Questions on the Cancellation of Roadhouse Weekender

The festival was due to take place over the weekend of July 4-6 2025

This piece mainly asks some open questions to Jak Wellard, organiser of what was to be the inaugural Roadhouse Weekender. He is, or those concerned with the festival are, welcome to answer them privately or in a public forum.

The Roadhouse website now contains only the following message:

With an extremely heavy heart, we have to announce the cancellation of the festival. We have worked night and day for the past 10 months to try and bring you an incredible experience so this is a decision we do not take lightly.

We thank everyone who supported us from day one, the teams who worked on the original project and our sponsors who were helping to make this happen.

Full refunds for all purchased tickets will be processed automatically. You should expect to see the refunds reflected in your account within 14 business days. Please bear with us during this time, as we will be dealing with a high volume of refunds and enquiries. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your refund, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@roadhouseweekender.co.uk

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

Sincerely,

The Roadhouse Team

This is not the first time people have promised things on the country scene and failed to deliver: the BCMA Fan Fest was cancelled the week before it was due to take place in 2023, and in 2024 it was discovered that thousands of pounds had been taken from acts who were promised sync deals with no delivery and little to no communication. One or both of these situations might have been down to amateurism and overreaching, but how many more times is this going to happen?

The cancellation of Roadhouse Weekender provides a useful test case for the new UK Country Music Association (UK-CMA.com), who are effectively a trade body to help artists when things of this nature occur. Fortunately, one of the board puts on Country On The Coast, her own well-regarded festival, while another board member puts on regular songwriter nights. Given that there will be more people wanting to make a buck with country music in the UK, which is possibly more popular than it has ever been, how early can the UK-CMA stop at source things of this nature from happening, and assure artists and fans that they are doing their utmost to stop them?

Ultimately, aside from the financial loss, there will be hundreds of people who now have a free weekend on July 4-6, who might now be sceptical of other new sorts of show. Fortunately, again, the UK wing of the Americana Music Association provide artists with a platform every January across two nights of showcases in Hackney, North-East London, which coincides with both a conference and an award ceremony which attracts some of the biggest names in music, this year Lyle Lovett and Candi Station.

Elsewhere, Black Deer and Talentbanq are quality providers of live music across the UK. The Kentish festival Black Deer is taking a fallow year so the team behind it can bring their mix of Americana and roots music, which they call ‘easy to love, hard to define’, to other bits of the UK. That includes Hassocks in Mid Sussex, where they are helping Morganway put on their gig tomorrow evening (April 9) and IV and the Strange Band mount three shows next week (April 15-17) in Manchester, Brighton and London.

Talentbanq’s events list includes shows by Louise Parker, Bailey Tomkinson and the Next Stop Nashville night, which comes to the Moonshine Saloon in Houndsditch, City of London on May 4, with headliner Dom Glynn. The UK country scene needs fewer Jak from Roadhouses and more Ray Joneses, given that one of the men behind Talentbanq is a fierce supporter of live music who has absolute buy-in from the artists who play his events.

There is also buy-in from artists for Buckle & Boots, a festival that is by now a well oiled machine akin to farmer Karl Hancock’s tractor; once again, over the late May Bank Holiday weekend, the Hancock family’s Whitebottom Farm will welcome some top notch musicians from around the UK and further afield to its two stages. This year the headliners are Michael Ray, who has enjoyed big support from US country radio, and Maggie Baugh, one of the stars of the 2024 festival. Watching on will be folk who will park their camper vans or pitch their tents and go wild in the Lancastrian country.

The previous weekend brings country back to the Half Moon Putney in the sedate Country In The Afternoon, which given that it finishes at 5pm enables me to return to Watford so I can watch Remember Monday bring a sound honed in the UK country scene to hundreds of millions of people at the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.

Then there’s Country Calling in Chelmsford and The Long Road on consecutive weekends in August; the former festival has dozens of UK acts and international headliners Dillon Carmichael from Kentucky and Kaylee Bell from New Zealand, while Midland, Drake Milligan and James Bay are the names in the biggest font on the Long Road poster. The British Country Music Festival in Blackpool, which this year falls over the last weekend of that month, also has a stellar reputation and there is no doubt that their festival, whose opening night will be headlined by Sam Palladio aka Gunnar from Nashville, will continue to allow acts to thrive.

Lil Nashville has had a stunning opening two months and now offers five days a week of honky-tonkin’ entertainment in Chiswick, West London. The people behind Wolverhampton venue Rodeos will open a honky-tonk in Birmingham on July 4, the very day Roadhouse was set to kick off; it cannot fail, given the appetite for country in England’s second city which sees US acts visit on a regular basis.

Acts coming over to play their own headline shows this spring or summer include Sam Outlaw, Jackson Dean, Eric Church, Scotty McCreery, Kip Moore and Breland. Riley Green plays three London dates the same September week as Post Malone brings country to Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, and the following month, Kane Brown and Darius Rucker will invite 30,000 people to see one or both of them in the same fortnight.

The back of this month’s Country Music People magazine boasts The Shires and Kezia Gill playing an outdoor show in July at Hampton Pool; come for the swim, stay for the quality UK country. But when a festival that promised Drake White as a headliner fails to happen, it drags down the reputation of UK bookers and promoters, much as when the BCMA give awards to the son and daughter-in-law of the people who run it, and when that same organisation boasts of having 1200 members.

There are many figures I can name who are doing great things independently to champion country music in the UK: Alan Cackett, who has seen everything there is to see and has met everyone there is to meet, is steering the career of Florence Sommerville; Gavin and Christine Chittick, who until recently ran the Millport festival and who have switched their attention to Country In The Afternoon; the aforementioned Hancock family, ably assisted by Buckle & Boots’ music booker Gary Quinn; and Sally Rae Morris and Steve Marks of the duo Gasoline & Matches, whose Nashville Sounds in the Round event brings country at brunchtime to the people of Birmingham several times a year.

