Features

Mighty Hoopla: Catch TLC, Sink The Pink, Glitterbox and London’s best club nights all in a field this summer

Mar 13 2018
Written by Adam Bloodworth

Photographer: www.lukedyson.photography

London’s wildest club nights and biggest music personalities are putting on the Mighty Hoopla festival this summer.

Mighty Hoopla festival premiered last year in Victoria Park but is changing venues and making its debut in Brixton’s Brockwell Park for 2018, where alternative club nights Sink the Pink, Guilty Pleasures, Bongo’s Bingo and Ultimate Power will unite.

Mighty Hoopla is a multi-coloured, multi-disciplinary creative LGBTQ+ splurge, a celebration of expression, individualism and music, mainly pop.

Artists confirmed for the day include legendary R&B headliners TLC, chav turned mum icon Lily Allen, who also headlines, Nineties normcore queen Louise, X Factor winner Louisa Johnson and Spice Girl Mel C.

Lily Allen returns to the stage ahead of her forthcoming album release, No Shame, which drops June 9 and has a more elegant and soulful feel than her last, 2014’s Sheezus.

“There haven’t been any outside sources telling me what’s right and wrong, what’s going to work for radio and what isn’t, so that’s really great. That also means when it comes out, it’s my fault,” Lily told Julie Adenuga on Beats 1 recently.

TLC were the R&B trio that defined a generation in the Nineties with their attitude-laced live shows. Now performing as a duo after the tragic death of Lisa Lopes in 2002, the group play their first ever UK festival at Mighty Hoopla and will bring back hit tunes including No Scrubs. TLC released a self-titled LP last year, their first in fifteen years.

Photographer: www.lukedyson.photography

Alongside the raft of pop talent there are the louder, brasher club nights. Sink the Pink are a troupe of dozens in drag playing to thousands in the Big Top tent, while gritty east London gay pub The Glory will pair things back with slightly more intimate performances.

Energetic Ibiza disco club night Glitterbox are also joining the raft of parties, as do Bongo’s Bingo, where teams of merry festivalgoers, drunk on warm prosecco, will shout bingo hall profanities.

Photographer: www.lukedyson.photography

A host of throwback names include B*Witched, Belinda Carlisle and the Vengaboys.

There’s more than the music from Sink The Pink. The colourful troupe have teased “flamboyantly themed dress codes, ballroom-style pageants, fabulous choreography, drag queen lip-sync battles, masterful DJ sets and more”.