WHILE the sun has set on the Are You Listening? Festival for 2023, one of the stand-out performers from the line-up was Reading’s own Tayo Sound.
His set at Sub89 –one of the highlights from the day– saw a member of the audience join him on stage for a cover of American Boy nestled among his easy-going but emotionally-invested repertoire.
Tayo has spent a number of years busking and performing around Reading, and around the UK for that matter, and he said ahead of the event that festivals are among the more enjoyable of bookings to get.
“I’ve done a few festivals and they’re probably some of the best experiences as an artist.
“A lot of touring can be quite lonely– it’s just you and your band seeing the same people every day.
“With festivals, though, you’re backstage with other artists having fun, and usually playing a shorter set so there’s a little less pressure; they’re a blast, for sure.”
There are also practical reasons, he explains, as touring can take a physical toll: “You still have to travel a tonne, but if you’re doing a festival season you only ever really travel a couple of days in a row and then you’ve got some rest time.
“When I performed a headline tour last year, it was two days of rehearsal and then we started the next day, followed by five shows on the trot.
“So that was a really intense, adrenaline-filled seven days.”
AYL itself, he says, is a particular highlight: “Part of the reason is that it feels like it’s the whole town with how many venues it covers.
“They’re all good for other reasons, but to see one event take over the whole town, is great.
“I’m hoping there’ll be even more independent business and events to really continue developing the culture here, and having all of the different venues is an opportunity to open that up.”
But he also says that he enjoys them as an audience member, too, despite a little envy: “If you’ve played there, you do wish you were the one on stage.
“That’s a hard feeling to get over when you know what it’s like to be on the other side.
“But I was playing at Truck Festival last summer alongside Sam Fender, and seeing him live, the energy of the crowd, so I very much enjoyed seeing that.”
Live performance, he says, is a big part of what attracts him to music: “Writing is so important to me.
“I very quickly realised that I do care about what I put out– I love it and care about it, and that goes together with performance.
“If you’re performing stuff you’re not proud of, that feeling really sucks, so to be honest if I wasn’t proud of what I was playing or wasn’t able to play live, I think I’d retire my writing.
“Every now and then, though, the stars align and the inspiration strikes– it’s rarer, but that can be as good a feeling as the gig itself.”
As for how he encourages such lightning strikes of inspiration: “For me, I have to wait on it.
“There are some people in the industry, like Rick Rubin, who curate their vibes and their inspiration space– there are some who’ve hacked it.
“But I think for the majority, myself included, you have to wait, which doesn’t mean you can’t write good music.
“But the ‘wow’ moments? You need to live life to have those moments.”
He explains that he feels external experiences inform the substance of an artist’s output, too: “There’s two forms of inspiration.
“Subject matter and sonic, I think– you can fall in love with a sound, or you can write about something really personal for it to be genuine.
“But also what you’re connecting with might not be what your audience connects with, and at the end of the day, they decide.”
This year AYL celebrated its 10th anniversary and has confirmed that it will be returning for 2024.
Updates from the team at Are You Listening? are available via its website: areyoulistening.org.uk
