FOCUS Wales is the grassroots festival redefining music’s future

The priority with events like these is discovery and the chance to level up – and when everything aligns, they can create canonical moments in the careers of artists, helping them connect to a label, manager, agent or even a humble journalist. Of course it’s a crapshoot for many bands who trek down to the likes of Brighton’s Great Escape, or head over to SXSW in Texas each year with the hope it might just be their big break.

Things feel different at FOCUS Wales. The Wrexham-based industry showcase event was launched in 2011 by two old friends who’d seen how other showcases such as SXSW and Liverpool Sound City worked and wanted to give Welsh music a similar boost in the UK landscape. The city’s proximity to Manchester also made it an easy location to help bring the bigger players from overseas (it’s just an hour’s drive from the airport), as did the remarkable number of venues to stage live music. Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, FOCUS Wales might not be as long in the tooth as the Eisteddfod – the oldest festival of music and culture in Europe – but it’s grown with some momentum to become a favourite of those who return to Wrexham for four days each May. I’ve heard its praises sung by folk in places as far flung as Bogotá, Montreal and Sydney and all with the same sentiments: it’s small, personal and well put together.

The festival’s hub is at Ty Pawb (“Everybody's house”), a vast building that was formerly the Wrexham People's Market but reopened in 2018 as a community arts space with a food court, pop-up stalls, and an art gallery. During FOCUS Wales, it’s business as usual here, and the music industry – artists and execs – meet each other at tables sitting side-by-side with locals grabbing a cappuccino and a Welsh cake. It all feels gloriously egalitarian, a vibe that continues through the four days I’m in Wrexham. The trend in putting these kinds of events away from capital cities – like Aarhus (SPOT Festival) over Copenhagen, Seville (Monkey Week) over Madrid, Hamburg (Reeperbahn Festival) over Berlin, or Groeningen (Eurosonic Noorderslag) over Amsterdam – is in itself an exercise in levelling; stripping away some of the pomposity and elitism you’d find elsewhere. The Welsh spirit of socialism is definitely in the room with us.

“I think more events need to shift away from the old school mentality of treating artists as if they're second-class citizens to the industry,” the festival’s co-founder Andy Jones tells me. “The artists are the industry, so events should do away with this segregation but I'm still seeing it at some events. Wherever possible, we should all be sharing the same spaces and learning from each other, to shape a better and fairer industry moving forward.”

Jones – who set up the event with school-friend Neal Thompson back in 2011 – also thinks the same logic should be extended to fans too. “All too often, there’s a two-tier system in place for queues at showcase gigs, or having closed door symposiums on industry issues and debates; the whole thing reeks of elitism,” he explains. “For us, it's always been about making the design of the event as inclusive as possible. So if those outside of the industry in attendance are inquisitive, want to sit in on a talk, and voice their opinion in a Q&A, well they're encouraged to do just that. Everyone is welcome to contribute to the conversation about the future of the industry at FOCUS Wales!”

This year’s event saw over 25,000 people – with more than 400 of them from the industry – catching 260 artists spread over 21 stages and more than three days. It’s a huge rise from its first edition back in when just 30 bands played a single stage over 48 hours. 15 years on the festival’s approach hasn’t changed all that much. “The design makes it quite a uniquely inclusive opportunity for new talent and industry to progress their careers,” Jones says. “And for those visiting here to find new talent, I think Wrexham is quite unique in having such a big cluster of music venues all within such a short walking distance, which means people do pack in a lot more music than they normally do at other showcase events. We're seeing the results year on year, as the business is getting done here.”

Among the conversations happening this year is a keynote with Lemarl Freckleton, the Newport-born rapper and producer better known as Lemfreck, who picked up the 2024 Welsh Music Prize for his album Blood, Sweat and Fears. After a packed show at The Rocking Chair, Freckleton sits down to talk about his incredible journey, which began with his first show at FOCUS Wales back in 2021. With just one song to his name, and no more than ten people in the audience, he was – he told Best Fit – ”shitting it”. “I couldn’t remember my lyrics… I got on stage, and it was just like—oh, this is it. This is the thing I want to do.” That performance, Frecklton explains, changed how people saw him: “But more than that, it changed how I saw myself.” Four years later he’s one of the festival’s biggest success stories and one of the country’s most exciting exports.

For artists such as Lemfreck, the chance to be seen by visitors from across the world is one of the festival’s major advantages – with some of the decision makers attached to the world’s best music festivals and showcases coming here every year. That exchange always goes both ways and the balance between the festival’s international relationships and its homegrown sounds also where FOCUS Wales excels. “It's developed quite organically,” Jones tells me, “as we've always had a portion of non-Welsh artists within the programme, from the very first edition – where we had artists from Scotland, Ireland, England, and Sweden – taking part back in 2011. As the years have gone on, we've worked to make sure there was always a healthy balance of international programming around the Welsh talent, to bring in new audiences and new perspectives, to help develop things here.”

