Do you remember a breakthrough in your career or a time when you felt like you fought through the noise and made it to the other side?
My music career started nearly 20 years ago, so it’s definitely been a gradual process for me. I would say some bigger moments were my first peak time festival sets. I think the first one where I felt like I had a real chance was AVA Festival maybe six or seven years ago. It was a Boiler Room set and I had one of those viral moments, but it was also the time of day and everyone being around the stage. They were always really supportive at AVA, they kept giving me great slots and were very supportive. As well as your own work, you need promoters or labels etc that believe in you and stand behind you because they have a lot of influence on how your career develops as well.
Musically, production-wise, during COVID I was going into the studio every night, sleeping there the whole time and learning how to write music properly and building skills that I didn’t have before. I was working full-time and gigging, so I just didn’t have the time to dedicate to writing music. Then I released my first record on Trust.
This release and my breakthrough set at AVA were two mega moments that stand out for me.
You’ve always had a very varied career, from organizing events to DJing and producing to running your label trust Records. How do you juggle so many different projects?
Mondays I take a day off. I’m at home doing my house stuff, you know. Then Tuesdays I’m in the Body Movements office all day working on it. Wednesdays and Thursdays I’m in the studio, but I do quite a lot of Body Movements stuff on those days too, every now and then. Then I try to find time to browse, go to record shops in the evenings and look for new music for the weekend. Then Fridays and Saturdays I’m on tour, Sundays I’m travelling. It’s hectic and I’m planning a relationship around it too, so there’s not much time for anything else!
What were your original inspirations for wanting to start Body Movements?
I’ve always been someone who wants to do things. I can’t sit still and often take on more than I can handle. When I worked in an office, I always asked, “So, what’s next?” I think it’s probably because I have some kind of neurodivergence in that I get bored easily, and when I get bored, I need to be active.
How did you manage to achieve these goals?
When I had the idea, I asked a few people if they thought it was a terrible idea or not. I spoke to people in the community and some event producers because I didn’t have much experience in that. Then I was introduced to my business partner and other co-founder Clayton, who has organised Little Gay Brother and many other queer events over the years. I was told that he wanted to do something similar and that we should work together. Then we brought in Simon from Percolate, who obviously had experience running events in Hackney Wick, and we just went for it. When we were going to launch it, it was March 2020 and about a week before opening when COVID hit. It was postponed throughout 2020 and 2021, and we had obviously put a lot of work into it. We had been working on it for almost a year before that as well, so when it was time to reopen we just kept going.
This year’s edition marks an important next step for the festival: it is moving from its current location in Hackney Wick to a new site in Southwark Park. What inspired you to make this move and how do you feel about the new location and the start of a new era for the event?
Hackney Wick is a fantastic place but the options we have there are limited. There are a lot of pros and cons to playing 17+ venues in one day. You have to work with multiple security and operations teams and they all have different issues with toilets, access systems and all these things that you normally only have once when you’re running your own festival in an outdoor venue or wherever.
There was so much to think about and we always felt like we had no control over who was working where. The people who run the venues have a lot on their plate and that can be really unsettling when you’re working with queer communities. There’s a huge duty of care that comes with that and there were also capacity issues when a lot of people want to be in one venue and another not so much so there are a lot of queuing issues. Then on the production side we installed our own sound systems in a lot of the venues but we couldn’t afford to do that in all of them.
So I was very much about taking the quality and the operational, technical and production side of things to the next level. I wanted it to be something I would love to go and play. Hackney Wick always felt quite loose and lawless, which was great, but I think there would be a limited timeframe in terms of how long people would actually want to come and play it. We wanted it to be a date in the calendar that people would really look forward to.
The festival seems to have become a real meeting point for the queer clubbing community in London and a permanent fixture in the calendar. How has it been for you to see the event resonate so well with your target audience?
It’s incredible but I think we’ve always seen ourselves as facilitators. The collectives and the people we’ve worked with have done a lot of work over the last God knows how many years to build these communities. So we’re helping to bring everyone together and make something special out of it because it’s very empowering and you have the whole UK queer community in one place just doing what they do really well. It feels amazing but I think a lot of it is down to the people we bring on board doing their thing.
At an event like Body Movements, it is important to ensure inclusivity and the protection of participants. How do you work to ensure this?
I would say our biggest cost at Body Movements is probably the amount of money we put into social and security. We also do a lot of meetings compared to other festivals and we take extra care of staff. We also employ extra people from the community who are recognisable on our social teams so that people feel safe, so when they get to the door there’s someone there that they might recognise from other events. We have SIA trained queer security staff, people who know how to use pronouns correctly, who are friendly and not people who might be quite intimidating if you want to approach them. We’ve even tried to facilitate training for queer security staff to get their SIA badge and things like that so that it feels more like a security and social team rather than the usual big burly bouncer.
We also do a lot of communication before the shows and have briefings with the actual safety teams and the production managers to let them know the different consequences that can happen if something isn’t done right, but we also try to keep reminding them that this is a vulnerable community and it’s really important to take care and go the extra mile at these events.
You collaborate with many collectives from the London scene and beyond on the event. How important is this element of community and cross-community collaboration at Body Movements?
That’s actually the original reason we started. I’d play at a lot of these events and with these collectives as an artist and I’d see the incredible talent that’s in these communities. A lot of times they were confined to smaller events, especially back when we started. I think the queer scene has really grown exponentially in the last few years, but when I played there, it was definitely really small parties with these wicked DJs that I don’t think had a chance on the stages of these festivals, and if they did, they’d just open and play for free. We wanted to create something where they were the stars. We have an emerging talent program where we bring in people who may have never played at events or festivals before and give them some really good slots at the festival and then we keep booking them. We just try to grow with the artists and the collectives and nurture young emerging talent. The people who have been so important to the queer scene for years and are amazing DJs, artists and producers who just haven’t had the opportunity to perform at major events. There are so many DJs like that in the queer community and I think their time has come.
