Padiham Music Festival comes alive this weekend

The event will see 12 bands perform in 12 hours on Saturday, starting with The Staags at 12pm. The festival will be completely free to attend and will finish at 12am, with the likes of Dayz Gone By, Wall 2 Wall, Zephyr, Wolfman Lateral, Zoltar, On Edge, Atlas, Shadow Company, Solar States, HFB and Nerve Agents, who’ll close out the day with a set that gets underway at 11pm.

Forge FTV founder Aaron Calland, who formed the platform in honour of his late wife, who loved live music, started the initiative recording jam nights at The Electric Circus before launching the jam nights at Sanctuary’s rock bar, Padiham’s Battle of the Bands and now the Padiham Music Festival. “The 12 bands have all agreed to do the festival for free, which is an unbelievable show of support from the grassroots musicians, just showing what a community there is there and what a community we've managed to build over these last seven or eight months,” Calland said when asked about the music festival.

The Battle of the Bands event, which took place at the Padiham Town Hall on March 14, 2026, saw five acts - Chimera, Vaguely Sane, Reillo ,Not Ned and The Staags take to the stage for a series of 30 minute sets. The Staags emerged victorious at the Town Hall, beating out Chimera by just one vote and with it, earned the opportunity to open the Padiham Music Festival this weekend. In essence, the Battle of the Bands served as a dress rehearsal for both the music festival and the Town Hall.

“I think it's helped to promote the Town Hall as a venue for that sort of thing (live music),” Mayor Lewis suggested. “The Town Hall is used for lots of different things, but we don't get too many nights like that with lots of bands on. Occasionally there'll be an event that has a band, but there's not been much sort of, just straightforward live music. And I think it's an ideal venue for that sort of thing,” Mayor Lewis added.

But what does the future hold for the Battle of the Bands? “I was really, really pleased with how it turned out. I'm so grateful to Aaron for the work he put into it and how he sort of got all of that off the ground and got the bands on board,” Mayor Lewis said.. But because it was sort of billed as a mayoral fundraising type event, it all depends on how the next mayor wants to take that forward in their mayoral year. I mean, they'll certainly have my encouragement to continue with it as it was really successful and it was really popular.

But whether or not it is going to be down to that next mayor, I'll certainly be encouraging them to take it forward. That's for sure,” Mayor Lewis closed out.

As The Staags have discovered from winning the Battle of the Bands, it’s an event that could open doors for artists in the East Lancashire area. “I think because we've obviously got the music festival coming up on the 18th, I'm hoping if we can get that as successful as I'm hoping it will be, then with that I can try and ask the town council to turn an event like that into a general town council annual event and then sort of try and take it forward from there.

And with the fact that the Battle of the Bands leads into, oh, that's how you pick, that’s how you can get a slot on the festival with the Battle of the Bands thing, that might sort of help be part and parcel of it and almost an introductory thing, the Battle of the Bands, and then you get the festival,” Mayor Lewis stated.

Nonetheless, the difficulty of coordinating the event for Mayor Lewis, Calland and Ange MacIntosh, who fronts the band On Edge and will be competing on Saturday, has been a consideration to weigh up.

“The one thing about the Battle of the Bands in Padiham is that we were concerned that we weren't going to have bands available because they'd be booked up already. Same with the Padiham Festival. We're playing early because we've got a gig later on in the evening. But there were some bands that weren't able to do it. They were really good and were willing, but the time factor impacted on whether they were free or not. So it does take a lot to organise and a lot to then get the right people in,” MacIntosh said.