Image via Publicist
After the worst of COVID-19, Strawberries & Creem made a triumphant return last year with Burna Boy, PartyNextDoor, Little Simz and many more. It was a trying time and not without its challenges, but the festival’s co-founders, Chris Jammer and Preye Crooks, managed to pull it off. This year brings its own, unique challenges, but it has every chance of being their biggest success yet—for one, they’re working with Sony’s live music arm, Senbla, which has given them a bit of a boost. But biggest of all? They’ve managed to bag U.S. rap icon Lil Wayne as their headliner—for which, in a bizarre twist of fate, we have Trump to thank.
Despite the ever-expanding scale of their operation, Strawberries & Creem—based in Childerley Orchard, Cambridge, since day one—is still a relatively young festival. After overcoming an initial rivalry, Chris and Preye founded the festival back in 2014, born of a club night called Creem (fka Cream before they got a talking to from Creamfields) that the pair ran with Will Young (not the singer) while studying at the prestigious Cambridge University. What started out as a small event for students quickly snowballed—almost by accident.
In fact, quite a few elements of the festival came to be by accident; S&C’s trademark inclusion of a ‘heritage’ act was actually the result of some quick thinking to make up for the fact that older acts with a bag of hits turned out to be more affordable than the artists currently at No. 1. That proved to be an inspired decision and it’s come to define them as the place booking the likes of Nelly and T-Pain alongside Skepta and Central Cee. They can book whoever they like now, but that balance is something cherished by the organisers and punters alike.
Ahead of this year’s edition, which takes place June 18-19, we spoke to the two co-founders about how the festival’s grown and how they’ve pushed themselves to stay ahead of an ever-evolving music and media landscape.
COMPLEX: You guys founded Strawberries & Creem when you met at Cambridge University in 2014. Apart from obviously being at uni, what were you both doing before the launch of S&C?
Chris Jammer: Preye started with Will [Young], doing club nights the year before I got there. I’d taken a year off to travel around, went out a lot, visited every other uni town and then, when I arrived, Preye and Will were already running a couple of events for uni students called Creem, Jam Hot and Freshly Baked. And then I came on as a fresher, as the new blood of promoters. It was March, in my first year, when we decided to do an end-of-year garden party and call it a festival. And that’s where Strawberries & Creem was born.
Preye Crooks: It was very organic, very authentic. It was definitely not based around money at the time. It was a club to put on music from the areas that we were from, that we felt weren’t represented in Cambridge. That turned into a garden party for 500 people, and then the following year we were very lucky to book Skepta. That took it from a 500-person event to a two and a half thousand-person event. And from then, it just kept on growing.
CJ: In that first year, we booked quite a few artists, didn’t we? Artists of note. We had Lethal Bizzle, we had Tempa T, Big Narstie was the second year, but we were booking people in the scene for like 300 people cap venues in Cambridge, which was almost our USP.
You have a day job as well, Preye?
PC: Yeah. I have another job. I was wanting to work in A&R for years and managed to get a job as an intern at Columbia, which Sony owns. I was at Columbia for seven years and then just moved over to start work at a new label that Sony also owned, called Robots & Humans. I obviously always spoke about Strawberries & Creem and told them it was something that they should get involved in. They ignored me but, eventually, for multiple reasons, they ended up coming down. I guess a lot of the employees of the building were there and it was spoken about a lot. They took the chance on us. So we have Sony’s first-owned festival in Europe and second in the world, behind Pharrell Williams’ Something In The Water festival.
The motto of the festival is Celebrate Heritage Champion Future. How do you strike that balance? Is there a formula?
PC: Yes and no. The story of the Celebrate Heritage Champion Future was arguably as much a financial decision as it was a music decision. We wanted to be really competitive as an event, but we didn’t have the budget to book the Tinie Tempahs or the Rita Oras or whoever were having number ones at the time. What we decided would be really interesting was to book artists who had a huge scale and size, but maybe were at a different stage in their career. So the Shaggies, the T-Pains, the Nellys—people who everybody knew in Cambridge, both at the university and with the local demographic as well, but potentially had had those hits a little earlier, so it was much more affordable for us at the time. So we always kind of had the heritage as the big headliner and then we’d fill it with loads of really exciting up-and-coming talent. We didn’t mean to do that at the beginning, but we realised that it became our brand and our niche. This year, we went heavy with our headliner Lil Wayne, which definitely has a heritage feel to it, so we felt that we only needed maybe David Rodigan and one or two others in that bracket. Other years we’ve done it the other way around. Last year, for example, we booked Burna Boy and Koffee, which felt much more like a booking of now. And then we had a heritage artist underneath that. So it doesn’t really matter, as long as we feel like it’s running through that line-up and you can really smell that energy.
CJ: It’s also quite important to where it is in the UK and Cambridge. What we noticed is the trends are happening in London and that Cambridge was slightly behind it, so it’s keeping it really cool but also very accessible and trying to strike that balance. It’s worked really well for our audience because you get to hear the cutting edge telling of what’s going on in the UK, but then also you do have that nostalgia and fun which brings it back into a really exciting event to go to.
Was it difficult to get Lil Wayne? He was banned from the country for a long time, wasn’t he?
