Forestside Shopping Centre Launches Forestside Music!
Forestside’s latest venture was born out of our decision to allow young singers to come on mall to busk while customers were shopping. Fairly quickly we realised that there is a huge amount of young original talent in Belfast and a large number of young people who are capable of writing their own material. All these young people need is a location and vehicle to help them on their way.
Through working with Panarts Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival and with the cooperation of AER and Dootdoot Music we ran a competition on mall to find the best young local singer songwriters capable of playing a stage at the Belfast Nashville Festival in March. Fifteen young people entered the competition and we were astonished at the standard of original music.
The competition was won by Johnson Tanaka Furusa, second place was Michael James Warke and Lucy Robinson came third. In addition to a £300, £200 & £100 prizes, the guys got to share the stage at Belfast Nashville Festival with Sam Wickens, Jim Lauderdale and Sonia Leigh. They all loved the experience as it gave them the chance to network and share experiences with Grammy award winning international artists.
But we didn’t stop there! Following their incredible performances at Panarts Belfast Nashville Festival, we hosted ‘Forestside Unplugged’. A live gig on mall in aid of Marie Curie where 12 out of the 15 young people performed live in front of their friends, family and other artists. The night was an outstanding success raising £870 for the Marie Curie it also gave our guys an opportunity to meet each other and gave each one their chance to be a headlining act.
We have followed up the success of the venture with ‘Forestside Under The Tree’ live sessions where we professionally record each young person’s original track and give them a mixed and mastered sound file and video file to use as a marketing tool and we have just launched Forestside SoundCloud and Forestside Youtube channels which will share our growing list of talented young artists.
‘Under The Tree’ sessions will continue throughout the year as well as monthly ‘Unplugged’ sessions in Caffè Nero with Sam Leeson, an established local singer/songwriter. We will feature guest appearances from established local songwriters who are forging a career in the music business. These guys will offer help and advice gained from their own experience. Anyone interested will be welcome, just get in touch with us if you would like to attend any of these sessions.
Our next big project is another young singer/songwriter competition in October 2016 and we will be accepting entries shortly. Watch this space! We will also be taking as many of our artists as we can forward to the Song Academy Young Songwriter competition which is a UK wide competition searching to find young original artists from around the UK. One of our artists has already been selected in the top ten entries for this year’s competition so success is out there and within your grasp.
Feel free to check out any of our music feeds and please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like your talent to be given a chance to be heard. All we ask is that you are local, can play live and you have written at least one original track. If we agree that you have talent, we have sound engineers, video professionals and a host of opportunities to get you noticed in the music world and we will do everything in our power to help you gain the recognition you deserve. Ed Sheeran needs a successor and it just might be you!
lee@forestside.co.uk margaret@forestside.co.uk helpinghands@forestside.co.uk
