A festival featuring some of the UK’s “most significant” female and non-binary artists is coming to Merseyside this weekend.
Sheeptopia Festival, an event curated by Liverpool-based musical trio Stealing Sheep, is taking place this Saturday, July 1 in Birkenhead and promises to be a fully immersive festival atmosphere.
Stealing Sheep, whose resident art space is The Invisible Wind Factory, will be headlining the event and joined by the likes of The Orielles, Yama Warashi, Alice Low and Judy Brush.
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Bex Hawley, member of Stealing Sheep, told the ECHO: “During lockdown, we set up this alliance of artists that were women and non-binary artists with an intersectional feminist agenda. We did a project which was called Infinite Visions and it was all about how to rework the music industry from behind the scenes.
“One of the outcomes of that was because we have a platform and an audience ourselves because we've been going for so long, we felt like we had a little bit of power to be our own kind of gatekeepers to help other women and non-binary artists have a stage and a platform.”
Sheeptopia is the first step of the band’s plans to start implementing change within the music industry as they know all too well about the imbalance in lineups at events and festivals when it comes to gender identity.
Bex, a former LIPA student who now lives in Toxteth, said: “Throughout our 12-year career we have witnessed that fork of tokenism - just being the only girl band on the lineup. It became a running theme that we would get booked as the supporting act even though we were bigger than the boyband - the headline act.
“It's usually subtle things and usually subconscious but we kept noticing that we were getting paid less to gig and our projects were being kept more static than our male counterparts.
“So it does become frustrating and we want to address and rebalance the issue so it’s not anti-men, it's just giving other artists a chance. It's very important to try and have more equality in this day and age."
Doors open for the Sheeptopia festival, which is being held at Future Yard CIC at 75 Argyle Street, Birkenhead, at 2 pm. Tickets cost £18 and can be bought online.
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