‘And Ticketmaster crashed!” Stuart Maconie kicks off the in-demand Supersonic pub quiz on Sunday with a riff on the festival’s entirely unintentional namesake, who a day prior broke the internet with demand for their upcoming reunion shows and spurred talks of government action on the ticketing market. At the risk of stating the extremely obvious, the name is where any comparisons end: held in two venues in Digbeth, Supersonic festival doesn’t trade in crowdpleasing anthems but noise from the fringes, serving a 1,200-strong clientele whose loyalty to the festival is evident in the prevalence of merch from artists who played last year (primarily US doom metal act Divide and Dissolve). Nor does it have anything to do with reductive Britpop nostalgia, with elements of this year’s programme reflecting and deepening recent fringe interrogations into British identity and folk tradition.
Partially that focus is the unintentional result of a lineup that feels quite a bit less international than last year’s: maybe that was intentional programming; maybe it’s indicative of the financial situation of a festival like Supersonic, which has to fight for funding (it has support from Arts Council England and other bodies) and certainly isn’t prompting the government to support the endurance of the UK’s pivotal DIY scenes. As Luke Turner wrote in the Quietus earlier this year, if the government deigns to touch on the importance of the country’s grassroots venues, it’s only ever in terms of the future superstars they might nurture, a myopic success-oriented mindset, rather than “as places in which music is played for the sake of communal joy”. And those struggles are writ large within Supersonic’s existence: even since last year, gentrification in Digbeth meant that the festival had to find a new venue at the last minute, as artistic director Lisa Meyer writes in the programme.
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