IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Adem Holness
A
member of the Black Lives In Music task force , BRIT School graduate Adem Holness has a history of supporting grassroots music via his work for charities including Sound Connections and involvement in initiatives such as BBC Introducing . Having managed Arts Council England ’ s grassroots emergency fund during the pandemic , and helped to save more than 130 venues in the process , Holness joined the Southbank Centre in 2022 as head of contemporary music .
Among the projects he has overseen at the Southbank Centre include Meltdown with Christine and the Queens , a site takeover with fashion star Nicholas Daley , artist development initiative Southbank Centre Studios , the return of free music series Futuretense , and sell-out gigs with the likes of Erykah Badu and Brian Eno .
What was the first concert you went to and did it have a lasting impact ? The first concert I remember is the Spice Girls at Wembley Arena . I ' m always someone who really finds the fun in live music and that gig had plenty of that . I was very young , and I
Chaka Khan curates Meltdown 2024
Ahead of Chaka Khan ’ s Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre on 14-23 June , its head of contemporary music Adem Holness discusses how his passion for supporting grassroots music and artists from diverse background has been instrumental to his chosen career path
Photo : Jo Metson Scott remember looking up at the screen with the band on it , and my cousin explicitly saying to me , ‘ don ' t look at the screen , you can watch them on TV anytime , they are in the room !’. What I always think about when putting on shows is whether the experience is connecting with people , and try to make it exciting and ambitious .
How formative was the BRIT School ? Massively formative . I think from the outside a lot of people think of it as being like Fame the musical ; a space to generate celebrities . It is like Fame in that people really are singing and dancing in the hallways but for me it was all about developing your own creativity and finding out about the kind of stories that you want to tell and the way that you want to influence creative spaces . Just being around that many other creative people across different disciplines was inspiring .
What led you to join the Southbank Centre in 2022 ? The thing I ' m really interested in is creating space to facilitate processes where artists and creative people can realise ambitions that they might not be able to realise in other contexts . That might be about a particular approach to performance or something that they ' ve never got to do before . To me , Southbank Centre felt like the perfect playground to be able to do that on lots of different scales ; whether that ' s a grassroots collective in the Purcell Room or Chaka Khan performing an album , that she had never got to perform before , with an orchestra .
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