INTERVIEW
TUSK FESTIVAL IN TYPICALLY INVENTIVE AND DEFIANT FASHION, THE TUSK TEAM HAS TURNED THE DISASTER OF THE PANDEMIC INTO AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPAND AND BROADEN WHAT IS ALREADY ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST FORWARD THINKING FESTIVALS. LEE FISHER SPOKE TO ORGANISER LEE ETHERINGTON ABOUT HIS PLANS For those of us with a taste for the experimental, the radical and the unknown, the loss of festivals like TUSK, Supernormal, Supersonic and the rest due to The Awfulness is keenly felt. Luckily for us, the TUSK crew aren’t easily kept down and the usual three day festival has now morphed into a huge two week online event with a truly killer bill. But it’s been a tough journey. “When lockdown first started, we decided to just sit on it and do nothing for a few weeks – we stopped promoting the festival as it seemed odd to urge people to buy tickets for something we suddenly couldn’t guarantee would happen,” explains Lee Etherington. “I think we started the month of April thinking October was miles away and we’d be fine and back to normal by then, but as that month went on that confidence waned and we had to have a serious think about what the best way forward was. We didn’t want to pump lots of our limited resources into setting up a
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live festival we weren’t sure would happen, but also didn’t want to take the plunge and cancel until it definitely looked like the best way to proceed.” Obviously when the cancellation happened, all ticket revenue was lost along with money already spent on flights, hotels and crew fees. So it’s one of the remarkable aspects of this virtual TUSK – the tenth – that the whole thing is entirely free. Concerned about the pandemic’s likely status in October and its impact on people’s income, and in collaboration with key partners like Sage Gateshead and the Arts Council, the funding was re-purposed and virtual TUSK was born. “We’ve been streaming since 2014 but have never managed to work hard enough on maximising the international stream audience. TUSK is all about spreading the word about artists we love – and suddenly all those artists have lost all their work and need our support more than ever.” Like-minded concerns like
