Brainwash Promotions

This year we’re celebrating our 5th birthday, so thought this would be an appropriate time to figure out for ourselves, and explain to the uninitiated, just what this small music festival is all about.



Brainwash began life as a three-day event across the Brudenell Social Club and Royal Park Cellars in 2006; the idea being that the venues’ close proximity to one another would create a flow of eager music-lovers across a small patch of Leeds’s much beloved LS6 area. Key to the ethos of the festival was, and is still, diversity: a mish-mash of genres loosely based around rock/indie/metal music but stretching from its confines into anything from folk to jazz to electronica; people don’t like just one type of music and they certainly don’t want to see the same band 40 times over a weekend…



We’ve had the mathy patterns of Japanese instrumentalists Lite (not forgetting their snot wielding tour buddies 54-71); the soft tones and subtle ingenuity of Adem; the epic rock progressions of Oceansize; the brutal noise of US legends Unsane; the neo-classical motions of Olafur Arnalds; we’ve even managed to somehow take Norway’s Jaga Jazzist from the majesty of London’s Barbican Hall one night into the modesty of a backstreet social club in Leeds the next. And that’s before you even consider the wealth of local talent, indeed the bedrock of an event like this, provided by the likes of Humanfly, Fran Rodgers, Vessels, Forward Russia, Pulled Apart By Horses, Glissando, Paul “Lone Wolf” Marshall and many more.



We’ve also had a charity element to the festival each year, raising money for the likes of Oxfam and Sheffield Children’s Hospital in the past few years. This year we’re in the process of setting up a teaching program with local musicians, aiming to provide free music lessons to those young people who would normally struggle to get any.



For many people, however, the ‘serious’ stuff doesn’t matter too much, and that’s totally fine – Brainwash is hopefully just an excuse to see a load of ace bands, discover someone you’ve never heard of and drink the very reasonably priced Brudenell bar dry…