Music

See the Lovebox line-ups and buy tickets

Groove Armada’s Tom Findlay is a little bit gobsmacked by the Time Out Lovebox Weekender line-up. ‘I’ve got tickets to see Sly And The Family Stone four days after Lovebox in Bournemouth and they’re going for £30,’ he says. ‘But on Saturday Londoners can see them in Victoria Park, and they’ll also get to see Blondie, Super Furry Animals, Patrick Wolf, The Presets, Tiga, Secretsundaze, Soul II Soul and so much more and it’ll cost £35! You do sometimes tear your hair out and want to scream “What more do you want?”’

Groove Armada, who’ll close Lovebox with a live set showing off their mighty fine new album ‘Soundboy Rock’ on the main stage on Sunday night, are still passionately involved in the festival that they started five years ago. ‘Yeah, totally. I wake up every morning thinking about it,’ admits Findlay, ‘and I’ve got a poster in the front window of my house in a desperate attempt to catch passing trade on the way to Clissold Park in Stoke Newington.’
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Of course, with a line-up like Lovebox has he shouldn’t be concerned at all, but experience has shown that many festival-goers buy their tickets in the last week or so. ‘I’d love to think that the festival will be rocking by 2pm,’ says Findlay. ‘I mean, we’ve got people like the Junior Boys and The Presets on around then so people should just get up and get in there! There are so many great things to do and it’s a big, beautiful park… but in the end, 363 days of obsessive planning can all come down to the weather, which is in the lap of the gods.’

His Groove Armada partner, Andy Cato, who lives in Barcelona, has been more insulated from the vagaries of the English summer, but he’s just as involved in the major decisions. ‘We’ve tried to get headliners who are relevant and interesting in a climate where a lot of the big corporate festivals want to squeeze you out,’ says Cato. ‘There’s an awful lot of arm-twisting and exclusive deals going on, so getting the artists that you want isn’t easy. I’m very proud of the result. It’s not like any other festival line-up; it’s got legendary acts and it looks to the future as well.’ For Findlay ‘Lovebox is a nice encapsulation of all that’s best about multicultural London this year,’ and both are thrilled at how the event has developed in recent years.

They certainly didn’t dream then that Lovebox would be hosting Sly And The Family Stone’s return to London after a 20-year hiatus. ‘Sly is the one,’ says Findlay, marvelling at a band who stood for racial and musical integration and in ‘Stand’ and ‘Fresh’ made two of the finest and funkiest albums ever. ‘If we’re stood in the middle of the park and he plays “Family Affair” and it sounds anything like it should sound like then I’ll probably be in tears.’

He’s excited too by bands like the Brazilian Bonde Do Role, ace new acts like Fujiya & Miyagi, clubs like The End, Issst and Horse Meat Disco… Tom and Andy will be DJing too. They’ve played together on the Terrace at Ibiza’s Space and covered for Pete Tong on Radio 1 this year (‘That’s been the soundtrack to my Friday nights for such a long time – driving up and down the M1 on my way to DJ somewhere – that to be the person saying ‘Welcome to the weekend’ was really special to me,’ recalls Cato). But aside from the odd occasion Cato and Findlay usually DJ separately, as they will during Lovebox when Findlay plays a Space Terrace-style set on Saturday afternoon and Cato delivers a Pack Up & Dance mix in The End’s arena. Their first Groove Armada club opened on Soho’s Gerrard Street in 1994, and ran for a couple of years until they booked guest DJ Dave Seaman. ‘We shelled out more than a grand for him, which was a fortune for us at the time,’ recalls Findlay, ‘but we just didn’t get the numbers. It was the same night that England played Spain during Euro ’96 and (England goalkeeper) David Seaman played a blinder. The next day the headline in the Times was ‘Seaman sinks armada’. I cut it out and stuck it on the wall and I did have to laugh, obviously, once I’d got over the fact that I was destitute and broke and didn’t know where to turn.’

Fortunately, the records which they’d started making ‘essentially to promote the club night’ were more successful than the club and a successful new musical career beckoned. Groove Armada aren’t your typical artist-turned-DJs, which is one reason why they’ve helped to book so many superb DJs at the festival. It’s likely that you’ll have read a lot about the live acts, so below are some of the DJs you should seek out this weekend…

See the Lovebox line-ups and buy tickets