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25
Aug
Interview: The man behind Love to Be Festival and its return to Harrogate
It’s the 1990s. Marc Dennis walks down a street in his hometown of Oldham and spots an advert for a resident DJ in a pub.
The 17-year-old, who has no DJing experience, blags his way into securing the job at a pub he was not even old enough to drink at.
The next day, armed with some DJing kit and youthful confidence, Marc and his friend played a night of crowd-pleasers for £50.
Never did he expect a set at his “dodgy” local pub to turn into playing sets and hosting events in New York, Sydney, Ibiza and, most importantly, Harrogate.
Three decades later, the Love to Be brand took over the Stray in Harrogate at its inaugural festival last year.
The Stray Ferret caught up with the Love to Be co-director and one half of DJ duo Trimtone, Marc Dennis, ahead of the its Stray return next month.
He says that after a successful night DJing at the local boozer, bookings at weddings and birthdays rolled in.
Marc said:
My uncle was a manager at a nightclub in Oldham at the time, and he knew I wanted to learn to mix. So, he snuck me into the club – I was 17 – and I watched this DJ mix. I was like, ‘wow, how is he doing that?’.
He was putting two records together and it just absolutely fascinated me. So, I wrote down the tracks he was playing and I went and bought them from a shop.
Marc practised until he could replicate the exact mix he heard at the nightclub. A few years later, he took up DJing full-time.
The inaugural Love to Be Festival in Harrogate. Credit: Charlie Mitchell
How Love to Be started
Tony Walker, one of the original founders of Love to Be and The Ivory bar in Harrogate, wasn’t available to join the interview, but Marc gave an overview of how they met.
Marc said Tony fell into DJing at Leeds University, playing his first set alongside Carl Cox – one of the biggest names in electronic music.
“My first gig was at a dodgy Manchester pub, his was with Carl Cox”, Marc says.
At the time, Tony hosted a Saturday night event in Leeds called Happy. When the owners of The Music Factory in Leeds expanded to Sheffield, they invited Tony to move his event there.
It quickly grew and rebranded to Love to Be – now a Sheffield-based events company and record label – with the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Roger Sanchez frequenting the decks.
The two men met in the late 90s, when Tony walked into a Manchester club Marc was DJing at.
“We ended up DJing together and got on like a house on fire. We’ve kind of been stuck together ever since”, Marc said.
The Love to Be brand boomed in the late 90s and early 2000s, hosting events nationally and internationally.
The brand changed hands over the following years but came back under Tony and Marc’s ownership in the early 2010s.
But when 2020 hit, a company based entirely on social interaction was turned on its head by covid.
Marc said:
We really had to reset what we did and look at different ways of keeping the brand in people’s faces.
It was tough. We have another part of the business which deals with local bookings for bars and restaurants and that was really tough for those artists. It was their income and that was taken away.
Marc said the company livestreamed music every week, including a charity stream at Christmas, and relaunched its record label during the pandemic.
“I think it kept us sane as well as giving us some purpose”, he added.
Why a festival - and why Harrogate?
But, as nightclubs became a distant memory, Marc and the team knew they had to transition into the festival market.
He and Tony had both DJ’d in the town back in the days of Ministry of Sound on Parliament Street and Tony played a key role in opening The Ivory on The Ginnel.
Marc said:
We looked at a few different options and thought Harrogate was a bit different. It’s central, so the transport is great, and Harrogate hasn’t really got anything like it. A lot of bars and clubs have closed in Harrogate, and our crowds are really nice – they want to listen to the music and they’re respectful of their surroundings.
We decided to just be sensible with it – the budget and everything – and make sure we just broke even. We put an organic post out on Facebook – no paid ads – and it just went insane.
Festivalgoers enjoying last year's event!
Around 3,000 house music lovers descended on the Stray last September, with one festivalgoer telling the Stray Ferret at the time the event “should’ve happened 20 years ago”.
Marc said the inaugural event was beyond his expectations, but what can people expect from this year’s festival?
We want to deliver the same sort of atmosphere and vibe as this year, but we’ve got a bigger line-up: Arman Van Helden, Gok Wan, Ultra Nate.
The capacity is bigger, there will be bigger lighting and we’ve got a new main stage structure.
The company has ordered additional turf tracking to protect the grass, expanded its VIP offering – which can cost up to £3,300 for a group of 10 – and increased the capacity to 5,000 people this year.
Last year’s event proved a big hit in the town, but one resident on Park Parade said the noise level was "totally unnacceptable".
He also claimed only residents within 250 metres of the event were notified beforehand.
The Stray Ferret put this to Marc and asked what steps Love to Be has taken to reduce noise impact this year and increase awareness for nearby residents.
He said:
We obviously sent everything to our database. We have to do physical letter drops through people’s doors within a certain radius, which we did last year, so we absolutely let everybody in the local area know.
We also have a sound person on site to manage the decibels so we don’t go above what we’re legally allowed to go above, and we have one out of sight that monitors the sound. We didn’t get anywhere near [the limit] last year. The stages are also covered this year, so that’s going to help the sound level as well. We are absolutely mindful of neighbours, and we stick to very strict rules.
Love to Be Harrogate is now the company's flagship event – but is it here to stay?
Marc said the company is “committed to doing this over a number of years”, and the festival will be reviewed year-on-year alongside North Yorkshire Council.
“Hopefully, it’s a long-term thing for the town because I think it’s great for Harrogate”, he added.
Love to Be Harrogate will return to the Oatlands Drive section of the Stray on Saturday, September 6.
The event will kick off at midday, with the last act finishing at 11pm.
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