Little Simz Curates 30th Meltdown: In Conversation With Deborah Yewande Bankole, Public Programme Producer At The Southbank Centre
- Oisín McGilloway
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Returning to one of London’s most important cultural hubs for its 30th year, Meltdown is back hosting 11 days of artist-curated shows and talks from a range of British and international artists.
Being Britain’s longest-running, artist-curated festival, Meltdown has seen its fair share of famous faces behind the wheel; from David Bowie, to Robert Smith and Shaka Khan. The festival has been through many incarnations in three decades, representing the spirit of its time through music and performance. That’s why this year’s edition is being curated by Little Simz, who has chosen to build her line-up on the same North London youth culture that has held up her stellar career so far.
As in previous years, the programme consists mostly of musical acts. From the tight, light beats of the Grime-father Mike Skinner with his legendary musical project The Streets, to the fun, free-wheeling music of Mahalia; from the Afrobeats of Tiwa Savage, to the alt-country Kara Jackson. Jazz meets hip-hop with BADBADNOTGOOD, R&B with Sasha Keable, and the power of Gen-Z is placed at the forefront with online royalty Lola Young. You don’t have to look far, in fact, to see the influence of youth culture on this programme; with the help of Meltdown Young Producers, Simz’ line-up is a hostile takeover of a lauded cultural space in the country’s capital. As well as gigs, there are design, sculpture and poetry workshops, as well as free-entry events for the more free-spirited ideas, all of which create Simz’ vision for an open artistic space in an ever-closing industry.
Ahead of the festival beginning later this week, STRAND caught up with Deborah Yewande Bankole, Public Programme Producer at the Southbank Centre who worked with Simz to host this stellar line-up, to talk about the arduous, but also rewarding process of bringing a diverse programme of high-class talent to the banks of the Thames, doing justice to the 30 years of Meltdown that came before.
What was your role in curating this programme?
As a creative producer at the Southbank Centre, I lead on producing the free, multidisciplinary programme of events for Meltdown, which is really the heart of the festival, sprawling across the whole site for 11 days. This involves working closely with the curator to understand what they want the feeling, mood, message and overarching creative thread of the festival to be, then translating this to a series of incredible, one-off participatory events! With this year’s Meltdown, the range of free events is incredible, from sculpture, poetry workshops, sound systems, dance battles to talks, open mics, and DJ takeovers!
It’s a complex process, involving so many brilliant minds, both within the Southbank and across Little Simz’ core team, all of whom are instrumental in taking something from an idea through to a world class event. It being a festival, the aim when working with the curator is to create a body of work that allows audiences to move seamlessly from gigs with world class artists like James Blake, Sasha Keable and Jon Batiste through to the most important innovative artists of our time like Kloe Dean, curating the Bodied: Dance Battle. Or Aziah and Loner’s Eglise: Unfolding Views, which takes audiences on a durational journey with their performance art piece through live painting and music.
Curating the public programme is ultimately about how we reimagine our invitation to artists and audiences to make creative connections on site. It’s an open invitation for ideas, for voices that haven’t always been given a platform, and for audiences who might otherwise feel an arts centre isn’t accessible for them. That’s what great public programming should do.
Meltdown has quite a famous history, with a whole host of famous names having curated the festival. What do you think Simz has brought to the table that holds up with previous years, but also maybe goes against tradition?
Meltdown is in its 30th year now, and every curator brings something unique. What we have this year with Simz is a curator born and bred in London, whom audiences have seen real time break through ceilings and become one of the most dominant creative voices of our time. I also think one of the really important things about Simz is how loudly she celebrates the creative pathways she came up through in London and works to make that accessible for others. With that, Simz has brought a radical clarity of vision around how we celebrate opportunities to be creative, to connect, and ultimately turn the site into a third space.
Simz embraced the invitation to dream big. We always invite curators to conceive of the site as their cultural playground, and she ran with that. We’ve created a programme that doesn’t treat the space as a set of formalised venues, but instead a public space that can become a youth club, a dance floor, a social space, and a space to connect, and create.
It's completely in the spirit of Meltdown and it also pushes us forward, expanding what this festival can be in years to come.
Could you talk a bit about your/Simz’ aims while curating this line-up?
From day one, we began unpicking the idea of how we build a festival that resonates with audiences beyond the real time experience of the events. We asked ourselves: What's the takeaway for audiences? How can the events be by audiences and for audiences? How can we invite them into Simz’ creative world to get a sense of her practice, inspiration and process? These questions got us to a place of looking at the creative family that contributes to her own work, like her choreographer, Kloe Dean.
There seems to be a focus specifically on young people and young artists, perhaps more than previous Meltdown festivals. Could you talk more on why you and Simz made this decision?
Simz was clear she wanted the programme to reflect the communities and places that shaped her, especially spaces like Mary’s Youth Club, where she honed her craft as a multidisciplinary artist. That took us towards conceiving not only what the festival would look like in part as a youth club, but as one built up entirely by young people. From there, the Meltdown Young Producers was set up: a cohort of 11 producers, all aged 18-25, recruited through London’s youth club networks. The Young Producers have been working incredibly hard to produce two days across the festival, reimagining a youth club in our public space. The first event: Works in Progress: Speak Easy is an open mic night which has invited young creatives across the city to apply to perform. The second event At Your Own Pace is a night which transitions much like an entire day in a youth club does, with a whole range of activities including crafting, team games, and headline performances from the likes of Shae Universe. The project is testimony to what young creatives can imagine when you provide them with resources and opportunity.
This year, there’s a wide range of events, with gigs from a range of artists, but also free-of-charge talks and interactive events – what was the aim behind including these?
Having free activity across any festival, season and programme is part of the core function of what the Southbank does! Currently 40% of our programme is free and these programmes are by design just as creatively expansive and cutting edge as what audiences can find across auditoriums.
We’re trying to move away from the idea that culture happens to people or is just handed to them. Culture happens with them, around them, because of them. That’s what these free, open-participation and interactive events are about.
We want people to turn up and see themselves reflected and also challenged. We want them to join a dance battle, step into a writing workshop, mould some clay, and leave feeling like they were part of something. It’s about co-creation. The Southbank Centre’s not here to just broadcast culture from a stage; we’re here to host it, share it and open it up.
Who/which event are you particularly excited for?
This is tough! The beauty of producing a festival is the wholeness of it - seeing how events are in dialogue with one another, from auditorium gigs to public space events. It creates this frenetic energy across the site.
But equally, having worked with 11 incredible young people across the last three months, I’m so excited for their events, At Your Own Pace and Works In Progress: Speak Easy. Watching young people take up space in a major arts institution is so rewarding. Their work is thoughtful, joyful and has a really fresh sense of perspective.
I’m also really looking forward to 101FM Sound System on our Riverside Terrace which is set to be a true celebration of bass and radio culture from London, and of course, Little Simz’ closing gig with our resident orchestra Chineke! is going to be a moment. Our 30th Meltdown is going to be an unmissable one!
Little Simz' Meltdown runs from Thursday 12th to Sunday 22nd June 2025 at the Southbank Centre, London.
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