7 Wonders In 7 Days Live Music Gig: Hungry Pigeon Festival
Hot on the heels of my announcement of Real Fresh TV’s social media charity engagement of the year: 7 Wonders in 7 Days, comes the first live music event in aid of the charity fundraising trip planned for September 2009.
For those of you who are unaware, 7 Wonders in 7 Days is an epic adventure trip I’m embarking on jointly inspired by my grandmonther’s funeral in February and Channel 4’s brilliant Secret Millionaire programme.
This is the deal: from 9th September 2009, 9/09/09, I will visit all 7 new wonders of the world in 7 days, raising £777,000 for 7 worthy charities. A mammoth social media undertaking in its own right, you can find out more and follow the campaign at 7wondersin7days.com.
I’m delighted to be playing my first gig in almost a year at the Hungry Pigeon Festival on Bank Holiday Monday to raise funds and awareness for 7 Wonders in 7 Days.
I caught up with Alex McCann, one of the founders of the Hungry Pigeon Festival to find out a little more about what was planned for Manchester’s newest festival of arts and music.
1. Why the name Hungry Pigeon?
We had this idea that we need a character to symbolise the festival and pigeon seemed to sum up the idea of an inner city urban festival so well. Where the “hungry” came from is another thing entirely and you’d have to ask one of my colleagues Stu Avery on that one…..but after sitting around for about 24 hours thinking does this work it ended up sticking.
Since we’ve got the poster around town it’s all anybody is talking about though cos it does stick in the mind…its like wow Hungry Pigeon has landed!!!
2. Name 2 bands Real Fresh TV readers MUST see over the weekend and why?
I really wish I could pin it down to 2 band because there’s 200 bands on and I want to see all of them.
I guess the 2 that everybody’s talking about are Kid British on the Outdoor Stage in Piccadilly Gardens on Sat 23rd May. That’s free entry so really you have no excuse and to see a band like Kid British who’ve just come off tour with The Specials and on everyone’s lips – I really do think people will be talking about this gig for some years to come.
And the return of Nine Black Alps at Urbis. Their first gig in God knows how long. A band that everyone thinks should be a lot bigger than they are but as we’ve seen with Elbow, Manchester bands like the slowburn. This gig’s also open to 14+ as well so it’s unlikely they’ll be doing any all ages show for a long time now so catch it while you can
3. What’s your involvement with the event?
The core team of four of us means that we literally dig in with everything we need to. We started preparing for the festival in November last year and it’s long process to book the bands you want to play, arrange the outdoor stage with support from Manchester City Council and then literally just spend the past 2 months getting the word out there.
All of us are gig promoters in our day job and between us we’ve had the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Twisted Wheel, Dear Eskiimo (now The Ting Tings), Karima Francis and loads of other bands…but to be honest this is our biggest undertaking to date and it’s gonna be a real proud moment to see it all come off.
4. What’s been the hardest thing about planning and organising the festival?
The hardest thing is including everything we want to include cos even up to the last 2 days more and more businesses in the Northern Quarter have wanted to become involved.
For us because we’ve took it from the grass roots and literally started up from nothing, we didn’t want to put on an event where it was just a collection of events that would have happened anyway, we found that there has been a lot of support along the way from local business who can see how good this is for the Northern Quarter.
5. Is it happening again next year?
Yes, mark Hungry Pigeon off in your calender….it’s going to be an annual event and fingers crossed it will get bigger and better each year. It’s certainly the vibe we’re getting off the streets at the moment
…….
Many thanks for the insightful interview, Alex.
A manic Bank holiday weekend including a wedding, a hen night and a gig means that this post is going up on after the Kid British gig. Apologies all…
If you haven’t gotten down to the festival, come down on Bank Holiday Monday and see me and the rest of the line up here! I’m playing at The Bay Horse, 35-37 Thomas Street at 3:30pm.
I’ve organised for my gig to be filmed so I’ll be posting previews, snippets and more video goodness here after the event.
Stay tuned!
Related posts:
