Interview: Marisam Events

In this conversation, Sam Harris and Maria Winter, founders of Marisam Events, a female-led events company in Northeastern Newcastle, discuss their background and the formation of their company. They talk about their favorite gigs and live music venues, as well as the importance of championing local talent and original music. They also highlight their event, Platform 22, which supports emerging artists, and discuss the challenges they face in the music industry, such as fair pay and affordability. They share their upcoming events, including Late and Live and the Layton Drive campaign for nightlife safety. Finally, they discuss their future plans for Marisam Events.

Takeaways

• Marisam Events is a female-led events company in Northeastern Newcastle that champions local talent and original music.
• Their event, Platform 22, supports emerging artists and provides a platform for them to showcase their original music.
• Marisam Events focuses on fair pay and affordability in the music industry, ensuring that artists are paid fairly and ticket prices are reasonable.
• They are also committed to creating safe spaces for musicians and audience members, with initiatives like the Layton Drive campaign for nightlife safety.

Aaron
Hello and welcome to InNewcastle and today again we’ve got some fantastic guests joining us. Just want to say thank you to Sam Harris and Maria Winter, the founders of a female led events company that come now in Northeastern Newcastle called Marisam Events. I’ll just hand over to yourselves if you’d like to introduce yourselves individually and just tell us a bit about your respective backgrounds.

Marisam Events
Yeah, so as you said, we are Mara Sam Events, female -led interactive live music events company, championing the local music scene, local venues, local vendors, and just really trying to…

revitalize the Northeast music scene. So yeah. Yeah, definitely. So I’m Maria, one of the co -founders. I recently graduated from my master’s degree in international multimedia journalism from Newcastle University. So as well as doing this, I also write for different music publications in and around the Northeast and London now, which is crazy. But yeah, so that’s a little bit about me. Yeah. So I am Sam, obviously, Mara Sam, if you didn’t get that.

Marisam Events
That’s the crack. But yeah, so as well as doing events, I’ve been doing music festival and artist PR for probably like four years now since my final year of uni. And I’ve been involved in festivals such as like Hardwick Festival, Durham Brass, worked with artists such as Andrew Cushing and some biggies as well like Noel Gallagher, Robbie Williams, stuff like that. But yeah, so we do that alongside, but we also say that we are PR journalism specialists as well as events just to add another few strings to our ball. And we also perform, we perform ourselves. We’re also musicians. Yeah, we studied music together at Newcastle University, that’s how we met. So we’re kind of well ingrained into the creative sector so yeah we do a lot of different things. Yeah we do a lot.

Aaron
Is there anything you don’t actually do?

Marisam Events
Feels like, you know what I mean? It’s finding time in the day, time in the week, you know? We really have to, we are married to our schedules at this point. Our calendars are our best friends, so.

Aaron
So obviously both working in the music scene heavily in the North East, again with festivals and writing about music yourself. For you, where does your personal favourite, from memory, gigs or where’s your favourite live music venues that you like to attend?

Marisam Events
Yeah, so for me, I’ve got to say…Not locally, but my favorite band’s Food Fighters. Everybody knows that. I walked in today with a Food Fighters tote bag on. It’s, it’s an obsession. Um, I would say anytime I’ve seen them, fantastic. I saw Paramore last year as well. They were unreal. I love a good stadium gig, but I also love just going to like my local pub, seeing some local musicians. I did that last weekend. I do it every week, let’s be quite honest. But yeah, I think venue wise, God, there’s quite a few that even we’ve worked with that we enjoy. Like we love the Grove. We love Bobbix, obviously. Yeah. There’s a few others where like Colonel Porter’s they do, they support quite a lot of small emerging musicians and yeah. And even some of the bigger venues, like I love a good gig in O2 City Hall. Love it. I saw Don Brokaw there a few months ago. It was fantastic. But yeah, like a bit of everything. Spotify playlists are a mess. But yeah.

Yeah, I think for me because I’m not really, well, I’m not from the North East. My family are from the North East, but the first time I kind of moved here properly was for university. So I’m the same as Sam. I really like going to the local pub and just seeing what’s on. But I think the beauty of what we do at Mara Sam, we get to work with so many different independent local venues. So it’s kind of opened my eyes to see the different areas and what areas can offer different genres. And we just,

just we get excited when a new one pops up and we’re like, oh, let’s check this one out. What can we do here? But yeah, City Hall as well for me, it’s where I saw the classic rock show, which is one of my all time favorite performances. I go on about it a lot. But yeah, so it’s just.

Aaron
Yeah the Classic of Rock Show was really, I’ve been to see them the last four years I think. Yeah, really excellent.

Marisam Events
I’m yet to go but you’re telling me that I should go so yeah you need to go. They’re incredible. Sometimes I think they play the songs better than the original musicians. Allegedly.

Aaron

So you mentioned it obviously, Big lovers of Music. So you met in university together. So what was the light bulb moment or how did Marathon events then come together and why? Why does New Guys will need another events company or North East even?

Marisam Events
Yeah, well this actually came about during one of our modules on the music degree and we had a brilliant lecturer called Jane Nolan. Yes, shout out Jane, we love you! Who offered a fantastic module and it was called Music and Enterprise and we were put in groups and we had to come up with a unique live music event to put on to the local public and as students we often went to different pub quizzes in and around Newcastle.

We thought, well, wouldn’t it be cool to just have a full on music quiz, combine the two, make it like a quiz and a gig in one. And yeah, that’s what we did. The idea just kind of came to life, but we were supposed to put on an event in that module, but due to COVID, the first lockdown hit and we couldn’t actually put it on then. So we thought once we graduated, we had so much interest from a lot of people and we thought, let’s just get it up and running once we graduated. So that’s just what we did.

Yeah, so like a lot of people kind of said to us you should really try this outside of uni So we thought like why not? What’s stopping us and then it’s just kind of gone from there We’ve just kind of built up our services our events just to encapsulate everything that the North East has to offer and everything we love as well like everything we want to see yeah, and I think the main purpose of what we do is that well two things really the interactivity between the musicians and the audience. We want to make it feel like a community and we always try and prioritise safe and inclusive spaces for everyone involved. But also, original music. We know ourselves as musicians, other than open mic nights. There’s not a lot of events that go on that really do showcase that. So that was one of our aims and I think that’s kind of what sets us apart from some different events companies. Yeah, we’ve had a lot of good feedback from local, original musicians.

like honestly we never get the opportunity to really just do our original music yeah there’s a few covers in there whatever you want to do but they said like it is really a valuable thing to have brought into this industry because honestly we know it’s hard to get a venue to say yeah you can play originals they just want you to play two 45 minute sets and covers yeah so you know what I mean so you just want a bit of you want to support these artists that are pouring their hearts into their music and we thought why not why can’t we? we do that. So kind of just run from there.

Aaron
Do you think bars, next question was why is it so important to kind of champion local talent, you know musicians there but I think you touched on it there bars just want your set list, a pre -known set list and such, is it, do you think it’s the fear of the unknown or why they’re so reluctant on kind of letting people champion their own music?

Marisam Events
I think basically they know with these 245 minute sets, they know with the same songs every week, they know what they’re getting and there’s no like…room for error because obviously when you go to a pub or whatever, well, especially like us, we want to hear live music. We always hear the same songs. That’s fine. We all sing them, but I think they just genuinely, they don’t, they don’t want the risk that comes along with support and original music because you never know how, if people are going to come in, if they’re going to like it, if they’re going to pay for a ticket, but like we thought honestly, we’d rather take the risk because we know how much goes into this, how much goes into being an original musician. So we thought like, no, like let’s see which venues are happy to support it as well. And we found a lot of venues are supportive. Yeah. And I think as well, this shouldn’t be the case, but you tend to get a lot more paid opportunities if you’re doing covers and you’re a cover band. And some bands, they could be performing, you know, your usual modern covers, but the original music they’re writing is such a different genre and they don’t feel as if they can perform that and they won’t get potentially any opportunities to showcase that so we want to kind of meet them in the middle and be able to offer them that platform.

Aaron
Are there any artists that you’ve seen out there at the moment you want to give a shout out for that you’ve seen that are emerging, we should be looking out for?

