Black Deer Festival organiser calls for more women artists

Nearly 70% of the acts at this year's Black Deer Festival will have female representation

An organiser of a big music festival near Tunbridge Wells said there was "more to be done" to improve gender diversity in line-ups.

Nearly 70% of the acts at this year's Black Deer Festival will have female representation.

The annual festival, which is run primarily by women, takes place in Eridge Park on the Kent-Sussex border.

Lead festival booker Bev Burton said women artists often have "more on their plate", including pregnancy.

A number of festivals have recently faced criticism for having predominantly male line-ups, including Glastonbury Festival, which received a backlash after announcing its bill, featuring all-male headliners.

The festival takes place in Eridge Park on the Kent-Sussex border

Ms Burton said: "I think it's for everybody to be part of this - for the fans to be listening and supporting female artists, for the promoters at grassroots level to be promoting female artists.

"When we're working with great female artists, there just seems to be a lot more on their plate."

She added: "One year, we were looking at a massive range of great female artists and two of the artists we went after were going to be heavily pregnant around the dates of our festivals."

Black Deer Festival, launched by Deborah Shilling and Gill Tee in 2018, will this year be headlined by Grammy-winning Bonnie Raitt, The Pretenders, Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats.

Shilling said setting up a festival in a male-dominated industry was "relatively ground-breaking".

"When Gill Tee and I first had the vision to set up Black Deer, we found ourselves across the table from men every single time when we were out trying to raise money to put the festival on," she said.

"And we've often found ourselves considering our dialogue when we were talking to our investors because it's not necessarily those things that you want to be saying in a business setting."

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