Hard work, determination and love for the scene: How Saoirse helped create the “UK’s favourite queer festival”

Do you remember a breakthrough moment in your career, or a time you felt like you pushed through the noise and made it out the other side?

It’s been nearly 20 years since my music career started, so it’s definitely been a gradual process for me. I’d say some bigger moments were being given my first peak time festival sets, I think the first one I felt was a real opportunity was AVA Festival maybe six or seven years ago. It was a Boiler Room set, and I had one of those viral moments, but it was also down to the time of the day and everyone being around the stage. They’ve always been really supportive of me at AVA, they’ve continuously given me great slots and got behind me loads. As well as doing your own work, you need promoters or labels and so forth that believe in you and get behind you, because they have a lot of input in how your career develops as well.

Musically, in terms of production, I was going to the studio every single night during the COVID period, I was fully sleeping in there and learning how to write music properly and building a skill set which I didn’t have before. I was working full-time and gigging, so I just didn’t have that time to commit to writing music. Then, I released my first record on trUst.

That release and my breakthrough set at AVA were two mega moments that stood out for me.

You’ve always had a very multifaceted career, from running events to DJing, producing, and running your label, trUst Records. How do you juggle so many different projects?

I give myself a day off on Mondays. I’m at home, I do my house sh*t, you know? Then on Tuesday I’m in the Body Movements office all day, working on that. Wednesday and Thursday I’m in the studio, but I’m also doing quite a bit of Body Movements stuff during those days as well, on and off. Then I try and get time for digging in, going to record stores in the evening looking for new music for the weekend. Then on Friday and Saturdays I’m touring, travelling on Sundays. It’s hectic, and I fit a relationship around that as well. So, there’s not much time for anything else!

What were your initial inspirations for wanting to start Body Movements?

I’ve always been someone who wants to do things, I can’t sit still and I often take on more things than are within my capacity. When I was working office jobs, I was always like, ‘Right what’s the next thing?’. I think it’s just probably a bit of neurodivergence in me that I just get bored easily, and then once I get bored, I need to be active.

How have you set about fulfilling those aims?

When I had the idea, I went to ask some people if they thought it was a terrible idea or not. I spoke to people within the community and some event producers because that wasn’t something I had loads of experience in. Then I got introduced to my business partner and other co-founder, Clayton, who has run Little Gay Brother and a lot of different queer events over the years. I was told he was looking to do a similar thing, and that we should work together. Then we brought in Simon from Percolate, who obviously had experience in actually operating events in Hackney Wick, and we just pulled the trigger. When we went to launch it, it was in March 2020 and about a week from opening, and COVID hit. It was held back in 2020 and 2021, and we obviously had put a huge amount of work into it. We were working on it for nearly a year before that too, so when it was time to open up again, we just cracked on with it.

This year’s edition marks a major next step for the festival, moving from its prior home of Hackney Wick to a new location at Southwark Park. What inspired the move and how are you feeling about the new location and embarking on a new era for the event?

Hackney Wick is a fantastic place, but it’s limited in the things we can do. There are many upsides and downsides that come with running more than 17 venues in a day. You have to work with multiple security and operational teams, and they all have different issues with toilets, entry systems, all of these things that would usually just be singular if you were running your own festival on a field site or whatever.

There was so much to consider, and we’ve always felt like we didn’t have control of who’s working everywhere. Things are busy for the people who run the venues, and that can be really worrying when you’re working with queer communities. There’s a huge duty of care that comes with that, and there were also issues with capacities when a lot of people want to be in one venue and not as much another, so there are a lot of queuing problems. Then on the production side, we put our own soundsystems into a lot of the venues, but we couldn’t afford to do that in all of them.

So, for me, it was very much about taking that next level up in quality and the operational, tech, and production side of things. I wanted it to become something that I would love to go and play at, it always felt quite loose and lawless in Hackney Wick, which was great, but I think it would have a limited time frame in terms of how long people would actually want to come and do it. We wanted it to become a date in the calendar that people are really excited about.

The festival feels like it’s become a real hub for the queer clubbing community in London and an essential fixture on the calendar. How has it felt to see the event connecting so well with your intended audience?

It’s amazing, but I think we’ve always seen ourselves as the facilitators. The collectives and the people that we’ve worked with, they’ve done a lot of work over the last God knows how many years to create these communities. So we’re facilitating bringing everyone together and making it different because it’s very empowering, and you feel the whole of the UK’s queer community in one place, just doing what they do really well. It feels fantastic, but I think a lot of it has to do with the people we bring on board and to do their thing.

For an event like Body Movements, it’s important to be conscious of inclusivity and safeguarding of its attendees. How do you work to ensure this?

I’d say our biggest cost with Body Movements is probably the amount we put into welfare and security, and we also do a lot of briefings and extra care in comparison to other festivals in terms of how much extra staffing we get. We also employ extra people from the community that would be recognizable working within our welfare teams so that people feel safe, so when they get to the door it’s someone that they may recognize from doing doors on other events. We have SIA-trained queer security staff, people who know how to use pronoun language correctly, who are welcoming, and not people who might feel quite intimidating when you want to approach them. We’ve even gone to the lengths of trying to facilitate training for queer security, so that they get their SIA badge and everything like that, just so that it feels more like a security and welfare team and not the usual big burly grizzly bouncer.

We also do a lot of pre-show comms, and we do briefings with the actual security teams and whoever the production managers are to let them know the different consequences that can happen from not getting something right, but also just trying to reiterate that we’re dealing with a vulnerable community and that it’s really important that you care, that you go an extra mile for these events.

You work with a lot of collectives from the London scene and beyond on the event. How important is this element of community and inter-community collaboration on Body Movements?

It’s really the initial reason why we started. I’ve been playing at a lot of these events and with these collectives as an artist, and realising the incredible talent that was within these communities. A lot of the time, they’ve been restricted to smaller events, especially back when we started. I think the queer scene has really grown exponentially over the last few years, but certainly when I was playing at them, they were really small parties with these sick DJs who I don’t think were getting a look in at these festivals stages, and if they were, they were just opening and playing for no money. We wanted to create something in which they were the stars. We’ve had an emerging talent program where we bring people who may not have played events or a festival before, and give them some really decent slots in the festival, and then we continue to book them. We’re just trying to grow with the artists and with the collectives, fostering young emerging talent. The people who’ve been so imperative to the queer scene for years and are killer DJs and artists and producers, who just haven’t had the opportunity to play large-scale events. There are so many DJs like that within the queer community, and I think it’s their time.