Marisam Events

Well, I definitely think Pretty Velvet, they are smashing it at the minute. They did one of our very first Platform 22 events. They actually won and well deserved. They were incredible. But now some of the gigs they’re doing in London and they’re just flying. I know. And it’s just incredible to kind of be able to see them perform at your event and then just see them grow afterwards and develop their own skills. It’s incredible. And it’s nice to like see some of our friends or in some of these bands that have played our events or that we go and see and it’s just nice to support the musicians around you like that there really is a community and yeah like we’ve got we’ve got friends who are touring and everything now and it’s just cool to see and support yeah

Aaron
And you touched there regarding your event Platform 22, which you have on tonight. For people that might be gone by the time this goes out. For people that take an interest to have a look at, see what it’s about. What is it and for those musicians that might want to get on the bill, how do they go about that?

Marisam Events
So Platform 22 is a local live music showcase and we usually have three or four different artists or bands in the lineup and they play a 30 minute set of original music in front of a live audience. Then audience members scan a QR code which is on their table and they vote for their fan favourite and the winner then receives funds to further their musical career and we have loads of different venues that take part in this and also lots of different genres.

So for example, we’ve done one at Trillians. We’ve got another one coming up at Trillians. So because we love rock, so we really had to put that one out there. But we kind of open it to anyone. It’s very up -and -coming artists, emerging artists and just DM us on Instagram, email us marisamevents .gmail .com. Yeah, Instagram at Marisamevents. But it’s literally we say like even if you have never played outside of your bedroom and you really feel like you’ve got a solid set of original music just chat with us we’re very open our communication lines are always open we’ve been there as well we are, we have been new so we just try and answer every DM that we get we always try and fit you in somewhere and they’re every month so definitely just get in touch we’re always open to hearing your music and audiences seem to love it as well they love the whole Scanner, in the QR code and that’s the interactivity element. They do and they appear in the different, well again, original music that we’ve had such positive feedback from this and you don’t really see this in and around the North East.

Aaron
I read in terms of championing musicians and funds to further their careers, I read that one of your ethos and focus is making sure that artists are paid fairly and it’s affordable for people to attend that just as importantly as well. Do you think it’s not out there enough in the North East or the music industry in general about equity across kind of all levels.

Marisam Events
Yeah, so we’ve always been very transparent with all of our costing structures, how much we pay our musicians, and we always try and meet or exceed industry standards because we know like we have been offered like pennies for gigs and you can’t live on that and we want to foster an environment where people can really make a living in the music industry even and that’s without having to go down south or having to and go to even like Manchester, they can stay here and be involved and flourish. But yeah, I think it isn’t something that’s talked about. It is a bit of an awkward subject, especially venues. They don’t wanna necessarily open their books to everyone, but I don’t know. We’ve just always kind of had that transparent kind of outlook. We always just want to be upfront with people. Yeah, we’re hoping people are going to also do that, like follow our lead. Yeah, same with ticket prices as well. We’ve always tried to kind of work with the venue and what they want to do. It’s as much as them as it is us as well. So we always do like student discounts, that sort of thing. So, yeah, we just try and do what’s best for everyone. Yeah, definitely fair profits, fair wages, just, yeah, fair prices for audiences.

Aaron
And then kind of setting up your company and offering the services that you do and events and such. When you said the reaction has been pretty good in terms of response and such like that, have you found yourself kind of with any hurdles or challenges or kind of while trying to go through or has it just generally been very good?

Marisam Events
I would say there’s definitely been hurdles. We’re in our first year of trade. Everyone says that is the hardest, like the first couple of years. So we definitely, we have our struggles and especially it’s literally…
we do everything, it’s us two, we do everything. Like if you see a poster, we’ve designed it. If you see like, you know, we’ve done it all. We’ve written it. Yeah. If you see people on the street with flyers, it’s us. So we really just, we just do the best that we can. And yeah, there’s been like, obviously, Solvents see us staying afloat alongside trying to provide things and like good opportunities for other musicians. That’s obviously something we try and of balance out and then we’ve got venues who…

Then you as an artist sometimes who are, I’m a bad replier, but a lot of these places are too. So we’ve, we’ve gone in, you know, we’ve done our bit and yeah. So I would say getting replies can sometimes be difficult. Obviously cashflow for everyone can be a struggle. Getting the word out. Like when you first explain the idea to people, if they haven’t been to one of our events before, they go, oh, how does that work? That’s cool. As soon as they’ve been to the event, after who was like, that’s brilliant. The idea is great. And it’s like, well, And I’m like, buy your ticket then. Like, you like it, so buy your ticket. And it’s like, it’s just really trying to push the word out. We just want people to know what we’re about, what we do, what we believe in, and just kind of invest even just their time in it, you know? It’s just, yeah. I think that’s Trial and error. Yeah, it is. It’s really been trial and error. And we’re still in that. Still navigating that. Process, but we’ll get there, you know.

