Paul Northup, who runs the August festival, spoke on Premier’s Inspiration Breakfast show about Greenfelt, which has been going since 1974 and started as Christian music event.
Northup said there would be performers and speakers that Christians would be familiar with such as theologian Paula Gooder, John Bell, Father Nadim Nassar and speaker Anthony Reddie.
When asked if it was good idea to book Pussy Riot, the protest group in Russia, Northup said:
“We think it was. We’ve been watching them with some interest over many years and it was in autumn last year that we made a concerted effort to try to reach out and make contact with them because we were keen to understand them more, their motivations more and to see if we could invite them to the festival – to get to know them better and for them to get to know what space that we’re trying to make.”
The group’s members have been arrested several times and been called sacrilegious by the Russian Orthodox church, whom much of their work is critical of. One of their most famous escapades was when they performed in the Cathedral of Chris the Saviour in Moscow in 2012.
Northup explained that they were not as controversial a booking as some may think:
“It’s an easy thing to say – to just go along with the government’s line that they were arrested for inciting religious hatred. What they were trying to do in that initial punk…
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