Bristol Beer Festival back for 22nd year

Brunel’s Old Station is the venue for the 22nd annual Bristol Beer Festival, which takes place from 21-23 March 2019. Run by the Bristol branch of CAMRA, there will be a carefully chosen selection of around 140 different real ales on sale over the course of the festival, as well as a good range of…

Nottinghamshire venue for the Big Fake

Nottinghamshire’s Thoresby Park is the setting for one of the biggest gatherings of “fake” bands seen in the UK, with The Big Fake Festival bringing 24 unreal acts together for three days of the nation’s favourite hits from 30 August to 1 September 2019. The conclusion to a summer of “Fake Festivals” across the country,…

Devauden celebrates 10th year

A family-friendly event set in the heart of Monmouthshire, Devauden Festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year and organisers have big plans for Chepstow’s little music festival. Taking place across three stages in the middle of May, it will feature some of the best local talent from across South Wales and the surrounding area…

X Factor auditions underway for 2019

The X Factor Live Tour 2019 begins in Nottingham this week, with the stars of the 2018 series Dalton Harris, Scarlett Lee, Anthony Russell, Danny Tetley, Acacia & Aaliyah, Brendan Murray, Shan Ako and Bella Penfold going on the road to venues across the UK and Ireland until 6 March. And if the sight of…

Digbeth to become Beer Central

With events in London, Edinburgh and Bristol, beer festival-organisers We Are Beer have already established themselves on the UK circuit… but now they’re adding a fourth event in Birmingham in July. Since opening the doors to their first London Craft Beer Festival in 2013, the company has been celebrating the creativity, diversity and dynamism of…

A tonic for gin lovers

It’s a generally accepted fact that Russians consume the most vodka, but what nation consumes the most gin? Any ideas? Britain, the US, China? Nope… the world’s biggest gin consumer is in fact the Philippines, drinking almost half of the 60 million cases sold annually. More than 22 million cases of Ginebra San Miguel are…

Jazzing up Bristol music scene

Bristol’s long association with jazz dates back to the 1950s and ’60s when a dizzying array of stars such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald regularly played to sell-out audiences at Colston Hall, today Bristol International Jazz and Blues Festival keeps that tradition going for four days in March. Taking place from 21-24…

Minehead makes a great Alternative

If you grew up in the 1970s and ’80s the names Angelic Upstarts, Peter and the Test Tube Babies and The Members will probably mean a lot more to you than some of the new bands making waves on radio stations around the country at the moment. It was a great era for music and…

It’s Glastonbury Calling

From humble beginnings in 2016, Glastonbury Calling is expanding to two days when it returns to the town next month for its fourth year. When organisers decided to put on a multi-venue event in a quiet Somerset town during the off-season it was unsurprisingly met with a little scepticism but with a lot of hard…