Aaron
And just to end on platform 22, you said there’ll be another one at Trillions for the rock lovers out there. Is there a date yet for that event?

Marisam Events
Yes, so that’s going ahead on the 19th of March.

Aaron
and just before that obviously you’re non -stop. So on the 2nd of March you’re at the Grove Newcastle for another event, late and live. For those again that don’t know about that, interactive is always but what can people expect from that event?

Marisam Events
So our Late and Live on March 2nd is our live music quiz. So every round is a music round. We’ve got different genres. We’ve got missing lyric. And yeah, so it’s a full live band. So it’s a gig and a quiz in one. There’s prizes to be won. Great prizes. Fantastic musicians to watch. Lovely cocktails at the Grove. Yeah, so it’s just, it’s going to be a good night. Nice bit of fun on a Saturday. Yeah. And the band hosts everything. They perform every question. Yeah.

Aaron
Well, that’s like a really good night and like you say, who doesn’t love a quiz night? So I suppose having that live interaction with a live band as well, just something else.

Marisam Events
Exactly. Everyone loves a music round on a course. Yes, we were like, let’s just times the spy a million, make it the whole thing.

Aaron
And then on the same night you’ve got another campaign that you’re launching, Layton Drive, so I just want to explain a bit more about this and kind of what it is and why as well that you’ve decided to do so.

Marisam Events
So Layton Drive is basically a safe transport campaign and we created this you know, particularly for females and gender minorities to prioritize nightlife safety getting to and from our events, but also events in and around Newcastle. We want to help make Newcastle a sexual harassment free zone and it’s going to be an ongoing campaign where we kind of build long -term partnerships with some local taxi firms and also female drivers just so audience members feel extra safe when they’re getting home from our events.

Yeah so we’re basically we’re already doing it now but we are trying to create a really safe space for musicians and audience members to just so that they don’t have to worry when they’re watching a gig. We’ve all done it we all have those thoughts in the back of our head when we’re at live music gigs or even just out and about in Newcastle and we just want to make sure that any Marisam event is an event you always feel comfortable at, you always feel like you can go to someone, there’s always someone there to support you and that’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re working with some really cool organisations and initiatives to really drive home that point. Yeah for example a representative from Shout Up, they’re going to be at this event and not only to support our campaign but to talk a little bit about the work that they do, you know their initiative started in 2017 and it’s just it’s amazing the work they’re doing in and around Newcastle and the wider UK so we really thought it was a no -brainer to to have them involved in some capacity.

Aaron
And what’s next for Marathon events? If there’s not enough going on already, what’s the future hold?

Marisam Events
Our calendar is pretty packed, but… Press pack? Yeah. So basically we’ve got obviously long -term, we want to be a national touring entertainment service as well as offering platform 22s around different parts of the UK, even international if anybody wants to throw for that. But yeah, so we’ve got that. And we also offer a press pack, like Maria said, that I think it includes my PR background, Maria’s journalism too.

Marisam Events
I think it also adds in an element of our platform 22. Yeah. And yeah, so we offer that to all information is on our socials at Mara Sam events at late in the letter N live and our website. So, yeah, just have a look, see what we’re about, give us a follow. We’re always posting something, even if it’s a meme, but it’s always relevant. We love a good trend. But yeah, so we just we want people to get involved and just enjoy it.

Aaron
Well, thank you for taking the time today to talk to us, really appreciate it. So thank you, Sam and such. So thanks again, Maria, and thank you for your time.

Late ‘n’ Live next event is at The Grove Newcastle on 2nd March – Click Here

Visit Marisam Events main website for more info and to contact them directly Click here.