Come Friday, 22-year-old Will Rolfe will be doing something that most people his age could only imagine. In the afternoon, Rolfe will open his undergraduate photography exhibition in IADT in Dun Laoghaire, chat to lecturers, students and visitors, before taking his leave and heading to Forbidden Fruit Festival in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, in Dublin’s city centre, not to celebrate as other students may be doing, but to work, because he is partly responsible for the line-up, as a booker for the festival.
How Rolfe got in this enviable situation is the result of a passion of music passed on from family, enabled by the internet and compounded by a community built around Sense, the club night he has been running with his friends since early 2014.
First festival
Rolfe's role as a booker for Forbidden Fruit, among other duties including booking the after parties, social media and marketing. It's a role that he cherishes because Forbidden Fruit was the first festival Rolfe attended in 2011.
“I actually live right next door to it on the Inchicore Road,” says Rolfe. “So I’ve a close connection to the festival because it’s local. I owe it a lot because I went every year and a lot of the music I listened to was because of the festival.”
Other musical influences came from his family. Nigel, his father is a renowned performance artist, an unusual job for a dad to have. Not surprisingly, his father has an atypical taste in music – “left of centre and rebellious” is how Will puts it, before going on to explaining how he heard the Nottingham minimal punk poets Sleadford Mods for the first time when his dad was blasting it downstairs in the house.
Will’s brother is 11 years his senior and was a DJ. Will remembers watching him playing records in his room when he was young, and soaking up the music.
“He always told me to find my own music,” says Rolfe, an instruction he took on enthusiastically as a teenager, delving into French house (Cassius) and hip-hop (Mos Def). It was the time of CD ripping and aquiring music through the internet (Bittorrent) and while Rolfe is now an avid (legal) streamer, he credits that all-you-can-download culture with his eclectic taste.
Into booking
It was the first year of college that Will first moved into booking music events, the outcome of using his photography skills to make some extra cash.
“I fell into taking night club photos in the Village and the Palace. The music I heard in the clubs wasn’t what I was enjoying, so I set up a night with a friend of mine in Dame Lane called Found.”
That night lead to Sense, which started in the Academy in early 2014 on Middle Abbey Street with a desire to build a community around the music Rolfe and his friends loved. A small team formed including resident DJs Jack Thompson and Jack Dunne, co-booker Jim Gillick and event manager Stephanie Gavin.
The venue’s reputation helped Rolfe secure some international names from UK bookers familiar with the Academy brand for Sense’s first run. Artists who have played the night include New York Transit Authority, Bodhi, DJ Ez, Kant, Hnny and Groove Armada.
Rolfe didn’t think of the club as a job. “I thought I was just learning something else outside of that, learning about the industry, yourself, music and you’re meeting new people constantly.”
Fortuitously, just as Sense needed a new home, the Button Factory’s dance promoters Hidden Agenda moved their weekly operations the Opium Rooms, leaving the Button Factory’s Saturday nights free for Sense, which is where they’ve operated since. Rolfe got to know the team at POD and an opportunity to book acts at Forbidden Fruit came along, which Rolfe reckons is a perfect fit for where’s he’s at in his music promoting life.
Being connected
"I'm connected to the target audience between the ages of 20 to 40. I'm on the streets, running clubs and a lot of my friends go to the festival. It's really important because it's hard to understand what's going on without being connected to that."
This year’s Forbidden Fruit festival line-up features acts such as Underworld, Skepta, Dizzee Rascal, Battles, Flume, Jungle, Pusha T, Groove Armada and Katy B. It leans on a melting point of electronic, hip-hop, grime, dance and alternative rock, but Rolfe says genre is a thing of the past.
“The crossover is a lot more blurred than it was in the past. Genre doesn’t really exist for anyone growing up now – young people don’t divide themselves into the genres they like. It’s all merging into one which is something I encourage, considering how broad my tastes are. I don’t like labels.”
When the festival gets underway this weekend, once he has finished his student duties, Rolfe will spend as much time as possible on site in Kilmainham.
“It’s important to feel what the festival is like on the ground. You could sit in an office, or backstage with an artist but you’re really not going to know what you need to work on for the following year.”
- Forbidden Fruit takes place this weekend in Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin.
