Hastings Fat Tuesday Music Festival has won Event of the Year 2018 at the Celebration of Sussex Life Awards!
The fastest growing festival in the South-East, and the UK’s largest Mardi Gras celebration, Hastings Fat Tuesday marks its 10th anniversary in 2019, with five days packed with live music and carnival celebrations 1-5 March. Borrowing heavily from the New Orleans take on Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday” is English for Mardi Gras), the festival is also hailed as Hastings’ answer to SXSW in Texas.
In 2018, Hastings Fat Tuesday made the Telegraph’s list of the world’s top 12 places to party.
The Celebration of Sussex Life Awards were presented at a ceremony at The Grand Hotel, Brighton, on Thursday 15 October. Hastings Fat Tuesday was nominated for the award by Sussex Life readers, and the other finalists were Brighton Fringe and Chiddingly Festival.
Adam Daly, Festival Director, said: “We are honoured and delighted to receive this award, which shows just how far Hastings Fat Tuesday has come. We are committed to providing platforms to showcase the very best local talent, as well as welcoming emerging and established artists from all over the UK, and there are plenty of treats in store for the landmark 10th edition of Hastings Fat Tuesday.”
Previous headliners have included Dodgy, The Membranes, and Skunk Anansie. Hastings Fat Tuesday 2019 promises quality live music, Mardi Gras madness, and plenty of surprises. More details of the programme will follow soon.
The festival is now open to applications from solo artists and bands to perform at two of the key events, which between them regularly attract audiences well into the thousands:
Unplugged Saturday (2 March) – a hugely popular acoustic afternoon in Hastings Old Town, with 200 individual performances.
Fat Tuesday Tour (5 March) – the climax of the festival with 24 of the best emerging and established bands touring Hastings Old Town venues, performing three 20-minute sets each.
Applications must be made online by the deadline of 1 December. Applicants will be asked to provide a bio, information about recent gigs, and links to their music.