Hard work, determination and love for the scene: How Saoirse helped create the "UK's favourite queer festival"

This article is in association with Unlock Your City, an official partner of Body Movements festival and Saoirse. UYC connects cultures, inspires creativity and supports inclusivity & the LGBTQ+ community, whilst offering new ways to engage with the events and artists you love. Follow @unlockyourcity for behind-the-scenes content and ticket giveaways for Body Movements & more.

Saoirse has always had a certainty about the routes she’s taken in life. Whether that’s fine-tuning the DJ skill set, bringing an ears-to-the-ground approach to her job as a label owner, or the incessant work she puts into production, the determination she’s funnelled into every aspect of her multifaceted career has proven her a scene stalwart in more recent years.

Body Movements is one of Saoirse’s most recent projects, proudly described as “the UK’s favourite queer festival”, taking place annually in London. This year marks its fourth summer outing, this time moving location from its former multi-venue site in Hackney Wick to a “new playground” at Southwark Park promising a special event, fully curated by Body Movements right down to the soundsystems and stage designs.

“I really want Body Movements to be a festival that people can get a lot from. Whether that's an incredible experience that they've had, whether that's meeting people from their community, falling in love, but also getting educated from,” she says. “We want it to become a date in the calendar that people are really excited about.”

Just days ahead of Body Movements’ next edition, we sat down with Saoirse and chatted about bringing together London’s queer communities in one space, the hardships of running a full-scale festival, and the advice she’d give to fledgling artists looking to follow in her footsteps. Check it out below.

Do you remember a breakthrough moment in your career, or a time you felt like you pushed through the noise and made it out the other side?

It's been nearly 20 years since my music career started, so it's definitely been a gradual process for me. I'd say some bigger moments were being given my first peak time festival sets, I think the first one I felt was a real opportunity was AVA Festival maybe six or seven years ago. It was a Boiler Room set, and I had one of those viral moments, but it was also down to the time of the day and everyone being around the stage. They've always been really supportive of me at AVA, they've continuously given me great slots and got behind me loads. As well as doing your own work, you need promoters or labels and so forth that believe in you and get behind you, because they have a lot of input in how your career develops as well.

Musically, in terms of production, I was going to the studio every single night during the COVID period, I was fully sleeping in there and learning how to write music properly and building a skill set which I didn't have before. I was working full-time and gigging, so I just didn't have that time to commit to writing music. Then, I released my first record on trUst.

That release and my breakthrough set at AVA were two mega moments that stood out for me.

You’ve always had a very multifaceted career, from running events to DJing, producing, and running your label, trUst Records. How do you juggle so many different projects?

I give myself a day off on Mondays. I'm at home, I do my house sh*t, you know? Then on Tuesday I'm in the Body Movements office all day, working on that. Wednesday and Thursday I'm in the studio, but I'm also doing quite a bit of Body Movements stuff during those days as well, on and off. Then I try and get time for digging in, going to record stores in the evening looking for new music for the weekend. Then on Friday and Saturdays I'm touring, travelling on Sundays. It's hectic, and I fit a relationship around that as well. So, there's not much time for anything else!

What were your initial inspirations for wanting to start Body Movements?

I've always been someone who wants to do things, I can't sit still and I often take on more things than are within my capacity. When I was working office jobs, I was always like, ‘Right what's the next thing?’. I think it's just probably a bit of neurodivergence in me that I just get bored easily, and then once I get bored, I need to be active.

How have you set about fulfilling those aims?

When I had the idea, I went to ask some people if they thought it was a terrible idea or not. I spoke to people within the community and some event producers because that wasn't something I had loads of experience in. Then I got introduced to my business partner and other co-founder, Clayton, who has run Little Gay Brother and a lot of different queer events over the years. I was told he was looking to do a similar thing, and that we should work together. Then we brought in Simon from Percolate, who obviously had experience in actually operating events in Hackney Wick, and we just pulled the trigger. When we went to launch it, it was in March 2020 and about a week from opening, and COVID hit. It was held back in 2020 and 2021, and we obviously had put a huge amount of work into it. We were working on it for nearly a year before that too, so when it was time to open up again, we just cracked on with it.

This year’s edition marks a major next step for the festival, moving from its prior home of Hackney Wick to a new location at Southwark Park. What inspired the move and how are you feeling about the new location and embarking on a new era for the event?

Hackney Wick is a fantastic place, but it's limited in the things we can do. There are many upsides and downsides that come with running more than 17 venues in a day. You have to work with multiple security and operational teams, and they all have different issues with toilets, entry systems, all of these things that would usually just be singular if you were running your own festival on a field site or whatever.

