Interview: One Love Festival 2015 goes large on reggae and roots

We’ve been speaking with some really interesting and inspiring music festivals over the last six months. It’s helped Liftshare and our community explore new events across the UK, including a wide range of musical styles, themes and offerings. Check out our look at Boomtown Fair for a great example of a truly unique festival experience.

One Love (September 4-6 at Popham Airport in Wiltshire) is a first for the Liftshare blog, as it’s a festival focussed solely on reggae, roots, dub and world music. Our community of over 430,000 members is hugely and positively diverse, so we simply couldn’t overlook these genres and this wonderful event.

The festival’s mission statement is also incredibly noble. It explains that One Love exists to promote, “the peaceful message of the music championed by Bob Marley and was created in honour of his famous 1978 One Love concert.”

It’s a great message, we’re sure you’ll agree. We wanted to know more, so we spoke with Dan at One Love to get more insight into the festival’s origins, 2015 line-up, side activities, ethos and much more.

Take it away Dan!

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Liftshare: Can you give us some insight into the origins of One Love Festival and why you wanted to focus on the Reggae and Dub genres?

Dan: We started the event as mark of respect to the famous 30th Anniversary of Bob Marley 1978 One Love Concert – I realised nothing was being mentioned or organised in UK for this historically important festival so decided to mark the occasion myself.

That, alongside that there were and still are no Reggae Festivals in UK, we grasped at great opportunity to fill a much need gap in the market place – and here we are eight years on going from strength to strength

Liftshare: We like that One Love aims to bring a positive message to the masses. To what extent is it important that festivals try to do good as well as give people a fun musical experience?

Dan: I think we are the only festival in UK that promotes peace, love and unity. It is very important to us, not only because our customers love conscience roots and reggae music, which has a underlying positive message, but they also care about each other and the World.

The world is hard place to live so we hope our daily inspirational messages help people through the day – and day by day we get step closer to One Love – where we all get together and feel all right!

one-love-festival

Liftshare: What can you tell us about the various acts that play One Love and about your Battle of Dubplates contest?

Dan: Saxon Sound System has been there from the very beginning. We started the event with them .Earl Gateshead has also been there from the very first event, Nick Manasseh has played at every single show too, and The Unity Hi Fi guys from Brighton have played 5 shows now!

This years acts make an amazing line up including many legends of old “The Originators” bands that have contributed and formed what we now call ‘Reggae Music.’ We are lucky to have such legends grace our stage, and innovators who are helping to bring reggae, dub and bass music into the future.

Here’s a Battle of Dubplates interview for you to check out.

Liftshare: How mindful are you of green issues like waste and abandoned tents, and how do you tackle them each year? 

Dan: We are very mindful of green issues, we have recycling waste collections so everything get separated, and we encourage our customers to use them on the events field . We use compost toilets, solar powered lighting and solar powered showers. We also encourage customers to liftshare!

Thank you to Dan and the One Love festival team for a great interview. As Dan says, the event encourages its patrons to car share together to keep carbon emissions down, and to keep your own travel costs low. Liftshare is cheaper than most forms of public transport, so why not request or offer a lift with our community today? Our new iOS and Android apps make finding an ideal lift even easier.

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