Swarmfest! The Savoy in Cork will be buzzing today as young acts take to the stage 

The music industry is full of people who can ‘talk the talk’, but Cork has a 17-year-old who is already ‘walking the walk’ by putting on a series of all-ages gigs. Today (Thursday, June 25) The Savoy will host edition number 4 of Swarmfest, an all-ages and no-alcohol live music mini-festival. Raymond Doherty has been steadily building a live music platform that gives first-time bands a stage alongside established names, offers young audiences value for money, and provides Cork’s music scene another place to gather.

‘Swarmfest 4; Versus The World’ follows on from their last show in April, and Raymond is clearly someone who has learned by doing. The first editions were packed with bands, this time, he says, the format has been tightened slightly, not because the appetite is any smaller, but because the lessons have become clearer, “There were too many bands, people were getting restless.” That insight came from dealing with the experiences of the venue owners, but also from chatting to the gig attendees and performers.

He continued: “I think it definitely was the right call to cut this one down,” he says, noting that the upcoming event will still run for four and a half hours. It’s a lengthy show, but one he believes is manageable, especially when the audience is young and some are attending their first ever gig. “It’s a hard environment to be in when it’s that long but I think having a lot of bands is just kind of naturally what makes sense as part of that.”

That balancing act — between ambition and practicality — sits at the heart of what he’s doing. SwarmFest began with a simple idea: give young musicians a place to play. “At first it was a thing of, you know, this might not make any money, and we might not be able to do it again, so we’ll put as many upcoming bands on as possible,” Raymond explains, “and now that it’s kind of safely reoccurring, we’re like, okay, we’ll get a couple big bands, so that there’ll be a massive audience, and then the small bands will be able to play their first show to a really good audience.”

That idea of platforming young talent is not just a slogan with Raymond. “What’s the point of it all, really, if you’re not giving young people a chance,” he says. It’s the kind of line that tells you immediately he’s thinking beyond the night itself and towards the wider culture around it.

The original spark came from being on the other side of the stage. Raymond had played in a support gig at the Kino, at an all-ages gig there, and that experience lodged itself in his head. “I got one taste of it, and I was hooked,” he says. From there, the idea grew quickly into something he could shape himself. He started Swarmfest that summer and even put his own bands on it early on, laughing that he was being “very self-centred.” One of those bands was Pinwheel, which has appeared at a number of the events since.

He is still surprised that he personally is getting known as ‘Swarmfest’ and that the word is out about the mini festival. “I’ve had a couple times where people will just message me out of nowhere, and it’s like, how did they even get my number? It’s crazy!”

That momentum has changed how he books as well, in the early days, he was filling a bill with friends, contacts and good intentions. Now he says he looks for bands that are talented, but also putting in effort and likely to connect with an audience. “I think every band who’s applied is very talented,” he says, “but it’s the thing of just the band that I think people would like the most, and people, and kind of is working hard.”

The structure of the bill is thought through too, headliners are placed where they can anchor the night, but Raymond is equally concerned with what happens in between. He knows people often arrive early, drift away, then return for the main act, so the middle of the lineup needs to keep them there. “Trying to keep people there in the middle is definitely a big thing,” he says. “We try to put some heavy hitters there.”

This year’s lineup reflects that logic. The bill includes Bodelash, Squire, Bigsky, Blue Wire, Dead Assets and Dear Unknown, each one bringing a different energy to the event, with the headline act being Babyrat - who played Live At The Marquee last Friday as openers for Bell X1. Zoe Callanan, Babyrat’s singer, recalls how seeing bands young was important for them. “Stevie (Healy, Drums) was involved in youth gigs with music generation growing up, but a core memory for him was going to an underage Academic gig back in the day in Roisin Dubh. He realised when watching Dean the drummer he wanted to be like him when he was older, he even got a pair of drumsticks off Dean!”

Some of the bands on today’s bill are already well known to Zoe and the band. “We had Bode Lash supporting us for our debut headline in the Savoy back in March and they are just absolutely phenomenal musicians, phenomenal songwriters and just all in all amazing people, a group we’re so happy to call pals of ours. We shared a bill with Squire last year in Waterford and they had such amazing energy and we’re buzzing to see them again! We’re just excited to be a part of such a stacked lineup and we think it’s so important that there’s events in Cork for all ages where they get to see local bands and get inspired to be creative find like minded people to collaborate with.”

Raymond is intent on the audience getting “a taste of everything”. He’s keen to include bands from outside the county too, because he wants the bill to feel less predictable. “I always like to get some bands that act from Cork,” he says, before adding that out-of-county acts bring “a splash of uniqueness”.

Representation matters to him too, even if he says some of the patterns emerged naturally rather than by design. The Pavilion’s manager pointed it out to him that it was so important that many of the bands were female-fronted or had non-binary members, which Raymond hadn’t specifically planned. That conversation made him step back and realise what he’d already created intuitively, “if we’re trying to make young people feel represented, then it’s important that young people who are female or LGBTQI+ should also feel represented in that. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s just as important.”

He also seems to understand his audience instinctively. Some of them are friends, some are familiar faces from around town, and some appear simply because word has spread. Raymond doesn’t claim to have the market mapped out in a spreadsheet. He talks about people hearing about it, turning up, and coming back because they had a good time. At one point, he even met someone in the crowd who had come down from Dublin purely because they had heard of Swarmfest — and not, as he first assumed, because of the band they were there to see. “I thought that was crazy,” he says.

The promotion has been less about heavy advertising and more about momentum, with social media and word of mouth doing the work. “A lot of it is word of mouth,” Raymond says, explaining that once a few people have a good night, others tend to follow. “They’ll just see that and be like, okay, all our friends are going to this because they had a really good time, so we’ll probably have a really good time.”

Raymond doesn’t see Swarmfest as just a list of bands. It’s a statement about access, confidence and the value of giving young musicians a proper platform.

• Swarmfest 4 v The World is at The Savoy on (today) Thursday, June 25, from 2.00pm-6.30pm. Tickets from Bunker Vinyl and online.