Kilimanjaro Live’s Joff Hall tells Access about the promoter’s plan to launch a new festival series in what promises to be one of the busiest years on record for major live entertainment events.

Kilimanjaro’s first festival launch since 2019, the 14,000-capacity Neck Of The Woods is due to take place on May 29 at Earlam Park in Norwich, and will use the same site infrastructure as the promoter’s Let’s Rock festival that will be staged at the same site the previous day.

Neck of the Woods will run across three stages with a lineup including The Kooks, DMA’s and Sea Girls.

Former TEG MJR promoter, Hall says Neck Of The Woods is set to be followed by another edition of the event staged at a different location later this summer. He says the opportunity to stage the event arose on the back of Kilimanjaro’s acquisition last summer of festival promoter UK Live, which was planning 80’s festival Let’s Rock at Earlam Park: “They’re there on the Saturday and they’ve got this wonderful site with a fantastic mainstage set up. So we got the opportunity to use it the day after for a different audience.

“We had an opportunity to use the infrastructure for that, and we felt Norwich was missing an event of this scale and audience.

“Looking at other outdoor shows in Norwich, there are a lot of things for fans of ‘80s music and pop but we couldn’t see any major events where indie or alternative music was being covered. So, we felt there was an opportunity to put something special on.”

Hall says there is a long-term future in Norwich for Neck Of The Woods, which Kilimanjaro has been working on since early Autumn last year – and that it has been created in a way that enables it to “pop up anywhere where it makes sense”.

The promoter says the decision on whether to launch the second Neck Of The Woods event later this summer depends on a number of factors falling into place, such as the ability to secure the right artists, dates and location, as well as the level of confidence in the market: “If you’re up against another festival down the road, it’s not going to make sense to compete, and it depends on the availability of the site.

“We’re hopeful that we can launch an additional Neck Of The Woods for 2022. If not, I’d like to think we would definitely hold more than one in 2023.”

The promoter says that as well as hosting big-name established acts, the upcoming festival will provide a platform for East Anglian talent, with half a dozen local bands set to play and an opening slot reserved for a local band on the main stage.