That diversity of genre, ideas, culture, and of language, is such an important part of the festival's DNA. In no other scenario could you see Seoul-based electronic-rap duo Hypnosis Therapy (히프노시스 테라피) reduce an at-capacity Wrexham pub to fevered chants of “Fuck Kim Jong Un”. Their set is a highlight among the handful of South Korean artists who are in town this week and make an even bigger impression after their set as locals haggle with them to buy merch.

Another cultural exchange brings three Māori bilingual artists over to Wrexham: MOHI, Jordyn with a Why, and MĀ, who each play a couple of sets across the three days of FOCUS Wales, with a dedicated showcase on Saturday afternoon at the Nghtclb venue. This British Council-facilitated exchange compliments shared elements of language reclamation and revitalisation in both Cymraeg and te reo Māori. “It's been quite a natural development that export offices and festivals with similar mission statements to FOCUS Wales have connected with us over the years,” explains Jones. “They've recognised that the diverse musical platform we have on offer here can be useful to their emerging talent, and we're ultimately a doorway into the wider UK market. With Korea, we've been working with Zandari Festa in Seoul since 2016, exchanging artists and delegates. The partnership with New Zealand this year was the culmination of three years of work, of learning and exchanging artists and industry between the Welsh and Maori music scenes, exploring the relationship that the new generation of talent in each nation has with its mother tongue.”

A panel discussion also picks up on the DNA of showcase festivals, and how they can help share culture, diving deeper into examples from across the globe. Cecilia Soojeong Yi is here repping her festival Peace Train DMZ, which runs this June in the Goseokjeong area of Cheorwon in South Korea. "We don't want to be political,” says Yi, describing the festival’s evolution. “Even in South Korea, there is strong liberal and strong conservative opinion [but] we are the music promotors, not the activists. We thought a music festival can be something in between the public and the commercial. We're in the middle.”

Alona Dmukhovska from Music Export Ukraine asserts that a cultural identity is the unique selling point of a festival. "They exist because we're curious about each other and this is a very safe space to demonstrate that,” she explains.

There’s discussion around Kneecap and boycotts of festivals around the world too – something that’s affected the likes of Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavík. In 2022, artists playing the Reykjavík event were pressured to quit the festival because of Icelandair’s involvement as sponsor. The pressure group wanted the airline to deny the Icelandic government the ability to book flights for individuals who are refused asylum in Iceland on the national airline. But, explains festival manager Ísleifur Þórhallsson, Iceland Airwaves was not in any position to change any of this: the airline was legally obligated to sell a ticket to anyone; the Icelandic government buys flights like any other customer and Icelandair could only refuse a passenger to be on their flight if they posed security risks. “So there is a lot of pressure put on the artists to do something that ends up hurting themselves and it’s unfair,” says Þórhallsson.

Canada is well represented too this year in Wrexham, with a night of music at the Penny Black that kicks off with Nova Scotian old hands Nap Eyes. Montréal-based Truck Violence – who are UK-side as part of the Quebec Spring tour – hit the stage later with the kind of ride-or-die verve that demands a bigger space but still manages to win fans in the packed room. The Mothland-signed quartet play songs from last year’s excellent Violence record and their artfully experimental guitar noise feels genuinely fresh; they’re future greats in the making.

48 hours later and in the same space, Gothenburg’s The Family Men tie with them as the heaviest band I see in Wrexham. Using loops and samples with their relentlessly driving take on hardcore, they’re darkly melodic in the best possible way.

Less than 100 metres from the Penny Black – I find another artist using loops and samples with an entirely different type of sound. Whilst she was working on another project at St Fagans National History Museum in 2012, Ogwen Valley-born Lleuwen Steffan found old recordings of hymns in the museum’s sound archive – some dating back to the 18th century. Many of them have been lost to time, only existing through oral tradition and captured via recitation on the recordings, stripped of all melody.

Steffan worked with the descendants of the voices she discoverd to create Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) which gives these lost works new life in a brand new context: sampled alongside reconstructed and augmented instrumentation: new melodies, vocals and abstract sonics. It’s the ultimate bridge between old and new music but feels daring and respectful at the same time. Playing in the 15th-century St Giles' Parish church – truly one of the most impressive in the UK and a jewel in Wrexham’s charm – Steffan’s work feels more emblematic of the event, and of Welsh music’s past and future, more than anything else I experience here.