Harri Larkin at Tramlines 2023
Every summer, Tramlines festival pitches up in Hillsborough Park. With a capacity of 30,000, it’s an event in any Sheffielder’s calendar. If you’re not going yourself (and most people are), you’ll hear it anyway, as the sounds of revelry, merriment and good music sweep through the city.
A lot of people in Sheffield go, but not many have the chance to play on one of the festival’s six stages. Even fewer have the chance to headline.
Oscar, a data scientist at Twinkl, does.
I’ve interviewed Oscar twice already, about the music project UDAGAN, which he runs with his wife, Saydyy. But when he’s not at work and not performing music with Saydyy, he finds the time to play bass in the indie-funk band Harri Larkin. The band, consisting of Oscar, singer-songwriter, Harri, and drummer, Danton, was selected by John Kennedy of Radio X as the winner of the Tramlines Apply. Out of the 1578 bands that entered the competition, Harry Larkin won. So it’s (they’re) a big deal.
I caught up with Oscar and Harri to find out how they’re feeling about the competition, the festival and what the future has in store.
‘When I talk about winning the competition, it just sounds insane,’ says Harri. ‘I’m so proud and amazed; I can’t believe it’s real. When I first heard about the prize, I thought ‘that is the best prize I’ve ever heard of — whoever wins that is so lucky,’ and then I never thought about it again until we got nominated. It was only when we got shortlisted that I thought I’d better have another look at what we’d win.’
The prizes are:
- The headline slot at the BBC Introducing stage at Tramlines 2023: ‘that alone would be the best prize ever,’ — Harri.
- Playing the ‘This Feeling’ stage at Truck Festival Oxfordshire 2023: ‘it’s huge — it’s sold out,’ — Harri.
- Playing Victorious Festival 2023: ‘Sam Fender headlined there last year, so that’s massive,’ Harri.
- £500 towards recording at Pirate Studios and a double page spread in Exposed magazine. ‘That alone would have been amazing,’ — Harri.
‘It’s going to be a busy summer,’ says Oscar.
‘This is the kind of thing you dream about,’ Harri says. ‘I cried at work when I found out we won.’ Harri’s day job is working in a Sky TV call centre. ‘I was trying to call Oscar and Danton to tell them, then I called my girlfriend, crying, and my phone was just blowing up. I’d only just started working for Sky and I had to go up to my manager and ask if I could go outside to cry because I’d just won a competition and they said, ‘yes, of course, go and tell your mum!’’
The band has been together for four years. Coincidentally, Harri and Oscar moved to Sheffield within a couple of weeks of each other in 2019. Harri posted on message boards that she was looking for musicians to help her form a band.
‘I got in touch and we chatted about it,’ says Oscar. ‘It took a while to have a jam together. The funny thing was, when we did, we realised we lived so close to each other that, if I looked out of my window, I could see Harri’s flat.’
‘That was another weird coincidence,’ says Harri. ‘I met Danton, our drummer, through a friend that worked with him at Aviva. I’d already tried to make the band happen in Cornwall, where I’m from, and then in Bristol but it just hadn’t worked. There’s a lot of gatekeeping in music. I thought, ‘well, if you’re not going to let me in, I’ll just find another gate.’ So then I came up to Sheffield and tried again with the exact same songs. Originally, Danton said no because he was too busy, but when he actually listened to the songs, he said he’d join us.’
In some ways, the band’s Sheffield resurrection felt meant to be. In others, not so much: the band got together, rehearsed together, played one gig and then the world went into lockdown.
‘It was really tough at first, because I’d just moved here, didn’t really know anyone and wasn’t able to meet anyone,’ Harri says. ‘For the first year, I really hated it, but something clicked about two years ago and now Sheffield definitely feels like home.’
The band seems to feel like home for its members, too; Harri describes it as a ‘big, happy family.’ It’s interesting, though, as creative relationships aren’t always easy, but then neither are families.
‘We’re all really different,’ Harri says. ‘Each of us has a really strong musical personality but, somehow, when we all come together, it sounds great and it gives us a totally unique sound.’
Oscar’s background is electronic and folk music, Danton loves jazz and Harri loves pop-punk and grunge. Mix all that together and you get Harri Larkin.
‘I’d describe our sound as upbeat, indie funk with some punk sensibilities,’ Harri says. ‘We’ve got jazzy chords and it’s the kind of music that makes you want to grab your friends and dance around the field.’
‘I think the thing that ties it all together is we all have our own tastes that we’ve really zoned into, but we’ve also experienced such a diverse array of music in our lives,’ adds Oscar. ‘We’ve never had an issue making different things work together. Harri can play a new track she’s come up with and me and Danton can play things from completely different areas of inspiration but it all just fits together. It feels like a very natural process.’
It can be so difficult to get teams to develop effective creative processes but Harri, Oscar and Danton seem to have managed it as easily as breathing. Harri has always been a songwriter but became a singer because she needed someone to sing the songs she’d written. She then plays them for Oscar and Danton and, together, they turn them into a Harri Larkin track.
It takes a lot of trust to hand over something you’ve worked hard on and is extremely precious to you. Harri puts the quality of the band down to trust; the current line-up is ‘the one’, she says. ‘I’ve had other line-ups of the band in the past and, sometimes, you do get power struggles. There’s such a nice balance with these guys, though. They really respect what I put in and I respect what they can add to it. I don’t know how we’ve done it, but it’s working really well. It’s scary to imagine adding other members because it’s such a well-balanced cocktail at the moment.’
And the balance is getting them places. This will be their third performance at Tramlines. Last year, they opened the main stage at Tramlines and now, in 2023, they’re headlining the BBC Introducing Library stage.
‘When we played last year, I had a walk around all the different stages,’ Oscar says. ‘I thought the Library stage was the nicest. The BBC always builds such a great atmosphere around their stages at festivals; it always feels like you’re somehow stepping outside the festival into another world.’
‘It’s the stage people go to when they want to discover new music,’ Harri says. ‘The people there will be there to genuinely listen. I can’t wait to show them what we’ve got.’
Find out more about the band over on the Harri Larkin website. You can also follow them on Instagram, Twitter and SoundCloud.
To find out more about Tramlines, visit the festival’s official site.
