Sophie Ellis-Bexter, Orlando Weeks and House Gospel Choir are now known to be opening on the main stage, with Ellis-Bexter taking the Friday, Weeks the Saturday and HGC the Sunday. It’s exciting news for them all, especially for Weeks, what with having recently become a father and releasing his latest LP earlier this year.

We are thrilled to announce the Spectacular Main Stage Openings for Wilderness 2022. Starting the party will be @SophieEB on Friday, @OrlandoWeeks on Saturday and @HouseChoir on Sunday. See the full programme here https://t.co/cMCbdRZtKw pic.twitter.com/kTlaQ1ubKx

— Wilderness Festival (@WildernessHQ) April 4, 2022

Weeks’ 2022 LP Hop Up reportedly covers his reaction to fatherhood, saying “I wanted that kind of cloud nine feeling with every song – that’s the job I gave myself and Nathan (Jenkins, aka Bullion, the album’s producer). It was to achieve a lightness or a buoyancy. It’s less document and more atmosphere (this time).“ You can hear one of his latest singles below.

And it’s not just music that will be heard at this event either. Throughout its four days, they’ve also got popular speakers lined up for appearances, such as comedian Russell Kane and actor Michelle De Swarte. And they also cater to the hungry festival-goers, with dining and feasting events apparently happening as well. You can see the full line-up at this link.

And apparently, there are even going to be some special themes this year, challenging audiences to “embrace your inner creative …. Whether it’s embroidering, painting, beading, or borrowing … old is the new, new darling and vintage is most definitely in“.

They tell audiences to “Take cues from Widow Twanky … antics, jesters and harlequins. Dig out your best pranks and wear them. Too much is never enough“. And triangles are supposedly their favourite shape at the moment, so do be careful what you wear when attending. It’s more important than you might think. There are more details on their website if you go by the previous link.

The festival is due to take place from August 4^th-7^th and tickets can be found here. They’ve got a whole host of different options, from general camping (lakeside view take your fancy?), quiet camping, boutique camping (for the luxury-seekers) and more. Suffice to say, it should be a good turn of events for people all over the campsite.

Sports Team’s annual Margate trips are infamous in the indie scene; they hire a bus from London and take a rabble rousing bunch on a trip to the sunny Kent coast. This year, Sports Team are doing it in style – they’ve recruited a fantastic line up and the event is now an all-dayer across two venues.

Alex Rice and co have curated quite the lineup for 2021’s seaside holiday. Post-punk upstarts TV Priest are hot off their debut, ‘Uppers’, an in-your-face, raucous album jam-packed with songs to get the pit going. Courting are on the bill, who’s superb EP ‘Grand National’ dropped a matter of weeks ago. Both of these bands have a cult following of dedicated fans – Margate ’21 tickets are going to sell fast!

English Teacher are one of the most exciting additions to the bill: their band of melodic, spoken word indie will strike a chord with Dry Cleaning fans. A further addition is instrumental groove aficionados Los Bitchos, who dropped two superb singles in 2019. There are some DJ sets included, from Golf Ahias, Billie Martin and indie legend and cheif Maccabee, Orlando Weeks.

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Sports Team themselves are fresh from the release of new track, ‘Happy (God’s Own Country’), which is a brilliant, frantic, two minute snapshot of English life and a satire on Tory Britain. The Margate bus trip is bound to be an exciting post-lockdown party for any indie fan. Each of the bands on this bill bring their own niche and the day will surely be full of fun, cans and indie bangers.

Sports Team are also due to play a lengthy UK tour, kicking off in Manchester this winter. They’re stopping off at cities country wide to tour debut album ‘Deep Down Happy’.

Proposing that the artistic process had “just run out of steam a bit,” Weeks reviews the band’s successes up to that point and questions whether there was any further to go. “It felt like we’d made such good strides with ‘Given to the Wild’,” he says, appraising the band’s third album, “and that maybe we had not moved on as far again with ‘Marks to Prove It’, and we’d been doing it for a very, very, very long time.”

Deflecting the question posed to him by interviewer Mark Beaumont if it was his idea for the band to split, Weeks said, “It was everyone knowing that that was what was going to happen. We’d had a difficult time making that final record and we’d reached the end of the line.”

Meanwhile, moving forward, Weeks’s debut solo album A Quickening is set for release in just two days’ time (June 12th). An impending release he again promoted today with a tweet on his official Twitter page, @OrlandoWeeks, this Friday also marks the singer’s upcoming live session for record label Banquet Records. Broadcasting at 19:30 GMT, he’ll be “singing a bunch of songs” from the new album.

Very pleased to announce on Friday you can view a session I’m doing for @BanquetRecords. I’ll be singing a bunch of songs from ‘A Quickening’. For those who would like to join me, you can find more details here https://t.co/9mc9ioBHPF pic.twitter.com/Mk0S8ogPjR

— Orlando Weeks (@OrlandoWeeks) June 10, 2020

The album’s earlier single “Milk Breath” had dropped in mid-May of this year, a song inspired by the birth of his son and the experience of watching him sleep. As he beautifully put it at the time, quoted in an NME article covering the new track, “When you’ve rocked him for 45 minutes and finally the wriggling has stopped and the muscles have relaxed and you put him down in slow motion and then stand, without breathing for another 20 minutes praying that he’s asleep.”

An absolute delight. That and more to look forward to, then.