IT TAKES A VILLAGE: Create Music Village 2026
A candid look into Ashford’s annual month-long live music fringe festival, from its guest curator, Jack Coleman
“... it’s a huge privilege to keep the bright torch burning”
Create Music Village (CMV) is a month-long fringe festival taking place across Ashford’s venues and community spaces. Since inception in October 2022, the festival has filled up the otherwise quiet month with live music from local bands, workshops for creatives and activities for families, as well as live comedy shows and crowd-pleaser cover acts.
The full programme is a mixture of free and ticketed events organised by Ashford’s Music Villagers - local venues, community groups, arts organisations and promoters. Further events are also booked by a ‘guest curator’, whose role is to oversee the full programme and book in events to tie everything together into a cohesive package while creating something that’ll hit with Kent’s live music fans. In previous years this role has been taken on by local music legends like André Dack (formerly of Ramsgate Music Hall) and BBC Introducing in Kent’s Casey Dale. This year that role has fallen to yours truly.
To quote David Byrne (as one oft should), “Well, how did I get here?”.
It’s my birthday, 2022. I’d been back in Kent for just a year after finishing studying in Manchester. During my time away from my home county, I’d really got into experimental electronic pop music but, coming back home, I wasn’t confident I could find places that could scratch this new itch.
Behold, experimental electronic pop artist BABii was playing… Ashford?
Hosting the show was the Ashford Grassroots music venue and event space Coachworks. I didn’t know it, but this was CMV’s first year in operation.
It was a pretty intimate show. Me, my partner and group of friends made up a fair amount of the total audience, but BABii closed her set with a beautifully beat-breaky, ethereal and transcendent cover of t.A.T.u’s sapphic classic All the Things She Said and it really felt momentous, like I was able to feel at home again. This little show in Ashford had me thinking two things:
Kent had the potential to be a place for cool music
That I wanted to make realising that potential into what I do
In the four years since that show, I’ve been involved in a long list of music projects across Kent, including youth music programmes, emerging music stages, residencies and grassroots music festivals. Being the guest curator for CMV 2026 is the latest opportunity I’ve been handed to platform cool music in Kent and I’m so excited to be talking about it here.
VILLAGE LIFE
The festival is held together by its community, the Music Villagers who produce the majority of the festival’s programming through their fringe events.
A big part of my interest in Ashford was down to its homespun DIY music scene. The real music communities and venues in and around the town, working at the grassroots level to support music events year round, of which the CMV programme captures a snapshot. There are also core offerings from key venues, like Revelation, which for the festival this year has booked a sell-out comedy show from Romesh Ranganathan.
As guest curator, I wanted to work in dialogue with what the Ashford creative communities were bringing to the festival and ultimately make it so that, if you zoomed out and looked at the programme as a whole, it would be an impressionist picture of Ashford and Kent’s music scene in 2026 - if you squint?
The biggest challenge was that it’s a month-long festival. Creating a feeling of cohesion was something I needed to think about. So I made two curatorial decisions: First, I would anchor what I felt represented the uniqueness of the ‘Kent alternative music scene’. Second, I created The Big Weekend programming block.
Taking place in the middle of the month, from 16th-18th October, I slotted five events across three days in a way that flowed and created a continuous festival experience from one day to the next... starting with a showcase gig at Coachworks (16th) to kick off the weekend.
Coachworks is such a staple venue in Ashford, it felt right to start there. It’s a venue where local DIY organisers working in any genre can take their shows up a notch, from the basement to the big stage. I’ll be putting on a line-up headlined by up-and-coming post-hardcore act Sunday Best.
Moving on to Saturday 17th is the real pillar of the weekend.
We’re debuting a new event called The Commuter Belt: Unplugged & on the move. This is a free event featuring six travelling artists, playing three sets each across four venues in Ashford’s town centre. It’s got that ‘choose your own adventure’ feel, mixed with the joy of discovering new music.
The afternoon will be capped off by a headline set from Lewis Floyd Henry, a prolific busker from Dover: a one-man band whose set-up includes a double-neck bass and guitar, foot-operated drums and an amplifier that he uses as a makeshift riff throne from which he blares out a scuzzed-up, foot-stomping melee of garage and psych rock.
When booking for Saturday evening, a prime slot, I found myself in the DMs of Stewart from Deal’s Smugglers Agency (and curator of Smugglers Festival). From his roster of global artists I booked The Big Weekend’s headliner and crown jewel, Electric Jalaba. Based between London and Ashford, they are a cosmic funk-fusion band fronted by Moroccan Gnawa master Simo Lagnawi and his Guembri bass lute. Their sound is all about hypnotic grooves and expansive soundscapes, tethered down to the earth by Simo’s magnetic stage presence. With the size of their sound, it only made sense to get them into Ashford’s largest music venue (and operational church), Revelation. In tandem with the opening act, dance and funk DJ duo Ashford Massive, everyone will be caught in the groove.
One of my immediate instincts when tasked with curating was to ‘go big’: acts like Pulled Apart By Horses, Barrioke and Riskee & The Ridicule, which came up fondly in conversation about previous years (particularly around the ‘no shirts’ incident… if you know, you know).
But I wanted to show how quieter acts can also feel ‘big’. So on Sunday 18th, Converge: a candlelit sound bath from the non-profit Sound Emergence will utilise the high vaults of Revelation - a gong, singing bowls and a tasteful touch of throat singing - to invite relaxation and reflection on the weekend’s proceedings (and ward off the Sunday scaries).
Since last year, Create launched its Create Offshoots programme, an initiative supporting Ashford’s emerging artists to access affordable recording and rehearsal space, as well as mentorship and live-performance opportunities locally.
Offshoots will wrap up its current programme during The Big Weekend, where at Coachworks we’ll be hosting a music professionals Q&A about gigging and touring, followed by a live emerging-talent showcase. Investing in emerging artists and facilitating an interchange from current professionals is vital for a festival like CMV to ensure that talent continues to come up and through the festival and through Ashford’s live circuit.
Festivals funded by local councils, which support the grassroots music ecology of developing towns like Ashford, are vital, but they are becoming rarer year-on-year as funding is cut nationwide. So it’s a huge privilege to keep the bright torch burning and make the case for why these festivals need to keep happening
INFO: createmusicvillage.co.uk
INSTA: @createmusicvillage
