STEVE Oates and his team have been running Warrington Music Festival since 2007.

Writing for Weekend, he reflects on the popular event’s growth and what fans can expect this year.

What I love about working on the Warrington Music Festival is the way that each year it throws up new challenges and opportunities.

These are often challenges that we set ourselves as we’re always trying to improve the quality of the event. It’s been a joy seeing the steady growth and improvement over time.

For example, at our first event in Queens Gardens in 2007, the second stage was a ‘party gazebo’ that I borrowed from a friend who had used it at his wedding reception the week before.

Although it had a really low stage for the bands to stand on, you still couldn’t see the heads of many of the performers from the audience!

The evolution of that ‘stage’ has been remarkable and this year it will be transformed using a festival big top in Bank Park.

This has been an ambition of ours for years and we’re all over the moon that it’s finally come together.

The Bank Park Big Top stage will host our first hard rock event on Friday, July 18.

This event is being organised by a group of young people working out of the Warrington Youth Café.

They call themselves ‘Futureproof Promotions’ and they’ve been learning how to run events as part of a Warrington Youth Service project funded by the National Foundation for Youth Music.

The big top and event infrastructure is being shared with the ‘Proms in the Park’ event run by Warrington Borough Council and Army regiment 75 Engineers on Saturday July 19.

Sharing the costs in this way have made it possible for all to benefit from high quality production and I think the proms event will be a great addition to this weekend of Warrington music.

Saturday will see performances by 21 bands in Golden Square from noon.

There’s some fantastic talent on show throughout the day and It’s a great way to get a flavour of the quality of music that is being composed and promoted from our town.

Saturday headliners, The Roughneck Riot, are probably our most successful musical export at the moment.

These are young guys who regularly get in a van in Warrington and travel to play to devoted fans across Europe.

They were fantastic when they played with us a few years ago and we’re really pleased that their busy schedule has room for us this year.

Warrington Music Festival has always been about providing a professional platform for local talent and we’ve always recognised the bands who work that little bit harder to push and promote themselves.

The Youth Carnival event will take place on Bank Park on Sunday July 20.

Alongside a full line-up of young musicians we’ll also have a range of activities being led by Warrington Youth Service, Warrington Youth Club, Warrington Wolves Foundation and other youth organisations from across the town.

There'll be lots of fun activities for all the family including a climbing wall and half-pipe.

The finale to the weekend is a headline show by Scouting For Girls at the Old Market Place, Golden Square.

Support is being provided by some of our most talented young musicians Kim Jennett and Conquer Rio.

It's great to be able to extend the opportunity to play alongside established artists to Warrington musicians, in the same way as we did last year with the Happy Mondays.

There was a great buzz in the town for that event and we hope we can do the same this time around.