
We did musical walking tours, looking at the history of that part of Belfast. We talked about the complexity of our musical and cultural history and how it isn’t as black and white as people often believe. We looked at how Folk Music travels around from one place to another, how it picks up and merges many elements from different places.
Why was Folk Music the genre you concentrated on?
At the time there was a sort of renaissance of Irish Traditional music which had been going on since the early 90’s. It had built on the success of Riverdance and things like that. At most folk music events no-one cared where you came from or what your religion was and there was also a lot of mixing of Scottish and Irish tunes as well as American tunes. So that was part of the folk music culture.
It was a little different here though. I’m not suggesting the musicians were any different, but the background I came from, Irish Traditional music really was seen as “theirs” rather than “ours” and we wanted to break away from that. We just wanted to make that music accessible to everybody. To us it was all about the music.
Accordion player Alan Kelly played at an early Open House Festival in Belfast
And the festival would have all the elements of the folk tradition represented. We would bring over English musicians, second generation Irish musicians, musicians from the Appalachian tradition and through doing that we could see the developments of the tradition taking place but also the impact that genre of music was having locally.
The Open House Festival became extremely successful?
The festival grew and grew until at one point we had a marquee in Custom House Square which could hold 2000 people and we put on Mumford and Sons, Seasick Steve, Wilko, Old Crow Medicine Show, Fleet Foxes.
This was around 2010 and 2011. At that point Belfast had branded itself as the City of Festivals and it had really taken off and so we were now competing for space with commercial organisations.
Things were changing in Belfast?
Our festival had a remit of cultural regeneration and place-making, and in many ways we felt our work was done regarding the Cathedral Quarter.
Culture Night had emerged and we were a central part of that. We did Chilli Fest as well which was a way of using the marquee during the day and then putting bands on at night.
But, we had a family in Bangor and we could see there were opportunities there. In fact, when we analysed the data of where our audience was coming from, a big part of that audience was coming in from Bangor.
We had a lightbulb moment that we should look at moving the festival to Bangor.
