NEXT: LEEDS FESTIVAL

Current: MANCHESTER JAZZ FESTIVAL

Sounds From THe Other City 2025

May 2025

Volunteer for the day at SFTOC, scanning tickets and providing festival-goers with their venue access wristbands and being the first contact they had with festival staff. 

Manchester Punk Festival 2025

April 2025

Working with a member of the WEIRDO Collective, I was an event assistant & photographer for a live podcast recording centered around South Asian representation. 

It was amazing to hear first-hand about the progression of South Asians in the punk & alternative scenes and the slight differences in everyone's journeys.

This position also came with an artist wristband, giving me access to all 7 venues of the festival so that I could try out some concert photography with a camera other than the compact one I usually take to concerts.

Independent Venue Week 2025

January 2025

Volunteer staff for IVW2025 North-West, acting as the face of IVW at different venue's gigs throughout the week. 

I was thrilled to be involved with 3 amazing venues in Manchester city center, engaging with concert-goers, and talking with sound technicians. Independent Venue Week is such a great scheme, helping these small but integral institutions of live music keep their doors open, showing gig-goers the beauty of intimate live music. And it just goes to show how amazing grassroots venues are and the importance they hold in the music industry!

I hadn't gotten been part of a live event since college at this point so it was really fun to get stuck-in and be part of team in the running of a concert. Other responsibilities included:

- Ensuring IVW imagery & merchandise was on display

- Gaining survey responses from concert attendees as research for next year

- Feedbacking venue info to IVW

- Handling doors/ticketing

- Shadowing sound techs

- Assisting in pack-down 

Louder Than Words Festival 2024

November 2024

Event volunteer staff for 2 out of 3 days at the UK's biggest music literature festival, hosted at Meliá Hotels International in Manchester.

On the Saturday, I stepped into an AV/Tech Support role, helping out the sound technicians and ensuring the talks ran smoothly and on the Sunday, I covered the merchandise desk. It was really fun to be able to experience the opposing roles of technician vs merch sales as one is a customer-facing role and the other is not, and seeing how both are important and contribute to the whole event experience in their own rights. I was also able to sit in on an interesting and highly relevant discussion on music journalism and how it has evolved over time.

This experience really opened my eyes up to another type of event in the music industry that isn't live music, which just goes to show how integral evenst are to every sector of the business world. The whole event was amazingly put together and clearly has a strong community behind it as this is their 11th year.