Exclusive Interview: Strawberries & Creem discuss their journey so far and big plans for 2024

Feeling faintly like the makings of a movie plot, Strawberries & Creem was conceptualized by freshers with little more than a Facebook invite and a reputation for hosting solid parties. Fast forward ten years, Chris Jammer and Preye Crooks  are at the helm of one of the UK’s top festivals. 

Bridging what they call heritage with fresh talents on the come-up on the British music scene, S&C has cultivated a tenured platform rooted in a homegrown lineup, nostalgia and one that’s challenging the standard of a ‘safe’ festival. Through sheer initiative and admittedly little direction for where they were going at the start, S&C has now boasted performances from top talents - from Skepta and Koffee to Mabel and Burna Boy, to name a handful.

Championing black artists and music they were listening to at the time, the team set an intention to bring grime, Hip-hop and a sounded edge to Cambridge, growing from their humble 200-person events to fields hosting 15,000. Fitting the gap for a different sound than what was featured at their local uni nights out has grown into a brand that is more than music. From setting a personal quota for 50/50 female and male artists and collaborating with United Nations Women, the team is on a mission.

Taking a break to reevaluate the brand and its direction, S&C hit our social calendars this year with their exclusive and star-studded collaborative event series with HUGO and plans for a better and brighter S&C in 2024. We connect with the founders of S&C to unpack how it all started and where they're going next. 

So how did it all start? Let's reflect on the S&C journey‌. 

Next year will be our 10th festival. So yeah, it's been a long journey, but a fun one, I guess. We started as a club night in Cambridge. There's a team of seven or eight of us and there's an MD called Will who was a Cambridge local, but went to Manchester Uni, he met me on my first day as a Cambridge uni fresher at the university fair. He kind of sold me this dream that he was doing club nights with music that represented where I came from, which was London.

So it was nothing particularly niche, but it was your Skepta’s and your Tinie Tempah’s and, whatever we were listening to at that time. So we started running club nights, around 200 capacity. And I guess those nights started to build as we opened up other nights for the other uni’s in Cambridge. We had a night for the locals. And after about a year - 18 months, we decided to kind of combine all of those different verticals within Cambridgeshire, and bring them together for a kind of outdoor event. And we called that Strawberries and Creem.

What was it like, that momentum of just getting even the 200 people, was that hard to foster the club night, how was the promotion on that? 

Yes and no. Like, we had, we had some shockers. We had a couple of nights where there were four people in the club. Or 600 people in the club, even though you were only allowed to have 200 in there. We learned we were always learning. What I always say when we talk about this story is that we never planned for this to be a business, a method, or a career goal or aspiration. We just wanted to throw parties. We enjoyed it. We wanted to put on music that we liked. So at the beginning, I guess it was hard, but we became obsessed with it because we knew that if we followed the right format back then it would take off. It was the days of Facebook events, so you know, if we got enough people to click ‘attending’ on the Facebook group it would catch on. We slowly started to develop a little community of maybe 50 to 100 people who we knew would be with us most weeks, and like anything, we just organically developed a community and a fan base, and that grew into the festival.

Can we talk about the brand? Let us know about the ethos.

The ethos, for a multitude of reasons, developed. Again, we can't say that we had the brand identity nailed after year one. We probably didn't have it nailed until year six, to be honest. But it developed over time. The first thing was always to bring diverse and eclectic music to a very un-diverse area. That's why we started it, you know. We always used to say the nightlife in Cambridge was Britney Spears, and we loved that, but like, it wasn't Lethal Bizzle, Big Narstie and Kano.

So, the first thing was to bring diversity in music to the area. What developed in year two and year three was that we wanted to stand out in some way. We wanted to provide something a little different from other festivals and live music events, so we always wanted to book an old-school heritage artist who could play an hour of hits. So it didn't matter whether you were 25 years old,18 years old or 30 years old, you had grown up with those records. Those records were the ones that were played on the radio and on the charts, we combined that kind of heritage booking with the most exciting new UK talent and we built our brand around that. Our brand tagline now is “celebrate heritage and champion future”, and from a music perspective, that has become the Strawberries and Creem brand. That allowed us to kind of separate ourselves from our competitors and grow from that. 

Recently or not so recently before the summertime, I went to a HUGO nights event. It was a fab time! Let’s talk about the collaboration with HUGO.

So the HUGO thing was great. We took a year off with Strawberries and Creem this year because actually, funnily enough, we wanted to change a couple of things that we were doing. We wanted to reassess what the plan was, hopefully for the next 10 years.

We also really wanted to focus on our socials. Our socials had become quite stagnant as we were so focused on our events. It's really important in today's world - more than anything - to make sure that the brand appears relevant and explosive and continues to grow. We've actually had a really good year on our socials. Our YouTube subscribers have gone up from 300 followers to 51, 000 and our Instagram numbers have doubled to just under 70,000. So, that was our focus, but we also wanted to do our bread and butter, which is events.

One of the members of the team had a relationship with some of the guys at HUGO. They were also looking to focus on the music space, and we all thought it would be a great idea to combine both of our music and fashion worlds in really exciting, exclusive London venues. Giving away tickets to fans is obviously something that's really important to us, but we also wanted to invite other musicians, models, and influencers to connect these worlds. We did two events, the first was in May with Loyle Carner, and the second with Leigh-Anne and AntsLive. It's been very fun. Hopefully, it’s something we can continue into next year. 