PC: Yeah, he was banned from the country for a very long time and I think he got pardoned by Donald Trump. And then, amazingly, we just had a conversation with the agents that we knew very well and we were able to make it work, which is incredibly exciting and someone that we’ve had on a list for a very long time. So we’re buzzing to have him over.
CJ: He’s not been able to perform here since before he dropped The Carter III—15 years ago! But yeah, Donald Trump did him and us a solid.
PC: Very ironically.
I noticed that alongside the traditional platforms and press, you’ve got Antz’s very popular Instagram page, IMJUSTBAIT, as a media partner. What made you want to take that route?
PC: We’re lazy and he sits on the next desk to us [laughs].
CJ: We’re independent in our mindset, and we’re always thinking creatively about how best to target our audience and to be honest. In this new age of Instagram and social media, his platform is second to none and leading in that respect—and he’s talking to the exact demographic that we want to. We got talking, because he does sit next to us, about things and what his vision was and where he wanted to go. The stars seemed to align because he was talking about getting into the live event space. We said this isn’t a job for the faint-hearted, so if you want to dip your toe in the water and see how we do this, we could come up with a sort of agreement. And yeah, it’s working out really well. He’s hosting the main stage. We’ve got a lot of content coming in the next couple of weeks leading up to the festival.
Due to the pandemic a couple of years ago, there was obviously a pause on the festival. What have been some of the biggest changes you’ve noticed when putting on the festival this year, and last, compared to previous editions?
PC: How long do we have? The pandemic changed so many different aspects of society and I think it’s still taking time to work out what a lot of those things are. I definitely think consumer buying habits have changed. I think we used to have a rough schedule of how many tickets we’d sell, at what point, what days of the month are really important, how important paydays were in one month compared to another. I think that’s all changed now because people have less confidence that things aren’t going to be cancelled or changed. I think we’ve seen off the back of the pandemic now and I don’t want to make it too political, but an upcoming recession… There’s been a lot of stuff that’s happened in real life that feeds back into our industry.
CJ: I thought there was some sort of hope post-pandemic, with everything opening back up, and there was this massive surge in people wanting to go to events. I think that has actually led to a massive increase in the number of events on the market. I saw a stat the other day that said there are 67% more festivals this year happening in the UK than there were in 2019. So there are all these new brands popping up to take advantage of the world opening up. We’ll see what happens with that. But there’s a lot more competition than there was pre-pandemic, for sure.
PC: It’s been the hardest year to date. Last year, everything was off. We were all in the same boat and I think, this year, the recalibration has been the lack of consistency between 2019 and 2022. Everything that we’ve ever taught ourselves or trained ourselves about this industry had to change and it’s been a massive learning curve.
We mentioned briefly the Sony/Senbla relationship. How do you see the festival growing and changing with their involvement?
CJ: Well, it’s amazing for us being totally independent, coming into work in a building like this and being able to learn from music industry experts and use their contacts to grow our own networks. I think the power of Senbla is brilliant because Ollie, who runs Senbla, has relationships with a lot of the big senior people at some of their agents. It’s really helped our other festival, the Cambridge Club, in being able to secure acts like Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie, bolting onto their tours. But I think when you’re in a building like this, it really expands what your vision of what this could be, and it just trickles down from there.
PC: Yeah. It’s weight and security—not in a financial sense, more in a confidence and safety sense. Ollie has been fantastic in insulating us and teaching us and allowing us to compete in what is an increasingly competitive market. Those relationships and that experience… You don’t realise what you’re missing until you’re missing it. We didn’t know about that. And as soon as we joined the Sony umbrella and Senbla, we’ve seen the benefits.
So you’re fully based in their office and everything?
PC: Yes. Senbla have a division in Sony now, and we’ve taken over that part of the office, basically. It’s the biggest mistake they ever made [laughs]. We’re fully part of the Sony/Senbla umbrella, and as a result we can leverage everything that goes on in the building—whether that be brands, the insight and analytics team, or the artists and the marketing.
More generally, what changes are you hoping to see in the festival circuit moving forward in the UK?
CJ: I mean, for us, we’ve been quite forthcoming with what we’re setting up to do on gender-balanced line-ups. Last year, we had a 50-50 gender balance line-up. This year, 60% of our line-up is women and we’ve seen actually that the industry is moving in that direction. We signed up to the Keychange pledge a couple of years ago and we’re seeing things change for the better. Secondly, we’ve kind of led the way in what a safe space event should look like and we’re building on that this year. Again, we’re hoping to really drive some real change there. It’s not just for us—it’s about getting everybody else on board and learning from what we did from our pilot last year. It’s been reported that 100 festivals—including the likes of Parklife, Reading, Boardmasters, etc—have signed a Safe Spaces pledge off the back of the work we did there. It’s been a real win for us and something that we want to continue to be at the forefront of.
And is there anything else you want us to know about this year’s festival that hasn’t been announced yet, or generally that you want to announce?
PC: Yeah! Special guests! Last year, Central Cee came out, Loski came out, Wes Nelson came out, and it’s going to be that level and even bigger this year. Secondly, what we want to get across—more than anything—is the discovery aspect of Strawberries & Creem. We’ve got an amazing women-led Carnival float; we’ve got a drum & bass stage; we’ve got a main stage and a house stage. We just want people to really come and experience what we’ve put together and be excited to discover new music and new culture.
