LONDON (Hollywood Today/AFP) 8/9/07 – The Underage Festival for minors, with no booze and no parents allowed, is set to play host in London to what organizers claim is the first “credible” music festival solely for children and teenagers Friday, where alcohol is prohibited and adults are banned.
The Underage Festival, which is to take place in a park in the east of the British capital, is the brainchild of a 15-year-old music promoter who is behind a popular club night in London for under-18s.
Cutting-edge indie talent on the verge of the mainstream has been lined up to entertain an expected capacity crowd of 5,000 teenagers.
The festival is being sponsored by some of the biggest names in youth culture, including MySpace, MTV and BBC radio.
Ticket holders, who have paid $40 dollars for the privilege, will have to prove their age is 18 or under in a neat reversal of the policy at the door of most adult music venues.
A special area outside has been created for parents who wish to wait for their children that includes information about security.
Organizer Sam Killcoyne, the son of a little-known indie musician, is said to have begun organizing his underage club nights after being turned away from a concert by The Buzzcocks, a British punk band, at the age of 14.
“It (the festival) is just going to be massive version of the club over three stages. A day’s worth of undiluted fun and mayhem minus the adults,” he said.
The success of Killcoyne’s monthly underage nights, held in a theatre on Saturday afternoons in southeast London, has sparked talk of a veritable “underage” scene in some British music publications.
Copycat events have sprung up in the British capital and have spread to other cities, where teenage punks, goths and “new ravers” — a mix of indie rock and the 1980s rave scene — go wild to adolescent guitar grinding.
“Underage will be the world’s first strictly under-18s credible music festival,” says the press release.
“Music-savvy youngsters will be able to attend a festival of their own for the first time.”
The idea is to hand a bigger stage to the bands who play regularly at Killcoyne’s club nights as well attracting new followers to the underage music scene.
It also gives peace-of-mind to anxious parents, with alcohol banned and the crowd made up of age-mates of 14-18.
The music even finishes at 8:00 pm, making an early bedtime a possibility.
The line-up includes about 30 guitar bands, few of which are widely known, including Cajun Dance Party, Blood Red Shoes, The Young Knives and I Was A Cub Scout.
