From Ed Sheeran to Let’s Eat Grandma: how Access Creative College has shaped 15 years of Latitude

As Latitude marks its 20th anniversary this July, it’s worth pausing on a partnership that most festivalgoers walk past without knowing it’s there. Access Creative College, a further education college with seven UK campuses specialising in the creative arts, has been embedded in Latitude for 15 years, running a stage, training crew, and quietly launching careers.

Ian Johnson, the college’s head of music industry partnerships and artist development, has been at the heart of that relationship. He’s also a local. “Latitude is work,” he says. “It’s lovely work. But I never really get to appreciate the acts the way I’d like to.”

Access Creative College, alongside its university-level sister company DBS, focuses primarily on students aged 16 to 19. The Norwich campus is the closest to Henham Park, and it was via a collaboration with a now-defunct local arts organisation, Culture Works East, that the college first got a foothold at Latitude.

“We ran creative workshops to re-engage young people in education,” Johnson explains. “That’s how we crept into Latitude.” What began as workshop delivery evolved into something more substantial. The college ran its own stage at Latitude for a number of years, putting acts on in front of a live audience, but the crew behind it was equally significant. Sound engineers, lighting operators, artist liaison staff, stage managers: many were Access Creative College students, gaining real-world experience in front of tens of thousands of people.

“Doing sound at a festival is very different from doing sound in a little venue. Once they’ve coped with something like that, and many things have gone wrong over the years—obviously we’re in England so weather is quite a big one—they feel confident they can cope with most things.”

It’s a solution to one of the music industry’s most stubborn problems: the experience paradox. “You can’t get a job until you’ve got experience, and you can’t get experience until you’ve got a job,” Johnson says. “To rock up somewhere and say you’ve done Latitude, that puts you straight to the top of the list.”

Some of the acts who played the Access Creative College stage have since gone on to perform on Latitude’s bigger stages. Among those who made that leap are Maya Law, Gabby Rivers, Beth McCarthy, Mullally, Bessie Turner and Arthur Black.

The biggest name is Ed Sheeran. Johnson encountered him well before the Latitude connection, when Sheeran was a teenager submitting a demo CD for a Norwich showcase. “He was incredible for his age,” Johnson recalls. He passed the demo to a management company, Crown, who signed Sheeran almost immediately. His mother was worried about him dropping out of education to move to London, so Johnson brokered a solution: Sheeran enrolled at Access Creative College’s London campus on an artist development scheme. “During that time we would give him shows,” Johnson says, “and one of those was an early Latitude, almost like an open mic.”

The other major Latitude story is Let’s Eat Grandma, Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, who formed the duo and recorded their debut album in the studios at ACC Norwich. “They came to our Norwich College. They played Latitude for us before they came to the college, when they were still around 15 and at school, they played our stage two years on the trot.” They have since played the larger Latitude stages, and Johnson says with evident warmth: “They almost feel like a Latitude act in a way.”

Johnson’s conviction in the importance of early opportunity is rooted in personal experience. At 16, playing in a teenage punk band in Norfolk, a bandmate had the idea of writing to the BBC, care of Radio 1, to invite John Peel to a gig in Snettisham. They heard nothing back. Then, on the night, Peel turned up.

“Just the fact he came and saw us, encouraged us, posed for photos, played us on the radio, talked about us. It meant I felt like it was totally tangible that it was possible. Somebody like that changed my life.” said Ian.

Peel even wrote about the gig in the music magazine Sounds, declaring Snettisham the rock and roll capital of the world. “I think he changed my life,” Johnson says. “And that’s enough. If you’ve got all the other bits going on, that confidence can carry you forward.”

This year at Latitude, Access Creative College is sponsoring the Climate Live stage, a solar-powered double-decker bus that performs across multiple festivals during the summer. Two college acts will play, alongside a graduating sound engineering student named Tom who is doing every Climate Live festival this year.

“It’s not a normal stage. You’re on top of a bus, trying to attract people walking past, it might rain,” Johnson says. “It tests your performance skills and communication skills.” The partnership itself came out of a connection made at Latitude. “That’s another partnership that came out of being at Latitude and being active.”

Asked for a single recommendation from this year’s line up, Johnson doesn’t hesitate: David Byrne. “That’s the one everybody’s mentioned to me. A friend saw that show in New York and came back saying it was life-changing.”