Why Rising North Festival May Not Be Back Next Summer

The Rising North Festival has landed the biggest booking of its short life — Ash headline the Clickimin in Lerwick on Saturday night — and the same weekend may quietly decide whether the whole thing comes back in 2027. Sales for the two big ticketed nights have run slower than in either of the previous two years, according to Shetland News, even with the strongest bill the festival has assembled.

The money involved is modest by mainland standards. Saturday's headline show costs £50. Friday night, topped by Pale Waves, is the same. The Saturday afternoon family session is £15, the after-party at Mareel is £16.50, and Thursday's fringe night and the Sunday sessions cost nothing. Behind all of that sit nine people on a committee, organising in a voluntary capacity around their actual jobs.

That gap is the real story. A line-up that would look at home at a mainland event is being delivered by a handful of islanders in a town of roughly 7,000 people. Shetland is not on anybody's touring route — getting a band and its gear to Lerwick means a flight or an overnight ferry, and those costs land on a festival that is three years old, not thirty.

Who is playing, and when

The event runs Thursday to Sunday across Lerwick. It opened with a free fringe night spread over Mareel, the Thule, the Lounge and Trench, and it closes with free all-ages sessions at Mareel on Sunday afternoon. The two ticketed nights at the Clickimin are the ones that have to pay for everything else, and both are strictly over-18s.

• Friday 14 August — Pale Waves, Clickimin, 6.30pm to 11.30pm, £50, 18+
• Saturday 15 August — family day, Clickimin, noon to 4.30pm, £15, all ages
• Saturday 15 August — Ash, Clickimin, 6.30pm to 11.30pm, £50, 18+
• Saturday 15 August — after-party, Mareel, 12.30am to 2.30am, £16.50, 18+

Below the two headliners is a long roll of Shetland acts, including First Foot Soldiers, The Plonkys, Ten Tonne Dozer, The Revellers, Black 8s, The Dirty Lemons and The Poppadom Kings. That local layer is the point of the thing, not padding.

How the Rising North Festival got this big

It started in 2024 in a much smaller shape, inspired partly by the buzz around the Tall Ships visit in 2023 and by the example of the Orkney Rock Festival. Last year was the first to bring in visiting headliners — Callum Beattie and High Fade. Twelve months on, the committee has jumped a full division and booked a band that headlined Glastonbury in 1997.

Why year three is the hardest one

Grassroots festivals rarely die of failure. They die of success, when the ambition outruns the volunteer hours and the cash float. Rising North is sitting precisely at that hinge.

Bigger names, bigger invoices

Booking fees for headline acts of this size are a step change from local bills, and general running costs have climbed year on year. When your break-even depends on two nights of £50 tickets in a place with a fixed population, a slow sales month is not a rounding error — it is the difference between a surplus and a hole.

Nine volunteers and an Up Helly Aa hangover

Chairperson Anthony Peart has described the recovery period afterwards as comparable to the intensity of Up Helly Aa, which anyone in Shetland will read as a warning rather than a boast.

The work that goes on behind the scenes is ridiculous – it's every day.

The two options being weighed

Rather than fold, the committee has floated running every other year, or shrinking to a single-night format. Both are sensible survival moves. Both would also change what the weekend is: a biennial event loses momentum with promoters, and a one-nighter squeezes out the free fringe and family strands that make it feel like an island festival rather than a gig.

What £50 actually buys you here

Compare it with the mainland. TRNSMT in Glasgow lines up Lewis Capaldi, Kasabian and Richard Ashcroft for 2026, with the travel, accommodation and queueing that implies. Ash's own 30th anniversary run for their debut album 1977 takes in the UK and Europe plus Australia and New Zealand later this year — the Australian leg opens in Perth on 4 September, with European dates from November. In Lerwick you get the same band in a leisure centre for the price of a decent restaurant meal.

Worth knowing before you book: there is a maximum of four tickets per order, concessions are available on the daytime tickets, and sales go through Ticket Tailor. The Friday all-ages show at Mareel has already sold out, so the free Sunday sessions are the realistic fallback for anyone under 18.

What to watch for this weekend

If you are in Shetland, the walk-up trade on Saturday is the number that matters — not for the accounts alone, but for the argument the committee has to make to itself in September. If you are watching from the mainland, keep an eye out for the post-festival announcement: an autumn statement confirming a 2027 return would tell you the model works, while silence, or a move to alternate years, tells you the third year was as hard as it looked. Either way, Ash play the northernmost show of their anniversary year on Saturday, and it will be the loudest the Clickimin has been all summer.