TUSK Festival 2020

They say 3 is the magic number and it all came together pretty magically for the 3^rd TUSK. Incredible trio performance from Ambarchi/Campbell/Flower that led to our second album release, devastating rock action from Endless Boogie, an amazing multi-drummer performance of Mike Pride’s Drummer’s Corpse, a Noize Choir workshop leading to a live performance, 4 fantastic exhibitions, more mind-melting film programming and much more.

TUSK lovers again showed their adoration of anything Japanese and excruciatingly loud as ENDON and Blackphone666 were received ecstatically (to put it mildly), The Wire Talks featured Neil Campbell and Hacker Farm and a surprise Richard Dawson set was the icing on the cake.

Year Zero for TUSK Festival and we start as we mean to go on, concentrating on people whose music we love but who don’t play in these parts nearly enough. Spread across two venues, so many highlights its hard to choose, but Rhys Chatham’s ecstatic face during the performance of his Guitar Trio with 9 guitars, drums and bass is definitely up there along with the devastating debut of secret supergroup BOC (Alan Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Chris Corsano). So great to expose the world to the North East’s musical treasures too.

And the BOC set taught us a very valuable lesson for all future TUSK Festivals – record everything!

TUSK Festival returns for round 2, this time all housed at the wonderful Star & Shadow. Another murderous line-up and we upped the ante on other elements too – a film programme produced by Has Gaylani and Joe Murray, a Sacred Harp session courtesy of Cath & Phil Tyler and Vicky Langan, a synth-building workshop with Tom Bugs, art and installations by Fritz Welch.

It’s those little things that bring the most satisfaction though – like bringing in unknowns Hild Sofie Tafjord and Stian Skagen & Erikk McKenzie and seeing them blow the audience away. Wall-to-wall great music all weekend – a face-meltingly good festival, if we do say so ourselves..