[BY LIAM KITCHEN]
For one night only, on the 29th of May, chaos will descend on Sunniside. Fifteen independent artists of all
sorts of mediums and persuasions concentrated in one area for the sophomore iteration of Sunniside Nights. After an incredibly popular debut last year, with a great turnout of local arts aficionados, Sunniside Nights returns bigger, busier, and better than before. One of the main organisers, Ross Millard, generously gave me some of his time to break down what’s going on at this year’s event, the ethos behind it, and how it could benefit an increasingly effervescent local arts scene.
“Obviously, it’s a busy place throughout the year, there’s a lot of different arts and culture things going on anyway – but with Sunniside Nights we wanted to just put a load of activity on one night, so people can buzz around and bounce between.” Sounds like a really artsy street party. “I’m really mindful that there’s a lot of building work going on at the minute, so part of the reason why we’re doing this is to have some activity going on so that when the houses are built, there’s already an established event that can start plugging into those new spaces as well.”
Aside from just putting on a show right on the doorstep for Sunnisiders, there’s a whole host of benefits the area can enjoy from events such as this. “For one, Sunniside Nights will bring people to the area that have probably never been here before or who don’t know what’s going on here; it platforms these spaces. Obviously, the likes of Pop Recs, Diego’s, and Wild Fire are constantly putting events on and they’re doing a great job – but when they’re plugged into something that’s sort of got more elements to it with concentrated publicity and marketing, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.”
Like Ross says, connecting your relatively larger venues like Pop Recs into the network of smaller venues gives the festival a unique dynamic, where it can feel like a widespread community event yet intimate and spontaneous. “All of the venues are quite small scale; you don’t have any massive rooms to programme – which is quite interesting for a little festival because that means you can put quite interesting things on in all of the spaces without the need to have five hundred tickets or a thousand tickets sold and all the heavy-handed stuff. So, it really feels like an artistic community here and it is just trying to draw that out a little bit more and maybe get some people to come down.”
One of the many shows on offer at Sunniside Nights includes experimental folk musician Richard Dawson playing here at Pop Recs. At the time of writing that show has sold out; however, it’s a good example of the style and attitudes of artists on display on the 29th, of which there are many more. Some events are networked around the big hitters such as the aforementioned Richard Dawson along with Santa Leticia at Wild Fire City whilst others introduce their audience to something a bit more unusual such as slam poetry at Theatre Space North East or the Worst Record Covers art exhibition at Abject Gallery.
“There’s a spoken word artist who is on in Theatre Space North East called Mike Garry who’s coming up from Manchester. He’s performed with New Order, John Cooper Clarke… and he’s done Carnegie Hall. He’s a big name in that world. So that’s a big privilege to have Mike on the programme.” Another artist Ross is personally looking forward to is comedian Scott Turnbull who graced Edinburgh Festival with his surrealist, lo-fi show aptly titled Surreally Good, taking place at Diego’s.
“He’s got a bit of Mighty Boosh about him, where it’s a bit daft and a bit silly, but there’s a very heartfelt storyline running through the whole show. I’m really glad that it’s proven popular with people for tickets, because it’s an excellent show and should be seen by as many people as possible.”
“It’s about having some budget to make some of these ideas a reality and then, once people come here once, even when Sunniside Nights isn’t on, you could get the same kind of footfall coming through on other events as well. That’s the idea, getting people used to going to Diego’s for a pint or the galleries on Fawcett Street or Abject – brilliant galleries that are constantly putting on interesting work. They have their own audience already, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a whole new audience coming to see that stuff?”
What’s most striking about Sunniside Nights, certainly in comparison to other events you could go to, is that it has been organised with the artists’ interests as the primary focus. “It is a proper arts event – some of the other things that I’m used to doing have either a family focus or a kind of emerging performer element to them. This is a chance to do something that’s a little more on the experimental side. It’s rare at the moment; the audience comes first a lot of the time. Obviously, we want the audience to have a great experience, but this is a chance to put the artists at the forefront.”
“It’s not just music, it’s not just comedy or theatre, it’s not just visual art. There’s a mixture of all sorts of things, because those crossovers are where the best things happen. That’s the dream for me: that someone would go to Abject Gallery and then stick their head in at Diego’s, then pop into Wild Fire – over the course of like three or four hours on a Friday night, if you’ve popped your head into six or seven places, that would be massive for me as the organiser.”