There was so much to consider, and we've always felt like we didn't have control of who's working everywhere. Things are busy for the people who run the venues, and that can be really worrying when you're working with queer communities. There's a huge duty of care that comes with that, and there were also issues with capacities when a lot of people want to be in one venue and not as much another, so there are a lot of queuing problems. Then on the production side, we put our own soundsystems into a lot of the venues, but we couldn't afford to do that in all of them.

So, for me, it was very much about taking that next level up in quality and the operational, tech, and production side of things. I wanted it to become something that I would love to go and play at, it always felt quite loose and lawless in Hackney Wick, which was great, but I think it would have a limited time frame in terms of how long people would actually want to come and do it. We wanted it to become a date in the calendar that people are really excited about.

The festival feels like it’s become a real hub for the queer clubbing community in London and an essential fixture on the calendar. How has it felt to see the event connecting so well with your intended audience?

It's amazing, but I think we've always seen ourselves as the facilitators. The collectives and the people that we've worked with, they've done a lot of work over the last God knows how many years to create these communities. So we're facilitating bringing everyone together and making it different because it's very empowering, and you feel the whole of the UK's queer community in one place, just doing what they do really well. It feels fantastic, but I think a lot of it has to do with the people we bring on board and to do their thing.

For an event like Body Movements, it’s important to be conscious of inclusivity and safeguarding of its attendees. How do you work to ensure this?

I'd say our biggest cost with Body Movements is probably the amount we put into welfare and security, and we also do a lot of briefings and extra care in comparison to other festivals in terms of how much extra staffing we get. We also employ extra people from the community that would be recognizable working within our welfare teams so that people feel safe, so when they get to the door it's someone that they may recognize from doing doors on other events. We have SIA-trained queer security staff, people who know how to use pronoun language correctly, who are welcoming, and not people who might feel quite intimidating when you want to approach them. We've even gone to the lengths of trying to facilitate training for queer security, so that they get their SIA badge and everything like that, just so that it feels more like a security and welfare team and not the usual big burly grizzly bouncer.

We also do a lot of pre-show comms, and we do briefings with the actual security teams and whoever the production managers are to let them know the different consequences that can happen from not getting something right, but also just trying to reiterate that we're dealing with a vulnerable community and that it's really important that you care, that you go an extra mile for these events.

You work with a lot of collectives from the London scene and beyond on the event. How important is this element of community and inter-community collaboration on Body Movements?

It's really the initial reason why we started. I've been playing at a lot of these events and with these collectives as an artist, and realising the incredible talent that was within these communities. A lot of the time, they’ve been restricted to smaller events, especially back when we started. I think the queer scene has really grown exponentially over the last few years, but certainly when I was playing at them, they were really small parties with these sick DJs who I don't think were getting a look in at these festivals stages, and if they were, they were just opening and playing for no money. We wanted to create something in which they were the stars. We've had an emerging talent program where we bring people who may not have played events or a festival before, and give them some really decent slots in the festival, and then we continue to book them. We’re just trying to grow with the artists and with the collectives, fostering young emerging talent. The people who've been so imperative to the queer scene for years and are killer DJs and artists and producers, who just haven't had the opportunity to play large-scale events. There are so many DJs like that within the queer community, and I think it's their time.

What is the booking process like for Body Movements? What are you looking for in the artists you choose for the line-up and where do you look for new talent?

We usually do a call out, and then I'll listen to like 300 mixes. As a DJ, I'm going out and being immersed in the scene, so I'm coming across a lot of DJs, artists and producers all the time. But then when we do the call out, people submit their mixes, I will listen to them all, and I'll be like, this has something unique that will really appeal to the Body Movements audience.

Body Movements prides itself on “state of the art production”, “custom stages” and “precise sound”, how much work goes into the festival’s production?

It’s different now because we're moving site. The production this year is going to be next level, we’re working with the team behind GALA. I think they're one of the best producers in the country, and when we've looked at what we're doing with the stages, they all sound great. We’re using RSH Audio, which are one of the best sound teams in the UK, and we have quite good sound levels in that park.

In terms of the type of production and staging, it's still going to have an industrial feel. Some stages are gonna feel like nightclubs within a forest or that sort of thing. It’ll still have that raw, Hackney Wick industrial feel, but surrounded in this beautiful, leafy green surrounding. So I think the production is gonna be a huge step up for us this year. Our costs are tripling or even quadrupling, and it's really hard to make money when you start doing that kind of thing. But I think it's important that we do this and we take Body Movements to the next level if we want to have that longevity.

It’s notoriously difficult to run festivals at the moment, with many citing big challenges and being forced into cancellation. How have you brought your own learnings and experiences from your 20 years in the music industry to how you approach Body Movements? What are some of the crucial learnings that you’ve applied to running the festival?

