Dates: 15th – 17th April 2016
Location: Pontins, Prestatyn Holiday Centre, North Wales
All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) – the organisation that has been promoting festivals, concerts and records across the globe for more than 16 years now and whose reputation for experimentalism, diversity, creativity and high adventure was forged on its long established association with events at UK holiday camps – is well and truly back on the home front.
Having turned its back on its trademark UK holiday camp festivals at the end of 2013, ATP announced a most welcome return to this format earlier on this year with news that their renowned Nightmare Before Christmas would be held over the last weekend in November in the Pontins Holiday Centre at Prestatyn in North Wales. There was a further cause for celebration when news broke that another event would take place at the same location in Spring 2016.
Next year’s festival will be curated by Stewart Lee, the revered English stand-up comic, writer, director and musician. A huge experimental music fan, Lee will be “interpreting John Cage” as well as performing his own stand-up comedy routines and hosting panels. And ATP has now revealed the names of the first acts that have been chosen by Lee to appear in Prestatyn over the third weekend in April.
The first names out of the Stewart Lee/ATP hat include one of Britain’s angriest 
bands, the Nottingham-based duo Sleaford Mods (pictured). They will be joined on the North Wales coastline in April by English post-punk rockers The Raincoats, Japanese exploratory noise rock band and firm ATP favourites Boredoms, and the Australian experimental jazz explorers the Necks who confirm not only the festival’s huge international reach but also the staggeringly wide range of musical genres it attracts.
Perhaps the most exciting revelation, though, is the fact that one of the truly great voices of British folk music will be appearing at the Pontins holiday camp next April. Shirley Collins, who turned 80 years of age earlier this year, was one of the key players in shaping the English folk revival of the late 1960s. She is as innovative as she is traditional and for this performance she will be joined by Oysterband founding member, Ian Kearey.
As if to celebrate this wonderful news, another mainstay of the English folk scene for many a long year, John Kirkpatrick will join forces with the Glasgow-based psych-folk group Trembling Bells to perform No Roses, the truly seminal album recorded by Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band in the summer of 1971.
Full details of this event, including the names of all the other acts who have been announced thus far and how to purchase tickets can be found here
Photo credit: Simon Godley