Loyle Carner

Antslive

Leigh-Anne Pinnock

Araloyin O & Corinna Brown

Caity Baser

We know S&C took a year off this year. But what was it like bringing the festival back, after a pandemic? 

So we were really lucky because we had just partnered up with Sony Music about 3 weeks before the pandemic, so funnily enough, we never thought that we were going to disappear. It gave us a lot of time to work out how we could get better and scale. The festival that we organized after COVID was probably our favorite one. That was the year we had Burna Boy, Little Simz, Giggs, and Bugzy Malone. A stellar lineup. We got really lucky and those artists were all incredible.. 

Actually, since the pandemic, it’s been harder. So many consumer habits have changed. The persistent rise of social media, the rise of concerts, and economic developments. All that has changed the landscape a lot more. Trying to figure out where we sit in and amongst this post-pandemic world, has been tricky. But, you know, we're trying, plus the brand is as strong as ever, and the team are as hungry as ever, so we’re in a good place.

On that note, what's in store for S&C in 2024? Like you said, that's our 10th birthday. That's pretty serious.

Yeah! Well, we're very excited. We definitely wanted to reassess the S&C and where we were. We're obviously super proud of what we’ve done over the past nine years, But now we want to make some changes to the very foundation of the festival and come back in 2024 bigger and better than ever. So, I'm very excited to say that there's some really exciting news coming. We can't say what it is yet, but we're planning to be back bigger and better.

S&C definitely has a strong ear when it comes to the British music scene. How has the British scene really influenced your lineups and the festival?

Yeah, it's a wicked question, man. Like, I (Crooks) work as an A&R at Sony as well. So my job is to find new music for Sony. So I guess it's really interesting because when I started, I believe it was the year that J Hus was appearing and Kojo Funds and I think like a year or two later, it was AJ Tracey, and then it became Not3s. It was this whole scene of Black British music that was fitting the clubs and the charts, and we were really lucky because our festival kind of started in that era, so every single year, we were watching Hus, and AJ, and D Block Europe, even Kojo, Little Simz and Stefflon Don all come through. So that UK element has always been a really intrinsic part of Strawberries and Creem.

But, we've also grown and expanded too. Burna Boy, for us, was really our first Afrobeats artist, and we had started expanding into the Caribbean scene with Shaggy and Koffee. So yeah, I think for us with Strawberries and Creem, it's always been about bringing an eclectic music palette to our audience. It definitely started in British music, but we want to continue to grow and scale that and make sure it's as diverse and as credible and as relevant as possible. 

There's definitely a little discourse around S&C really platforming female artists. Was that always intentional?

Probably not at the beginning. At the beginning, we were children running around thinking we were throwing cool parties. It was when we got a little older that we started to ask ourselves a serious question about the legacy of this event, and what our brand values are.

For 12 hours, 15,000 people come onto a site where we can create ethics and values that we adhere to and we want to promote and support. We had heard a really harrowing statistic about the amount of sexual assaults that take place at festivals. And obviously, we did not want to be a part of that. It was something that all members of the team were really, really passionate about - making sure that we could shine a light and also prevent in any way that we could.

So the first thing that we wanted was to make sure that the festival had a real feeling of diversity, right from the core of the music. It's really easy to promote diversity, but to then book a lineup that's 90 percent male doesn't really add up to us. So we made a vow and a promise privately and publicly to make sure that our lineups always had 50% non-male performers. And that was the first thing that we did, which raised some eyebrows, which to us it shouldn't be raising any eyebrows. This should be a given. 

Then we developed it from there. The second thing was to ask ourselves, now we've got 15,000 people coming to site, how can we make sure that the right values and behaviors are being adhered to at the event itself? It meant that from the minute you got off the train at Cambridge to the minute you went home, there were procedures and policies in place to make sure that people were very clear about where Strawberries and Creem stood on expected behaviors, with zero tolerance of sexual harassment, and that we kept people safe and fostered an inclusive atmosphere. There was a marquee where people could go to talk in a safe space, guardian angels who offered support around the site, a code of conduct for everyone to follow, and loads of other things that we really thought about with UN Women UK.

From a music perspective, it was always about the heritage and the future. But wider than that it's been about diversity and supporting all the different groups within the world of diversity. That's been really important to us and we'll continue on it. 

What are your plans for the future? What have we got in store? 

Loads is the answer!

The festival is our centerpiece and we want to keep doing that. But we've got some exciting surprises for people. We've really enjoyed doing events with other brands, such as HUGO, so there's definitely an element of S&C that’s interested in creating activations and parties for people.

There's also a couple of really exciting conversations about Strawberries and Creem going international, which is something that we've had an eye on for a few years. We've had some interesting opportunities come our way in the past few months on that note, so stay tuned for that…

We're also really excited about the growth of our socials. So much of the world now, as you know, takes place on our iPhones and swiping fingers, so we didn't want to be left behind in that space. What we try to do at Strawberries & Creem, as we said, is represent diverse music. So, we've taken that onto our socials and we’ll continue to create unique and exclusive content that Strawberries and Creem own and that we can share with people. And I think if we can do all of those things, uh, well, we'll be very, very busy, so we'll leave it at that for now.