Lazydays Festival

In Southend-on-Sea the grass of Priory Park was not asking for a three-night campsite or a Farnham festival. It asked, in July 2024, for an inaugural weekend of craft drinks and pop, indie and rock: Lazydays Festival, put on by WeCraft Events — Mike Bromfield, Elliot Waters and Andy Williamson — from the 26th to the 28th. Anyone looking for Lazy Bishops has the wrong county. There are no Library Gardens of Surrey here. There is a park with a priory on one side and the Essex estuary on the other. Anyone looking for Leigh Folk Festival has the wrong thesis: here cider and gin enter the contract as much as the guitar.

The idea was a craft-drinks festival with live music, not a headliner compound that sells beer on the side. Four sessions: Friday night, two on Saturday, a long Sunday. Day sessions were announced as family-friendly, with a children’s mocktail bar and free entry for the youngest. The first drink came with the ticket. That is not a box-office detail. It is the thesis: you come to drink with judgement and to hear bands, in a coastal-town park, without pretending you are in a Glastonbury field.

The inaugural bill explained the ear. Craig Charles closed Friday. The Futureheads, David Rodigan, Sleeper, Mystery Jets, The Hoosiers, Sundara Karma, Newton Faulkner, Girl Ray, DJ Yoda and The Cuban Brothers took the rest. There were two stages; the Signature Brew Live Stage gave room to smaller names. It is not a list for showing off. It is a map: britpop coming back, radio indie, funk and reggae selectors, a DJ coverage calls a cult name. Pop, indie and rock in a Southend park, not in a London hangar.

Priory Park is not the pier beach. It is a broad park, grass and trees, with the priory as a stone neighbour. You arrive from Victoria Avenue, enter a town compound, walk between producer stands — more than fifty announced — and food stalls. There are tastings, a cocktail masterclass, Lazy Haze as a mood name. The sea is near, but the festival is lived with your back to the water, on the grass. Essex July weather can be estuary sun or wind that moves the glasses. There is no tent camping in the park. People go home, to a Southend hotel or to a train toward London.

Bromfield, Waters and Williamson came from the drinks trade, not from a stadium booking office. Local coverage remembers the council licence application: alcohol and music to set hours, Friday to Sunday. The inaugural was photographed: Futureheads in front of a grass crowd, Charles on Friday, the weekend closed. A first festival is told as a first festival. It is not asked for a decade of legend. It is asked that the park sounded and that the drinks had a producer’s name, not an anonymous litre.

Box-office figures — early bird gone in January, session and weekend passes — should not become a trophy. They measure that Southend could hold a hybrid of drinks and bands without moving to a roadside compound. The day crowd must have been more family; the night crowd more stage. That session split is the format. Anyone who treats Lazydays as Leigh folk or as a Farnham Saturday mixes three different maps.

This is not Lazy Bishops Festival. Farnham is in Surrey and its documented Saturday is 2010, a library garden, Amber Rubarth. It is not Leigh Folk Festival, which looks at the estuary from Leigh-on-Sea with another history of acoustic song. Lazydays Festival is Priory Park, 2024, WeCraft, drinks and a pop-and-indie bill that fits an Essex park. Confusing them is a map error, not a nuance.

Anyone walking from the gate to the producer stands notices that the park stays a town park: paths, trees, the priory in the corner of the eye. Day sessions ask for families and a first drink; night sessions ask for more volume and less mocktail. Lazydays Festival is better read as priory grass that refused to be only a beer fair or only a band bill. Between Bromfield, Waters and Williamson, between Charles on Friday and Sundara Karma on Sunday, between Southend and everything that is not Farnham, English pop and indie have a July inaugural that did not ask an already written coastal festival for permission. Priory Park lent the grass. WeCraft lent the drinks thesis. What remains is a town weekend that sounds like guitar with a glass in the hand.