Parklife Grows with new location

Founders Andrew Hingley and Bowe O’Brien discuss the festival’s future.

Natalie Prass plays the Parklife festival on Sun., Oct. 18.
Photo credit: Courtesy Mason Jar Media

?Concert promoters Andrew Hingley and Bowe O’Brien weren’t looking to start a festival when they started booking what became Parklife. When plans for last year’s one-off charity event fell through, they pushed forward, bringing Jake Bugg to Atlantic Station. This year, on Sun., Oct. 18, Parklife moves to the Piedmont Park Promenade. The picturesque venue is well-known for hosted musical events in the past, most notably with by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Parklife, however, raises the promenade’s potential as a host for more contemporary music, with a lineup boasting performances by Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Natalie Prass, and Strand of Oaks.“The Piedmont Park Conservancy has been incredibly supportive,” Hingley says. “If we execute this well, I think they will certainly be open to exploring other great music and genres to put in there.”
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?The change of venue more than doubles the capacity of the festival, Initially, the event was meant to be a charity show. They seek to elevate what concert-goers expect from an outdoor festival, with curated food trucks and Georgia brewery Terrapin on taps. Above all, they’re looking to maintain a relatively intimate atmosphere for the audience, which the Promenade more than accommodates with its 4200-person capacity. “Going much bigger than that, you’re going to lose the vibe of what we’ve been doing,” Hingley says.
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?The capacity of Parklife may be staying the same for the foreseeable future, but Hingley and O’Brien are still looking to grow. Using the Parklife moniker, the founders have begun booking and promoting individual shows at local venues, too, with acts ranging from Gregory Alan Isakov to Glass Animals. The festival itself, they hope, will follow suit, with more frequent events and an increasingly eclectic lineup. “It’s gonna pop up: There might be eight Parklife festivals next year, there might be two of them,” Hingley says. “We can only do them when we feel, from start to finish, the festival is curated the way we want to see it.”
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????O’Brien goes on to underscore that, from the timing of the event to the number of artists on the bill, factors that usually take high priority when building a traditional festival are relegated to the back burner for Parklife as they build each event around the artists “I don’t know if festival is even the right word,” says O’Brien, who already looks at Parklife as its own kind of series. “We don’t put booking agents under pressure and say, ‘What have you got on this date?’ We go around and say, ‘What’re you excited about next year?’”
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?Hingley’s background in booking for storied venue Eddie’s Attic certainly reveals itself in this year’s lineup, as both Isbell and Stapleton are vets of the local listening room. “The concept for what Andrew and I want to do with Parklife is to have music that is of exceptional quality — lineups that music lovers really love,” O’Brien says. “Next year, you’ll see us stepping outside the Americana/folk genres and doing other things.”
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?Natalie Prass, whose Spacebomb Records debut earned an onslaught of acclaim earlier this year, joins Strand of Oaks in opening this year’s festival. If the founders have their way, the lineup will captivate from top to bottom.
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?Parklife takes over the Piedmont Park Promenade on Sun. Oct. 18. $45-$125. 2 p.m.