CityLife

Main event: Feel Good Festival 2010

We chat to Ian Broudie, frontman of The Lightning Seeds

Rochdale - August 13 and 14, 2010

The explanation for the rise of the micro-festival around the UK is a pretty simple mathematical equation: town centre festival + resulting footfall = a much-needed boost in takings for struggling retailers.

And it’s an equation borne out by Rochdale’s Feel Good Festival – an event that began life as a food market with a few chefs showing visitors ‘How To’ with their groceries, but has since grown into one of the region’s best summer freebies.

Last year was the moment when Feel Good really came into its own after deciding to programme in a broader range of entertainment.

A funfair, street theatre and circus acts appear again, and the addition of live music was so well received that, this year, the
organisers have gone all out and scheduled music events in seven venues: a special main stage outside the Town Hall, plus shows in Bar 5, Touchstones Rochdale art gallery, The Flying Horse, Mango, the Litten Tree and East.

Event organiser Debbie O’Brien says the festival quadruples traffic in the town on an average Friday and Saturday, and provides an even bigger benefit for night time businesses as the music events continue until late.

“We’re expecting 10,000 this year,” she says. “It’s difficult to think of any other event that would drive that traffic into Rochdale.

“The evaluation we did last year showed a very high percentage wanted to come again from right across the area.”

Buoyed by that success, then, Feel Good has been through a growth spurt. On the culinary side, the festival is business as usual – only bigger. But it’s the music aspect that’s likely to draw in a completely different crowd.

On this year’s celebrity chefs list is Norden gourmet Andrew Nutter, who hosts two Celebrity Kitchen sessions on Friday (11am) and Saturday (midday); housewives favourite and
regular on TV cookery shows Gino D’Acampo, who takes three sessions on Saturday (11am/1pm/3pm); and fusion food master Aazam Ahmad, who has been with the festival since the beginning and shows us some tricks today (1pm/3pm) and tomorrow (10am/2pm).

Neighbouring the kitchen is the open market in The Butts, from 9am-5pm, offering both meat, fruit and veg, plus cooked meal and snacks.

There are even health consultants on hand to give you lifestyle tips and acupuncture massage and Reiki healing is also available.

The list of musicians is equally impressive. Local names like Karima Francis, Kirsty Almeida, Catherine Tyldesley and The Travelling Band play across the venues, and another north west boy – Liverpudlian musician, producer and writer of footie anthem Three Lions, Ian Broudie – headlines the main stage with his recently revived band The Lightning Seeds.

This show, says Ian, forms part of an extensive voyage of discovery to find out whether he really wants to be part of the music business any more.

He released an album last year – one, he reflects, that he wanted to put out under his own name but his record company didn’t share his view – after a decade of sadness motivated him to write again.

First he lost his parents within a year of each other, then his sister, Sharon, died in her 40s of a brain tumour, and lastly his older brother, Robert, committed suicide by throwing himself off the bell tower from Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral.

“Writing is what I do and, hopefully, having that outlet keeps you going and gets you through,” says Ian.

“Everybody has stuff in their lives they have to deal with – everything just came at one time for me, it’s a problem of getting older.

“At this stage, it’s more that you wonder whether it’s still valid for you to make music.

“Eventually I decided I didn’t care – this is what I do. It’s a bonus if people still want to listen.”

Since Glastonbury last month, Ian has slowly been rekindling a love of live performance. “For things like this, a free festival, you’ll have a casual listener and a more populist set is the thing to do,” he says.

“The new album is too dark for this. I have really enjoyed playing hits sets this summer, but it’s not a bubble I’d like to be trapped in forever.”

But will this summer’s experiences make him stay in music? “I wanted to get out in the world and play some songs and see if I could still be that guy in The Lightning Seeds,” he laughs.

“Your head becomes a bit more in the right place for writing new records. My solo albums weren’t coming from the same place.

“I can see myself putting out more albums as The Lightning Seeds now.”

Discovering the joys of being a major label musician for the first time is Kirsty Almeida, whose debut album Pure Blue Green is released at the end of August.

Born in Gibraltar and moved to around 20 different locations before she got to the end of her teens because of her father’s job in oil, Kirsty decamped to Manchester in 2002 to join jazz band Descarga, and eventually set up creative collective Odbod.

Contemplating her future two years ago, she shut herself away in a cottage in Sheffield to write the solo record she’d always dreamed of making. After that, she planned to move to Hawaii to become a marine biologist.

“You know when you feel inside that it’s something you have to do and if you could it do you would fulfil your dream? Well, that’s how I felt,” she recalls.

“I just wanted to write an album for me – I had no intention of anyone else hearing it. And I knew I’d still be in music in Hawaii; I just also wanted to swim a lot, and play with dolphins.”

With her multi-talented band of seven, Kirsty says she’ll air the new record complete with steel pan, horn, clarinet and piano players.

“Her style is a raucous assembly of blues, soul, folk, jazz and swing and, just as with Amy Winehouse or Adele, it’s the power of her voice that’s all important.

“My dad’s a singer and I wasn’t really allowed to sing,” she says.

“Because my dad tried it, they thought it wasn’t a very good route to go down and I should be a lawyer.

“But I’d be a terrible lawyer – I’d make all the evidence up.

“I remember being in a school and a teacher telling me I had a mellow voice and I thought that was really rubbish, so I stopped singing for a long time.

“My dad would say, ‘You’re not a singer. Mariah Carey is a singer; Whitney Houston is a singer – you’re too different’.

“I don’t think people value difference any more – it really isn’t celebrated. But I love singing – I kept singing ’cos it feels good. And that’s how I became experimental.”

It’s a trait she shares with Catherine Tyldesley – recent addition to the Emmerdale cast as voluptuous love interest Abi Peterson – who spent her youth in drama schools and academies and now enjoys careers in both singing and acting.

“The best way I’ve heard my style described is as the female Michael Buble,” laughs the Worsley-born singer.

“I do a lot in the swing and jazz vein; I love Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe and modern stuff like Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Motown.

“My mum is a Doris Day obsessive, so I grew up with that, and she used to do her aerobics workouts singing along to Whitney Houston. I just joined in.”

The pressures of filming may mean that this is your last chance to catch Catherine behind the mic for some time – but, she promises, not forever.

“I always wanted to be an actress and I write scripts as well. But that and singing are so different – I can’t ever see me doing one and not that other.”

A full schedule of the festival is available to download at rochdale.gov.uk via the What’s On guide on the Leisure and Culture tab. No pre-booking needed – entry to all events is free.