The pandemic has claimed one of its first musical victims of the year, which is sadly for us UK Americana Music Week. In a statement from Stevie Smith & The AMA UK Board and Event team, they said: “On behalf of the AMA UK board I am bringing you news today that breaks my heart – regretfully due to the recent developments with the Omicron variant worldwide, our international partners have had to pull out of being at our event and this has had a knock on effect that makes the event unviable. That along with hospital cases rising at rapid rates, the pandemic seems to still be far from at its peak here in the UK. The board have decided that in the absence of Government guidance we have to make this difficult decision ourselves and that the only safe and sensible thing to do at this late stage is to cancel UK Americana Music Week for 2022.
This has been an incredibly difficult decision to make because as you know keeping the genre vibrant and giving you all a platform to showcase your music is our highest priority, but this is now out of our hands and we have no real choice but to take this path.
I want to thank Renae Brown from Arby Projects for all her incredible hard work, and the rest of our event team; Romano Sidoli Consultancy, Adrian Basketfield – Nightowl Productions, James Walker – Brighthelmstone Promotions, our designer Lucy Powell, The Northern Cowboys, Wholehog Productions, Jess Plant, Michele Stodart, Gary Horsman and Leon Nockolds, our PR team Richard Wootton and Claire Horton. Thank you to our international partners from Canada and Norway, all of the sponsors, media partners, our showcase artists and the Hackney venues who have all been so supportive and wonderful during this really hard time. The knock on effect of having to cancel an event like this is so widespread and we are hugely grateful for the support from everyone.
We are hoping to broadcast a virtual edition of the awards so keep an eye on socials for the details. We will also be doing some online panels and other activities throughout the year – as soon as this has been unravelled we will be working on making as much available to you as possible.
Our 2023 dates are confirmed for January 23rd-26th so mark that in PEN in your diaries now. If it is possible for you to roll over your tickets this will help us enormously, but of course if that isn’t possible for you then a refund will be issued.
Anyone who has delegate passes or festival wristbands will be sent a separate email from us in the next week and will be given the option to rollover to 2023 or receive a refund. All awards ticket holders will be contacted directly by the Hackney Empire with the same options to roll over to 2023 or to receive a refund.”
We wish them all the best with what promises to be an amazing event next year. Do keep hold of your tickets if you can.