Not to mention other artists, some of whom have informed my questions to Jak at Roadhouse, and the former members of the board who resigned without telling people why. Was it because they were embarrassed to be associated with Jak, or because they suspected something worse?

And what about me, your humble scribe who tries to get along to gigs, write about great music and sympathises with the chancers, con artists and mañana-merchants. Ultimately, I feel duped, as a fan of the genre and supporter of the scene, and angry on behalf of musicians who, once again, just want to play their music in a room or a field or a tent to people but are being met with unnecessary obstacles.

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that the UK country scene is a place where dreams go to die or at least be impeded from happening. After two decades playing and writing music, and receiving knockback after knockback, Kezia Gill is the market leader, playing the O2 Arena and CMA Fest, and with huge support from BBC Radio 2.

Aside from her, who else can reach those heights? There’s Jack Browning, who himself had two bits of airplay inside a week on the station, and First Time Flyers, who have an experienced manager and Radio 2 airplay of their own. Then there’s the aforementioned Florence Sommerville, or Janet Devlin, who has just played C2C and whose album Emotional Rodeo is very good.

It will take a complete eradication of amateurism for the wider world to take the UK country movement as seriously as it deserves to be taken. The last 15 years have seen number one albums by Ward Thomas, Hyde Park shows for The Shires and consistently excellent mixes of homegrown and international acts at Country2Country, The Long Road and Buckle & Boots. Roadhouse Weekender could have been a pearl in the oyster, but it was revealed to be fool’s gold.

And you’re looking at a fool. Jak, answer these questions. Firstly, about the festival itself:

1. What did you envisage would happen, in July 2025, when you began to plan the festival, which would bring together country-loving folk over the weekend of US Independence Day?

2. What precise promises did you make that you knew you could, and could not, fulfil?

3. Did you obtain a licence to put on the festival?

4. What parts of the festival had been sorted by a) the end of February and b) the cancellation date?

5. How many tickets were sold by April 7?

6. Was 17,000 too ambitious a number of tickets to sell?

7. Why did the festival’s Creative Director, not the acts themselves, sign the contract?

8. Why did it take six weeks to cancel the festival when that person was no longer part of the team? Further to that, why were the artists not told about their contracts being voided?

Questions about the board upheaval:

1. What happened in between the announcement of the lineup postponement at the end of February and the public resignation of the board?

2. What happened in between the public resignation of the board and the April 7 cancellation announcement?

3. Can former members of the board now talk in a public forum about what happened, or did they sign NDAs in perpetuity?

Questions about communicating the festival cancellation:

1. Why did it take until April 7 to cancel it when the board resigned at the end of February?

2. Why did the cancellation happen around 12 weeks before the festival was due to take place?

3. Did the venue in Bodiam, East Sussex know you planned to cancel the festival, and did they know about the cancellation before the artists?

4. Why were the public told, via an Instagram post, before the artists? Do you think it respectful not to tell the artists privately first, given that they would be the ones providing the entertainment and whose appearance at the festival will ultimately persuade people to buy a ticket?

Questions about US acts:

1. Why was the promised lineup announcement delayed in February?

2. Precisely why did certain headliners and visiting acts express reservations about playing the festival?

3. Did any acts who were travelling over from the US pull out well before April 7?

4. Will the former Creative Director offer assistance in helping sort shows for acts who have committed to coming over in July?

Questions about financial redress:

1. Can you confirm that all artists’ contracts have been voided for the Weekender?

2. The promise is that all refunds will be made ‘within 14 business days’, which given the Easter break gives you three weeks and a deadline of April 29. How confident should we be that these refunds will happen, and what legal mechanisms are in place should refunds be late?

3. Have all outstanding payments been made to artists who played promotional events across the country in recent months, or who were intended to perform in any events leading up to the Weekender? It is believed that artists were often paid late or had to chase for payments.

4. Why did the advance information for these events not include basic information about invoices, and why were acts told to bring their own monitors and mics?

5. Has all the money pertaining to the festival been paid out, or is it still in the Roadhouse account? Who has control of the account aside from you, and does the festival have oversight from an accountant given the board resigned in February?

Ad hominem questions:

1. Given that you previously worked as a dance music DJ, label owner and promoter, was country music just a convenient genre for you to try to make a quick buck off?

2. Seven years ago, your Safari label promised to ‘refocus’ and relaunch. Was this a fib, or is there a genuine explanation for what happened next?

3. In early 2017, Safari had to cancel a launch party due to the venue falling through. Given this, did the initial Roadhouse board do their due diligence on you? Were they taken in by your promises?

4. Did having a newborn child, and associated motivations, act as a way for you to continue with the festival until announcing the cancellation at the last possible moment?

5. Was Roadhouse a confidence trick, and did you fool the public into paying money for a non-existent festival, and the artists into agreeing to be on a bill, using the Creative Director as a credible shield?

6. Finally, and the most serious charge: are you merely amateurish, or is there something going on that needs further examination in a court of law?

Let me restate that you are welcome to answer them privately in email communication or, better still, in a public forum with complete honesty and transparency. Your attitude up to this point makes me err on the side of cowardice, in which case ought to steer well clear of the UK Country scene.

Last year, having investigated a case where dozens of artists gave money to a couple promising sync deals for American TV shows, I concluded that such confidence tricks should never happen again. This year, in a case where dozens of acts lent their good names to a new initiative that would benefit their careers, I don’t know what to say other than suggest that every act, fan or industry professional should join the UK Country Music Association, who really are working hard to unite, promote and develop the UK scene and amplifying the voice of UK country here and around the world.

Find out more at UK-CMA.com.