Award Winning Wild Fields Festival

Wild Fields 2024 was a great success, bringing Earlham Park to life with a collection of fantastic artists from near and far. Recently having been awarded Best New Festival at the UK Festival Awards, organiser Ben Street sat down with Outline’s Tabitha Smith to discuss the festival’s origins, its social and cultural aims, and the role of Wild Paths in the city of Norwich.

Wild Paths as a collective has been around for the last six years, entrenching itself in the Norwich music scene. Founder and director Ben Street does a lot for bands and venues in the city, organising events and collaborating with businesses to interweave all the best parts of Norwich into thoughtfully curated nights of the best music the city has to offer. Ben explained how the collective started with a group of them, ‘designers, marketeers, bookers and music enthusiasts’ all coming together, with their ‘maiden voyage’ happening in 2019 with the first Wild Paths festival. Spread across Norwich, the festival had stages in twenty-three of the city’s venues, and a lineup to boast about, with SPINN, Gengahr and The Magic Gang’s quintessential indie rock having drawn many festival goers in through the doors of The Shoe Factory that first Saturday. Despite COVID-19 hitting the following year and disrupting plans for the collective, Ben revealed that this led to a fortunate opportunity, creating the first ever Wild Fields festival. With a bubble of 320 people, Wild Paths set about creating an incredible festival experience for attendees on the Norfolk Showground and, despite reverting back to the Wild Paths format in the years following, this past summer brought about an opportunity to draw Norwich’s music scene back into an open field once more, this time in Earlham Park.

Ben explained to me the initial ideas of Wild Fields 2024, with the ambition being a four-day event in north Norfolk, with six stages and ‘upwards of 160 acts’, with each stage presenting a different genre or sound, just like the Wild Paths setup. ‘It still felt very much like a first year’, Ben explained, revealing how the project was downscaled due to a lack of funding; ‘it’s been a very difficult year for independent events.’ Expressing gratitude towards UEA and Earlham Park for providing the festival with a new home, Ben discussed how these changes meant the list of anticipated acts was condensed. The Friday lineup remained cohesive, with ‘the cream of UK jazz’ filling the bill, but the Saturday was ultimately more varied than anticipated, with post-punk stars Squid playing alongside spoken wordsmith Kae Tempest. Despite this, Ben explained how these aspects gelled really well. ‘I think people got it,’ Ben laughed, ‘everyone that was there was a music lover and a lot of them will have an eclectic taste.’

It is clear that Ben is very focused on curating Wild Paths’ distinct sound. ‘I’ve always had a real appreciation for a very broad spectrum of music,’ he told me, ‘so I’ve wanted to bring a real breadth of different artists to the city,’ something which he has been able to do by introducing the collective’s London events to the Norwich scene. The collective hosts Bluetone, ‘a series of neo-soul, alt-jazz and trip-hop’ music at the Blues Kitchen in Brixton, and New Breed at the Shackwell Arms in Hackney, a showcase of the best new post-punk and psychedelic rock music the scene has to offer, with Ben explaining that these soundscapes make up ‘the two faces of Wild Paths.’ Having recently brought Bluetone to Norwich, the collective aim to ‘pair really great musicians with amazing venues and brands too,’ having already worked with Seven Wolves, Universal Works and Yarn to host three successful jazz nights with their own food pop-ups. ‘It has proved really popular, so watch this space!’

At the core of what Wild Paths do is an unwavering dedication to Norwich’s best local acts, once again across a variety of genres. ‘From the get-go, the whole prerogative and motivation for doing Wild Paths was to bring acts into the city, but also pair them with the best of the local and regional bunch, and shine a spotlight on those guys as well.’ This can be seen in the group’s event history, with artists like Alice-Lily and Sam Eagle returning year on year to play their shows, with Ben relaying that Eagle opening Wild Fields 2024 embodied the sentiment that ‘this is Norwich!’ Interweaved with fantastic local talent, Ben told me how thrilled he was to partner with promoters that enabled the festival’s bill to be filled with big names too, with Mercury Prize winners Ezra Collective in particular being a huge get. ‘That changed the game for us,’ Ben enthused, crediting ATC Events and JOY Concerts, two multi-national promoters, with their success in that area.

Alongside this, drinks partners like Lemonaid and Charitea helped curate a ‘socially positive element’ to the festival, initiatives who give five percent of their profits to projects in the global south, as well as Love Juice, who help fund LGBTQ+ projects nationally. The presence of partner Climate Live was certainly noticeable, with their infamous pink bus being stationed in the festival grounds for its duration. ‘We really wanted it to be part of what we were doing,’ Ben explained. The bus’s top deck became a stage at the festival, with musicians and speakers performing from the top of it, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive. ‘People loved it! They were coming over and chatting and that’s the whole idea; it’s a big bright pink bus with loads going on, and if you want to have a conversation about climate and motivate people to get involved and change the way they behave and act, then that’s the way to do it!’ Despite the bus’s large impact on the festival as a whole, Ben revealed that the logistics of getting the bus into the grounds weren’t nearly as challenging as you’d think. ‘We laid out the site plan so that the bus could quite easily drive in. It took a few times to get the right position, but actually it came together really well!’ To top it all off, the sun shone for the entire weekend, allowing the stage to be powered solely by its own solar panels. ‘Wild Paths, but Wild Fields maybe even more so, is about using music to bring people together and creating positive change […] but it’s also about having a good time as well!’ Ben summarised.

Despite the festival’s big acts, partners, and even their most recent award, Wild Paths is fundamentally a close-knit team that have been around since the very beginning, right down to the musicians that play in their shows. ‘We’ve had performers who have come up through the ranks and played loads of different events we’ve put on,’ Ben said, naming I.Am.Afiya and Alice-Lily as acts that are closely linked to the festival and its community. Speaking about the festival’s success, we discussed whether the festival’s location had something to do with the immense response Wild Fields has had. ‘You always have to really convince people to come to Norwich because it is tucked away,’ Ben started, ‘but because of that we’ve created a really robust and connected scene and it’s really supportive.’ Describing Wild Paths as a ‘microclimate’ of sorts, Ben expressed how unified the whole experience of running these festivals feels; ‘the audience and the artists and the volunteers and all the team really […] it feels quite amorphous, like they all know each other. Sometimes they’ll play different roles and that’s a really lovely thing which is quite unique to Norwich and Wild Paths.’

Speaking about what this new year holds for Wild Paths, Ben told me nothing was set in stone, but that he is ‘quite excited about bringing Wild Paths back to the city [after] having a few years out.’ He explained how much the scene has changed in Norwich over this time, with some venues being used for other events, naming The Last Pub Standing as a venue that has become far more active with live music recently. ‘I think it’s the perfect time to bring Wild Paths back to the city for that reason. It will always feel different because venues close and spaces aren’t available and you have to get imaginative finding new spaces.’ Finding these new spaces is looking like a key aim for Ben and his team, revealing that there have been talks of creating a Wild Fields/Wild Paths hybrid by utilising a green space in the city centre. This is the most exciting part of the year for Wild Paths as these initial ideas for the event start to emerge; ‘there’s a lot of conversations going on […] you get into it and it’s all manic, wild energy, but now we’re plotting it all out.’ With nothing yet confirmed, Ben has said to expect ‘loads of extra partners, loads of new spaces, and possibly some slightly bigger shifts as well,’ and with the event’s current trajectory, it will certainly be a highlight of Norwich’s summer events.