Skabour supports South Kent Mind

The weekend commencing 17 September saw over 700 people descend upon Folkestone’s Grand Burstin Hotel and surrounding venues for Skabour Festival 2021, the first since 2019. 8 bands and 12 DJs played to festivalgoers over the course of the 3-day event, with many of the acts booked for the 2020 festival performing. Neville Staple Band, Dawn Penn & The Maticians, Saxon Sound System, Mad Professor and many more entertained the audience.

Once again Skabour supported South Kent Mind by collecting funds throughout the event. The charity is very grateful to festival organisers and festivalgoers for their support in raising funds and awareness for mental health.

Skabour is a community, not-for-profit festival, organised and run by the Ska-Co-op Team of local people and luvvers of ska, rocksteady, dub and reggae. It enables a platform to stage and bring international legends, established bands, and new young bands to play and perform in Folkestone.

Skabour Festival mission statement

Skabour was formed in 2010 out of a discussion between deputy chair and face of Skabour John Sims & local seafood purveyor Tony Pye.

The idea progressed to the possibility of having a few bands at the  Folkestone Harbour to compliment John’s (aka Teflon) “This Art 2 Tone” exhibition in Folkestone, having already featured at Margate, Brighton, London, Coventry and New York.  Friends Andi Elliott, Andy Shorten, Trevor Moss came to form a festival team utilising all their individual experience and work skills.  Ilir Hoti a local web designer in Dover took on producing the website and the word quickly spread, along with the help of flyers, posters, banners, BBC Radio Kent support and a printed programme.  The idea suddenly became a full blown festival with some funding from Folkestone Town Council and the Roger De Haan Trust.  It was also funded by tickets sales of indoor venue evening events at the Quarterhouse in Tontine Street.

Andy Shorten was to candidly come up with the name SKABOUR as the event was ska music and at the harbour… and so SKABOUR was born.  It was astonishing and amazing that the local community really got behind it and supported it.  Visitors came from afar including Australia, USA, Europe, South Africa and Japan.   A fabulous success. The Beat were the headline act at The Quarterhouse, plus Arthur Kaye & The Originals and Intensified. King Hammond, Special Brew from Coventry and local bands featured outside at the Airstream stage at the harbour.

Skabour

Photographer credit: Kevin D Harvey

Find out more about Skabour.

If you’d like to follow Skabour’s lead and support South Kent Mind, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our Get Involved pages to find our more.