Backyard Festival is coming to Leam, and here’s what you need to know

After a long month or two of back-to-back assignments, soul crushing exams and enough stressful Tabula notifications to make you throw your phone into the canal, all Warwick Students will need a way to relax come the end of June.

And what better way to enjoy the sunshine but in Leam’s Mill Gardens at Backyard Festival, a brand new music festival featuring student artists from a variety of genres? Yep, Leam is now cool enough to have its own music festival 😎

Warwick students Antina and Mana, the organisers of Backyard Festival, explained: “Backyard is where the vibrant and colourful music scene of Leamington and Warwick Uni meet together, to celebrate the end of the academic year with a massive party.

“All the student artists, including DJs, rappers, singers and bands, who you can hear perform during the year will be uniting to celebrate artist creation and to get the chance to perform for their fellow students and friends.”

As the event is aimed at students, tickets will be priced more cheaply than other local music festivals, and it’ll be held right in the centre of Leam. Backyard also promises to host a banging afterparty nearby, so there’ll be no need to fight over who’s hosting afters.

Third-year Antina and second-year Mana both study Management at Warwick, and are the co-heads of Koan Records. Koan is the UK’s first student-run music label aimed at recording, promoting and facilitating music and live-performance opportunities to student musicians at Warwick from various genres. As a not-for-profit, they reinvest all their funds in events, promotion and recording equipment.

For Backyard Festival, Koan Records is teaming up with TULU Presents, a creative collective in Leam that creates a development network and place for independent artists to connect and collaborate with other artists, industry professionals and brands.

Organisers Antina and Mana

Explaining why they created the festival, Antina commented: “We decided to create the Backyard Festival because we wanted to leave a notable mark on the Warwick music scene. In fact, some past Koan team members had thought about organising a music festival years ago, and the idea was brought up again this year during a meeting between Koan and TULU.

“We’re very grateful for the collaboration with TULU as they’ve given us massive support in the festival’s planning and connected us with key third parties. The logistics side wouldn’t be possible without them. Therefore, as this year we have built a much bigger team and are in collab with TULU, there’s no good reason not to turn this festival idea into reality.”

Backyard’s head of design is third-year Warwick student Harry, who spoke about his excitement for the festival. He said: “I love the backyard because to me it’s really important that we celebrate student creation as much as possible, and giving musicians a stage to perform on in front of loads of people is such a great way to do that.

Head of Design Harry

“I am super excited for it: we would not be bigging this festival up as much as we are if we didn’t think it had the potential to be absolutely legendary.”

Related stories recommended by this writer:

• This is what every Bridgerton character would be like if they went to Warwick

• Warwick Uni denied a dyslexic student extra time as it would give them an ‘unfair advantage’

• Warwick has launched a new interdisciplinary Taylor Swift module