A big thing that we see is that we've never really been a big headliner festival, we sold a huge majority of our tickets before we even announced the line-up. We'll still book a really solid line-up of UK talent, but also internationally known guests, but we're not about the headliners. A huge cost that comes with festivals is obviously their talent budget. We'll also book a lot more artists than your average festival, and I think that’s what makes us a little bit different, is that there's a lot more variety and it's more appealing to a bigger audience. That’s quite important when trying to bring the queer community together, and you need to offer a bit of everything for everyone as much as you can. You’re never going to get it perfectly right, but we try and have a wide spectrum of different kind of music you can see.

It’s difficult because for our festival, we're working with a community that don't have loads of money, so we can't put our tickets at the same price as most London festivals. We're probably about £20 cheaper by final release, but I think at some stage, we have to eventually start increasing prices because we're getting a 30% increase on our cost, which is probably more with regards to the production we're doing now. We're increasing our ticket prices by about 4% so we're obviously having to swallow that cost which is really difficult, but it's always a hard decision on how much you can actually increase the ticket price by so it's still sustainable. But then, I think what's really important for us is making sure that we always have a big offering of low-income tickets for people who can't usually afford to go to festivals, and we'll always keep quite a big allocation of our entire capacity back for people who just can't afford it or are on low income, and that's something that we will continue to do until the day we finish.

What are the main ways you’ve seen the dance music scene evolve and change in that time? Do you think it’s important to evolve with trends or stay firm in your own convictions? Or strike a balance?

I think it’s a bit of both. What's really important is to not feel bitter about the trends that are going on around you, even if it's not to your taste at all. There's a lot of music that might be trendy right now that I find hard to understand, but that doesn't mean anything really. If other people are loving it, allow them to have fun. You see a lot of having huge rants on Twitter or Instagram about how terrible the music is now or how it's not the same, or how phones are bad, blah blah blah. Nobody actually cares. You just need to focus on yourself and what you’re doing rather than looking at everyone else, and I think for me, I played a lot of different music when I was younger. Probably actually a lot of the stuff that's hugely popular now, like really fast, speedy stuff when I was about 16, 17, 18. Then I moved away from that, and since my early 20s, I've stuck to that conviction of the sounds that I like. I will always respect the people that are coming through and doing something different or new, or maybe not new but something that people are obviously really enjoying at that time.

Do you think the conditions of today’s industry demand that artists be multi-hyphenates and diversify their careers?

It depends what you're doing, especially if you're really amazing at doing one particular thing or have a craft that they do incredibly well and that's what's gotten them where they are. But I think it's much harder to break through the noise now, because so many people have other arms of things that they do. Everyone is a DJ, but if you're running an event and a label and you're doing other things within the community, people then get more of what you're all about. For me, I think that's how I've been able to show people. There's an element of trust there as well, if you're doing a lot of things and you can see that you're committed to it in a certain way, then you build trust within your following too.

What piece of advice would you give to new artists who want to make their way in this industry?

Firstly, you need to have your one thing that you do and make sure you're good at that. I've been in the industry for 20 years, so DJing comes as a second language to me now. You firstly have to become really good at that one thing, know it well, and know that you can deliver that off the back of your hand. Then it could be a good time to open up and have a look at other avenues in which you want to express yourself. I don't think that you should just start off doing loads of different things all at once, because you might do everything mediocre. Get really good at that one thing that you want to do, whether it's production or DJing, running a label, whatever it might be.

What are your dream future goals for Body Movements?

I really want Body Movements to be a festival that people can get a lot from, whether that's an incredible experience that they've had, whether that's meeting people from their community, falling in love, but also getting educated from. A big part of what we want to look like is a day of educational purposes like free workshops, DJing workshops, production workshops, maybe a graphic design workshop, stuff like that. We can give back to the community that helps people get their foot in the door with things that may not have been accessible to them, as well as being a big party. We want to create something that's a lot more community-focused as well, but obviously the amount of work that goes into running a festival of that size with a very small team, it can be difficult to do. We’re just trying to sustain our festival, so we’ll see what happens after this first one in Southwark Park. It's going to be really special, and as long as nothing terrible happens, then we can really look at what else we want Body Movements to become.

Can you tell me what you’ve got coming up? What's next for you?

I've just finished a remix, I'm really excited about that. It's an artist I've been following for so many years and they're just an absolute icon. I'm also currently working on a remix for someone who is very close to me, who you'll know very well, for a track off their new album. But I can't really announce that yet! At the moment, it's all eyes on Body Movements, and once that's over I'll be able to focus on myself a little more.

Follow @unlockyourcityuk for exclusive content and access to tickets, and grab your Body Movements tickets here

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Assistant Editor, follow her on Twitter