We first featured Club Soda back in 2019, when the charity (which empowers musicians and creatives with learning disabilities) relaunched their innovative volunteering project Gig Buddies. Next Monday, 24 March, Club Soda is hosting Soda Beat at Stanley Arts, so we chat with the charity’s director Olly Tipper to find out more, as well as how the charity has evolved since 2019.

Croydonist: How has Club Soda developed since we first spoke?

Olly: In 2019, we had just become a charity. There were 4 of us in the staff team and we had just started a major new project in Gig Buddies, which supports adults with learning disabilities to access Croydon’s music and culture scene. Fast forward six years to 2025 and we now have 7 staff and over 30 volunteers! We work with over 100 participants each week across all our workshops and projects, and attendance across all our live events in 2024 was more than 2,000.

During the pandemic we tried to keep our community positive and connected through taking our events and workshops online, and we also started to produce a regular Magazine and Podcast called ‘Leisure Link’ which our members create content for. One of the biggest ways we’ve evolved since 2019 is by developing our campaigning voice. Leisure Link is the main vehicle for this, but so is social media, where we are very active and find we’re able to raise awareness of what we do to a much wider audience. Sharing stories from our artists and members in self-written think pieces, interviews and photo series has given our Club Soda community a loud voice in the local community. Whether it’s reviews of local venues, musicians promoting their new work or gig buddies documenting their favourite gigs, it has been great to see individual stories reach far and wide.

Croydonist: Tell us more about your regular Soda Beat events, and how next Monday’s differs.

Olly: We usually organise three Soda Beat live music events a year. They are fundamentally music gigs like any other, with a lineup of bands, singer-songwriters and a DJ. However, where they differ from other mainstream gigs is that they’re proudly inclusive of artists and musicians with learning disabilities. We have a mission to champion the talents of learning disabled musicians and to strive for equal opportunities in mainstream cultural spaces not to mention the music industry!

The majority of performers at Soda Beat are musicians we work with across our artist and workshop programme. And we always try to feature a guest artist and a non-learning disabled act to perform. Our next Soda Beat at Stanley Arts on 24 March will be a little different as the whole lineup comprises emerging artists from our Next Big Thing programme (plus some special guests too). These are young musicians with bags of talent who we’ve been working with for the last twelve months thanks to funding from Youth Music and London Music Fund. Each of the 8 artists involved has had mentoring from one of Club Soda’s experienced music leaders, support to write and record their new music, a chance to film a music video and access to special masterclasses led by guest musicians. The event will also feature a cross-genre performance titled ‘Changing Seasons’, featuring Luminous Starchild, a producer and composer from Club Soda, who produces high energy electronic dance music, in collaboration with Fiona Brice, a hugely experienced classical music composer, and an associate of London Mozart Players.

Croydonist: What have been the highlight events for you over the last couple of years?

Olly: If we can be cheeky, we’d combine all our festival appearances at Wide Awake and Cross The Tracks in Brockwell Park across 2023 and 2024. These represent an accomplishment of our charities’ mission that artists with learning disabilities be heard and accepted in mainstream cultural spaces by mainstream audiences. At some of these festivals, our members and artists have been given the opportunity to talk about their experiences as disabled gig-goers as well as perform live.

These experiences have really pushed forward our mission to occupy mainstream gig spaces and last year we started a new relationship with another huge festival, We Out Here, and we think this is just the beginning, there’s a lot more to come! These partnerships have been so special because there is a true appetite and eagerness to change the scene and make tangible changes in accessibility. It has also been fantastic to see gig buddies at the barrier and in the mosh pit of music they’ve never heard before, as well as mainstream festival goers dancing along to our bands saying it’s ‘the best music they’ve heard all day!’ . Programming learning disabled artists on the main line up is the next step… if anyone is at Mighty Hoopla this year, you better keep your eyes peeled.

Croydonist: We hear you may be going on tour with some of your artists next year – are you able to reveal some of the plans?

Olly: Yes! Many of our bands, artists and DJs we’ve been supporting for years have always wanted to go on tour! So, that’s exactly what we’re planning to do in 2026. We have exciting partnerships in place with an incredible number of organisations like ours and live music venues across the UK. We are planning to perform in 10 different cities including Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester, Belfast, Cardiff and many more. Our artists will perform at a wide mix of events, some disability-led events like our own, others more mainstream.

Elsewhere we’re planning to help organisations and venues organise an inclusive club night for the first time! We are also planning to launch our own Toolkit for putting on inclusive gigs aimed at touring bands and artists from the learning disability music scene. To make sure our Toolkit is as good as it can be, we plan to work with Robyn Steward, a brilliant musician with autism who runs Robyn’s Rocket events at Café Oto in Hackney, as well as Attitude is Everything and Richard Phoenix who released the DIY Access Guide to inclusive gigs back in 2017.

Croydonist: If our readers can’t make it to Soda Beat next monday, what’s the next Club Soda event they can attend locally?

Olly: We recommend our collaborative event, SoDaDa, which takes place at Fairfield Halls up to four times a year. SoDaDa is a cabaret style event with loads of impromptu music, dancing and art which we deliver in partnership with our friends SLiDE Dance and TURF Projects under our collective name, FUSE. The next event will take place on Friday 16 May 7pm-10pm and the team take over The Tanks Tate on 30 August, which will be a big moment for the project.

Thanks to Olly for chatting with us. You can get tickets for next Monday’s Soda Beat here. Keep up to date with Club Soda on their website, Instagram and Facebook.

Images courtesy of Club Soda – last image by Jason Warner

Posted by Julia