Interview with Kat Morris. Festival Director of The Great Escape Showcase which takes place in Brighton between 16th to Sat 18th May 2013.

How do you decide to book the artists for The Great Escape? 

It’s a combination of many factors really that go into making the decisions, but ultimately The Great Escape is a showcase festival and we showcase the best new music from all over the world.

So it’s a combination of the team travelling to different international showcase festivals and selecting international acts. We also run an open submission process on our website so anyone can put themselves forward and we have a team of people that review the music from there. We also have a booker who is essentially out at gigs every night and online and blogs and review's artists all the time. We also have numerous content partners that host different stages and we bounce ideas off of them and they feed ideas to the festival team. 

You travel all around Europe and overseas looking for the bands? 

Yes actually the whole festival management team end up travelling between one festival and the next. We cover 20 different countries and listen to music from all over the world.

We don’t all go to 20 different countries as we might never have time to do anything else. But it’s a really strong representation of the best new music from outside of the UK as well as the best British artists as well. 

Red Ink photo: Julie Edwards

You always have a lot of artists from Brighton and surrounding areas, is that in recognition that the area has a great talent pool and also to keep the local feel to it? 

Yes absolutely, it actually happens naturally because as you say Brighton is such a strong creative city and so strong musically with its own independent music scene. In fact it’s not really too much of an effort to ensure Brighton is strongly represented. Some of our most exciting bands this year are from Brighton, for example we have Tom Odell and 80’s Matchbox B-Line Disaster. 

You’re teaming up with The Adam Mickiewicz Institute, how did you make this decision?  

Every year we showcase artists from all over the world but every year we choose one country or a region that we particularly focus on. We chose Poland as we have actually started to build a relationship with them over the last 3 years. We are gradually getting to know more about the industry and the music emerging from Poland.

I think 3 or 4 of the team members over the last few years have been to Poland and listened to the music first hand. It has now reached that perfect point that we thought it was time to place more of a focus on the music from there. 

Why is the Alternative Escape running in parallel with TGE rather than just being part of it? 

The main difference is that the core programme has every single band booked by TGE and chosen by our festival booker. So if you buy a ticket for the core festival programme you know that it’s very much something that’s been solely curated by us as a festival.

With the Alternative Escape it's an opportunity for other venues to put on their own shows. They can book whichever band's they like and we then support and promote it alongside TGE, but we need the differentiation between the two. I guess just to be clear that the core programme is booked by us and the alternative escape is booked by promoters and friends of the festival. 

Between the times of booking the bands and when they appear, their popularity could have grown. How does that affect the venue and the time they perform? 

We review which artists profile has grown since booking them. When the shows come around, wherever possible we try to offer the artist more than one show or to try and make sure as many of our festival goers can see them as possible. So if it's at all possible we also try to upgrade them to a bigger venue. 

Will there be any pop up gig's this year? 

There will be yes there’s a few shows unannounced at the moment and they will be announced on the day. They include a few surprise artist performances as well as shows and unusual spaces around Brighton. 

Can we expect any surprise artists at the dome?

I can’t say at the moment.

The festival is a window for all the artists performing, roughly what percentage of artists get booked for gigs/festivals as a direct result of playing at TGE?

We carried out a survey last year and the results showed that 61% of the delegates surveyed post TGE had seen an artist that they wanted to do business with.

The convention primarily, it does attract a lot of industry insiders, would you encourage more members of the public or is it an even share? 

Obviously everybody is welcome but in terms of the main general public they are mainly people that are studying or trying to get into the music industry themselves. 

Unlike Greenfield festivals, metropolitan festivals aren’t dependant on the weather, so why does TGE take place in May? 

I guess a couple of reasons; I don’t think the month has anything to do with the weather.

We are at the end of the industry convention circuit and at the beginning of the festival season so that’s the reason why we chose those dates so we fit in neatly with the rest of the international festival calendar.

Do you feel there will be a growth of metropolitan festivals because of the weather we’ve had in the last few years or do you just think the festivals will adapt? 

I imagine a bit of both, obviously inner city festivals do have an advantage from the weather point of view but there are wonderful reasons to go to Greenfield festivals. I don’t imagine they’d ever replace each other; I like to think that both will continue to develop and adapt. 

In a British way, the festival stops for tea, what's the thought behind this approach? 

I guess exactly that I suppose some people need to have a little break, actually we had some feedback from last year's festival that some people didn’t want to stop and they wanted to keep on going. So, we have where possible tried to run our festival a little bit earlier or a little bit later this year to narrow the gap between the matinees and the evening shows so people can cram as music as they can in a day? 

Who would you like to see at this years Festival?

If I actually get to go to any of the gigs the bands that I would definitely not want to miss are Wall, Eliza and The Bear, Phosphorescent, Marika Hackman, Teleman, Melody's Echo Chamber, Merchandise, Jagwar Ma, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Temple and Cloud Boat. They are all personal favourites of mine and also Everything Everything who are playing the dome.

The Great Escape 2013 takes place at Various Venues, Brighton, East Sussex between Thu 16th to Sat 18th May 2013 Tickets on sale here.