Slam Dunk Festival 2025 Preview

National World - LocalTV

We meet the founder of Slam Dunk Festival, Ben Ray, ahead of its return to Temple Newsam on Sunday 25th May, with Live at Leeds in the Park also returning there on Saturday.

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Ben Ray. I run Slam Dunk Festival, the festival here that is taking place at

00:07the weekend. Slam Dunk started as a club night back at the cockpit in 2001. The music is

00:16quite specialist. It's rock music, but quite niche in the fact it started in 2001 with

00:22the explosion of U.S. pop-punk, ska-punk and some heavier music that hit the mainstream

00:30basically. Something that was underground hit the mainstream and yeah, the club night

00:35started. We started doing really well. We started doing a lot of shows in the Leeds area. That

00:41built up to 2006 where we started the festival. I was working with a band called Fallout Boy

00:48at the time. They were exploding. We had just played Leeds Refectory, which was the biggest

00:55indoor venue in Leeds at the time. The agents, they were coming back in the summer. The agents

01:01said, I would love to do Leeds again, but you haven't got a venue big enough. We had just

01:10started doing shows at Millennium Square with Leeds City Council. Ultimately, I said to them,

01:15look, I can get an outdoor venue. And they said, oh, that might be a bit big for them

01:20for a headline show. And I said, well, look, I've got this Slam Dunk brand. We'll put a

01:25few more bands on. We'll extend the day and also we'll call it a festival. Over the last

01:3015 years, I suppose, it's changed multiple times in its format. We get people coming from,

01:35you know, all down from Scotland and north of England, Wales, the Midlands. And the interesting

01:42thing is that people are traveling from around the world to come here to Leeds for this event,

01:48because it is fairly unique internationally, the type of music it specializes in. We've

01:55got three artists topping the bill. So a day to remember. They're great for this festival

02:01because they're kind of, they mix all the sort of sub genres that we have here. And then

02:06electric call boy from Germany who have exploded over the last couple of years. They mix metal

02:13and, you know, elements of electronic. Finally, I'm very pleased to have a large UK band on the

02:20bill, which is Neck Deep. They are from Wrexham. Got another festival on Saturday, which is live

02:27at Leeds. It's a similar format, but just a different style of music. It's more indie, indie rock. You

02:37know, headlined this year by Block Party and Manic Street Preachers. So I think between the two things,

02:45we've got something for everybody. We've been here now for a few years and very used to the site. You

02:51know, we get great support from Leeds City Council. Leeds is very much firmly on the international

02:57map of alternative music.

Category

Transcript

Recommended