Crystal Palace Festival
This year’s Crystal Palace Festival will showcase its community’s creative talent and energy to its biggest audience ever.
A diverse array of local musicians, singers, poets, comedians and dancers will take to the stage for a live show that will be broadcast online on the weekend of August 15-16. With the pandemic leading to cancelled events throughout the world, the organisers have announced the festival will be broadcast online from a temporary television studio that is being set up at the top of Upper Norwood Library Hub.
Musicians headlining the event include noise punk duo JOHN and soul singer-songwriter Andrew Ashong.
JOHN have been causing quite a stir of late, gathering fans right across the continent after supporting Idles on their European tour. Andrew Ashong the British-Ghanaian soul singer-songwriter, DJ and producer is from Forest Hill. Andrew’s single with Theo Parrish Flowers was Gilles Peterson’s single of the year in 2013.
Noreen Meehan, the director of the festival, said she is thrilled that this year’s festival will be able to reach so many people:
“We are just incredibly excited about our live show from the library which I think is really unique,” said Noreen. “We will have two sets – one for live bands, theatre and dance and then one with our fabulous presenters and solo singer-songwriters, spoken word artists and comedians.
“We are also so lucky to have incredible south London artists Andrew Ashong and JOHN headlining this year but do stay tuned for the whole weekend as we are recreating as much of the live park event as we possibly can!
“Huge thanks are due to the Arts Council, Croydon and Bromley Council for supporting this very special event and also London Hotel Group, owners of the Queens Hotel and all our supporters for helping us get this far!”
The show will be broadcast from 2pm – 2am on Saturday 15 August and 2-10pm on Sunday 16 August and can be watched on the Festival website crystalpalacefestival.org, YouTube and Facebook Live.
Main picture: Andrew Ashong