Lovebox are delighted to welcome London clubbing institution fabric to the Park this year. The legendary fabric is regularly named as the best nightclubs in the world, having welcome the likes of Ricardo Villalobos and Carl Craig during the seventeen years it’s occupied an old store space on Charterhouse Street, opposite Smithfield Meat Market.

We spoke to Oli of fabric for a little insight into how and why fabric are hitting a festival field for the first time.

Why does now feel like the right time to bring fabric to a festival?

For us, it’s not really so much about the timing – it’s about the partnership and us having found the right festival to work with. As an east London based venue ourselves we’ve long had an affinity with Lovebox and what it does, the music it hosts, but it’s the freedom to bring the ethos of what we do in the club to a big top tent that’s the most important thing for us. We’ve never been a business that simply puts our name to something for the sake of it. This is the first time we’ve ever taken fabric outside of our EC1 footprint and we do sincerely care about the music’s presentation and the environment and our customer’s comfort. The opportunity for us to install a bespoke sound and light system and have it run by our in house team was essentially the perfect situation for us.

 

What makes Lovebox a good fit for fabric?

For all of the above reasons and more to be honest. Lovebox have given us free range to represent fabric at the festival. We’re even looking at installing a wooden floor and full sound draping and we’ll be keeping the DJs on ground level so that we can replicate the sort of intimacy and experience that people have at the club.

 

What will be the challenges of bringing a club so renowned for its sound to a field?

Well, simply put we’ve had 16 years to learn and tweak the sound in each room at fabric. Our technical team are here, constantly testing new products and EQing the rooms for certain musical styles on the night so although the architecture of the space here hasn’t changed – that much – adapting the soundsystem to what’s happening in real time is a massive part of what they do. We’re partnering with Pioneer for the bespoke system for our tent and a massive point is that it’ll be immersive sound, with speakers set all around you. There’ll be challenges in the set up for sure, but the entire team is incredibly passionate about ensuring that this won’t just be another front blasting system blasting out into the open air. 

 

What can Lovebox-goers expect from the fabric stage?

We’ve split the lineup between the days of the festival to best represent our club’s programming. The Friday at Lovebox will represent FABRICLIVE and the Saturday will represent our Saturday night programming so the two lineups will be pretty different from each other. On Friday we’ll be hosting more bass heavy music with elements of drum & bass, grime, hip hop and garage and on the Saturday we’ll be exploring the realms of house and techno with our residents Craig Richards and Terry Francis alongside some extra special guests.

 

Visually, will the stage be reminiscent of the club or something completely different?

Our entire game plan is to bring a big slice of what fabric does week in week out to the festival, so yes, to put it bluntly we’re hoping it will be as reminiscent of the fabric experience as we can possibly make it. Wooden flooring, powerful sound, intensive light shows… the whole deal really.