“We are literally part of the furniture in Medway”
What Steven asked Anthony Martin, musician and organiser of the 20th anniversary of Antfest
Anthony Martin has spent 20 years putting on gigs for good causes, raising more than £100,000 along the way. Steven caught up with him, appropriately, while he was out training for another charity fundraiser, to talk about 20 years of Antfest, Medway’s music scene, and why he has about 200 copies of his debut album sitting in his garage.
Where are you now?
I'm by the Medway Tunnel, near the Royal Engineers. It's a little alleyway that goes down there. Before they built the tunnel, it used to be where the concrete prison hulks were, along the Medway. We used to go crabbing here back in the day. I'm at Whitewall Creek right now.
Is there any particular reason you’re there?
I'm doing a training walk for a charity walk for One Big Family, helping the homeless. They walk from Victoria to Chatham High Street. It's supposed to be 50 kilometres, but the guy that runs it, Darren, doesn't really know how far 50 kilometres is.
I’ve done it three times, and last time we got to Cobham, or Higham... one of them. And he said, “Oh, you'll be pleased to know we've done 50K.”
Well, no, because we're literally 10K away from where we're supposed to finish. Damn you! But yeah, that's on October 25th.
Are you known by any other names?
Ant Monkey.
How did you come by that name?
My first ever email. Ant Martin was taken, and I like monkeys. So that was my stage name for 15 years.
What is your official occupation?
I do things with spreadsheets in an office that will be obsolete in the next five years after AI has taken my job.
I bloody love a VLOOKUP, me.
Do you have any other additional roles, paid or unpaid?
I play bass in a wedding and function band. I organise Herofest as a charity promoter and I help out at a place called The Molehole in Gravesend, organising their event schedule and stepping in on audio mixing duties.
It's so much fun. It's like building this community and creating this network.
What is Antfest?
It's a music festival I started in 2006 when I was working at Vanquis Bank down in Chatham Maritime. One of my colleagues and friends, Adam D'Souza’s dad, passed away from a heart issue. They set up the Gerald D'Souza Foundation in line with the British Heart Foundation. I didn't really know how to help, so I thought, 'What do I know how to do? I can organise a gig.'
I organised a gig at the Command House with the help of Jay Allen, who used to be active on the local music scene, along with Vic Wintergreen and Steve Davy, who were both super supportive and helped grassroots music a lot in the early noughties.
I put this gig together with loads of bands, and it went really well. I enjoyed the feeling of doing something positive, and it triggered an enthusiasm for charity fundraising that I'd never really experienced before.
From then on I continued putting on Antfest, and then I got asked to move to a place in Gravesend, where we do Herofest. Over the last 20 years I've been running different charity events. We hit £100,000 raised this year for a variety of different charities.
What has that money helped the charities to do?
Elliott Holmes Foundation identified that they've been able to offer mental health support to around 35 to 40 young people, and One Big Family have some statistics on their website that show how much each £1 or £10 donation is worth and what it does.
They have starter packs for people who are vulnerably housed, and the money raised pays for them to have that starter pack, which they wouldn't get through other means. They also run a soup kitchen which feeds over 100 people every week, as well as community outreach and support.
What music was played at that first Antfest?
It was a bit of a mixed bag, really. When I was at college, my friends all had different interests and tastes, and they were all in the bands that we started off with. Mostly pop-punk, bouncy fun stuff.
We had Los Alvadores, they're a folk-punk band. Battle Ska Galactica, a ska-punk band. It was mostly 'insert genre of music' and then 'punk' at the end.
Over the years we've had all sorts of different people. We had Luke Jackson, who's gone on to bigger and better things, supporting Jools Holland all over the country.
I think we've platformed over 500 different bands, and they're all completely different genres. We've been to the depths of heavy metal. There's a Rage Against the Machine tribute band called Rage Against the Latrine. We have Zombie Circus Blues with their debut album Deep Bacon.
It's so much fun. It's like building this community and creating this network.
It's the 20th anniversary. What are you doing to celebrate?
I'm having a big old gig at the Command House, and some of the bands that were in the first Antfest are playing again. They didn't stop playing. They've been playing the whole time.
There's a whole bunch of different acoustic acts playing at the beginning.
It's a nice, fun-filled day by the river, and family-friendly. That’s underlined.
What time does it start on 27 September?
We're running from two o'clock, but my advice is to get there at 1.30 to avoid any difficulty parking. Two o'clock is the first act. We're running two different stages, one outside and one inside.
Later on in the evening, as it gets a bit colder or darker, we're going to move everything inside and have the last two bands playing indoors.
Alexei Sayle was being interviewed about dystopia, and he said that with all the stuff that's happening with AI and politics, even in these dark times, we need times to laugh and to experience art and music. It feels a bit like we're going into a bit of a dark, dystopian time, and maybe now is the time to really hunker down and build into these communities that are already there that you could just become part of.