“The concept of something like Sunniside Nights is not new… but it sort of is for this area. It boils down to having decent relationships with the venues and spaces. I’ve programmed quite a bit of it myself, Dan from Pop Recs has had a good say and the venues themselves have put ideas forward as well. I’ve been really pleased that people have been up for it; if you’re a venue in the area or a space that could be taken over for one night, why would you not want to be a part of it?”
There’s no doubt Sunderland’s creative sector is having a moment right now – Music City, Big Weekend, a whole host of organisations working to support grassroots artists in the area – but it’s events like this which highlight the artistic community that is committed to more off-the-wall styles of self-expression. Take Tins of Town, for example, which is taking place at Tribeca; featuring a 19th-century Victorian camera, local photographer Andy Martin is offering people the opportunity to have their portrait taken the old-fashioned way, after which it is developed in real time onto a tin plate. Where else could you get something like that?
“It feels like there’s opportunity in Sunderland at the moment, where there isn’t opportunity everywhere else,” Ross says. “It’s quite tough out there to raise money to do things like this, and the DIY scene seems pretty strong here; there’s a good punk scene; there’s a lot of people doing stuff in a community sense.”
“One thing you always have to have your mind on is quality amongst that – yes, you want to be supportive of everything, and if someone bothers themselves to put something on, they do need to be commended for that. But we should also have quality at the back of our minds about what we’re delivering. Are we doing the space justice? Are we doing the audience justice with what we’re putting on?”
It’s fascinating to hear the thoughts of someone so central in Sunderland’s arts community in regard to where it could go next, perhaps where it really should go next.
“It is brilliant that things are happening. Lots of people want to shout all of the time about all of the stuff that’s happening, which is great – we absolutely need that as a city! But the thing that actually gets a place to the next level, or gets it noticed by the wider region or the country at large, is when you start having absolute quality coming through, you start seeing things that go beyond the city.”
“So, in the next three to five years, I think that’s the next step that this city has to go on.” But how do we get there? “Well, money for a start! Being able to support people to do things more, having more concentrated opportunities for people to develop. Instilling these principles in artists that are coming through to say: ‘okay, this is a series of hurdles; you get over one hurdle, that’s not the end of the journey. There are all these other things in front of you that you also need to overcome if you’ve got genuine aspirations for doing it. That’s not a bad thing! It should be an exciting challenge to people.”
Rather than just a means for an artists’ self-fulfilment, Ross believes this transformation will translate to the audiences, too – and subsequently the entire town’s creative scene. “I think we’ve still got to take the audience on that journey a bit more. Get the rooms busier, get more people engaged in feeling like: ‘yeah, I’m going to buy a ticket and go watch that band tonight!’ And it’s not about supporting stuff, because that feels a little bit like charity, doesn’t it? You should want to be – you should want to be in this room because you do not want to miss what’s going on.”
“If you could spread the idea that – if something’s on at Sunniside, you know it’s going to be good, because otherwise they wouldn’t have it on. That would be a great place to get to, if it had that badge of quality about it.”
“It’s not going to be spoon fed or on a plate. As an audience member, you’ve got to buy in and come along because [the show] is actually worth your time. When you look at other areas and towns where there’s music on all the time, they’ve got a reputation. That only happens with time, years and years and years of people plugging away – what would be helpful is if Sunderland had three or four more artists who broke out of the city, who can shine a bit of a spotlight on the place.”
Like any festival, Sunniside Nights will need to almost reinvent itself every year. This fact isn’t lost on Ross, who seems very keen to push boundaries with the festival without losing sight of the ideas that spawned Sunniside Nights in the first place: “It means we get relationships with new places, find new places in which to put stuff on. The whole scale of it has gone up, but it still feels like a test – it still feels like we don’t really know how it’s going to go. I think that’s alright when it’s just the second one, there’s not an enormous amount of pressure riding on it, thankfully.”
“In terms of next year, get a bit of feedback from the audiences and venues, see what people want more of and less of – but try and grow it into something that really does put the art first, because I think that’s quite rare at the moment. The conversation has changed and audiences are number one most of the time. This is a chance to kind of do it a little differently and hope that audiences come along for the ride a little bit.”
For more info head to sunnisidenights.com