IN CONVERSATION WITH: GAG & THEIR EVENT WITH SHEIVA AND LIL SKAG
On the evening of Thursday 13th March 2025, the Jago in Dalston was decked out in Irish tricolours, Palestinian flags, and a bold banner that read “Saoirse don Phalaistín” (“Freedom for Palestine”). It was a clear statement of intent: this wasn’t just another night of live music. Organised by GAG, a grassroots collective founded to champion marginalised voices, the event brought together the pulsing punk energy of Sheiva and the thumping rap bars of Lil Skag.
I arrived early enough to watch the artists soundcheck. Sheiva and her band were working to engineer a thick instrumental sound, while Lil Skag and his DJ tweaked mic levels and 808s. Stylistically, it wasn’t an obvious match, but the organisers didn’t seem interested in curating for compatibility, and by the time the room started filling, the energy suggested the crowd wasn’t either.
“It’s about platforming artists who didn’t start off having everything,” says Kaz, GAG’s founder. “Artists who basically start off a step behind.” That emphasis on artists who need the platform, not just those ready to play one, is core to the ethos. “You’d be surprised how well a girl on sitar will go with a punk band,” she adds, “because everyone in the crowd appreciates music and wants to have a good time. That’s all that matters.”
This philosophy seems to have shaped the audience too. Every attendee I spoke to trusted GAG’s taste more than their own expectations. “The best thing about GAG is that you have music you wouldn’t normally experience,” said one regular. When asked who they’d like to see next, most simply said they’d leave it up to GAG. But it’s not just about platforming underrepresented artists, it’s also about challenging what the organisers see as a more systemic sameness in London’s live music scene. “It’s often just a bunch of fucking white guys,” says Aisha, one of the team.
GAG is a ‘Queer, Irish, POC-led’ collective made up of Kaz, Tara, and Aisha, who respectively identify as Irish, Kurdish-Canadian, and Pakistani-Scottish. They do not consider their diverse identities to be central to their mission, but rather that their lived experience gives them the perspective to ensure a sense of safety for those who need it. Tara explains, “when you have people in leadership that are respectful, but also have a bit of that lived experience of what it means to be on the fringe… that can dictate the whole atmosphere of what a space is meant to be. It means that people can feel safe. It’s not necessarily that it’s a queer or POC space; it’s that the safety is there for those who need to have it.”
Safety, platforming, and curation; it all ties into GAG’s central goal of community. When Kaz first arrived in London from the West of Ireland to work as a data analyst, the city felt cold. “I just felt it was a really lonely place,” she says. “So, I started GAG basically in my sitting room, with just 20 people, to have a community for a day.” Now, it’s something bigger. One audience member told me they’d been attending since the early days: from intimate garden parties and houseboats, to bigger venues like The Jago.
The growth of GAG brought with it new team members: Tara, with contract and finance skills, and Aisha’s promotion expertise. But the DIY roots haven’t been forgotten. Tara describes joining the team as an act of resistance against corporate consolidation. “When I moved to London six years ago, there was something about live music that was really sort of scary,” she explains. “With COVID coming in, and a lot of the smaller independent-based venues shutting down, I kind of feel like what we do at GAG is a form of rebellion. It’s a way to keep smaller venues alive and smaller artists fed.” She laughs, “we can’t let everything go to Live Nation and Ticketmaster.”
GAG team, (From left) Aisha, Kaz, and Tati
She urges people to support what’s happening at the grassroots level. “Every day of the week, there is a gig going on in London. We do a lot to be able to live here. It’s a tough city that eats you up if you’re not careful. So go to a gig, have a drink and have a nice time. It’s all we’ve got, really.”
That “nice time” takes many forms at GAG shows, often in quick succession. One moment, you’re watching a whole crowd head-bop to bars and braggadocio; the next, you’re lifted off your feet and swirled around by the crowd moshing to punk songs; the next, you’re lost in the chaos of everyone twerking and skanking to a selector’s set. The vibe might be best summed up by an audience member’s one-word response: “Infectious.” She added, “it’s kind of rubbing off on each other, and we’re all having a really nice time together, and that translates across to everybody in the room. It’s a really special thing.” Another attendee summed up the atmosphere with the Irish phrase ‘craic agus ceol’: fun and music.
That energy has a ripple effect. Kaz says artists often collaborate after performing at GAG, despite wildly different styles. “Even though it’s such an eclectic group, the people are weird, and they don’t usually gel together, but they love each other, and then they work together in the future. I think that’s really special.”
It’s not just artists who connect. One of the audience members I spoke to was himself an organiser of a spoken word night in Deptford called Doggerels, built around similar values of platforming marginalised communities. This cross-pollination, between artists and organisers alike, gives GAG’s events a momentum beyond the night itself.
LIL SKAG
After soundcheck, Lil Skag is stood outside in an alley by the Jago, taking a moment before the event commences. Later tonight, he’ll be on that stage, rapping in front of a crowd that will echo his bars back to him. But right now, he’s just catching his breath and having a chat.
Skag, who grew up in rural Ireland, doesn’t pretend his route into rap was obvious, but he stresses the importance of his experiences in Berlin before moving to London in giving him the space to figure it out. “Landing in Berlin,” he says, “I immediately noticed: it’s a city where you can be whoever you are. You walk into a place, say who you are, and everyone’s accepting. That helped me quiet the voices from back home. You know, the ones saying: I can’t do this, I need to play GAA or be hurling. But in Berlin it was just: ‘fuck it. I can do what I want. . . I don’t think Lil Skag would be Lil Skag without my time in Berlin.”
Asked about whether the queer community in Berlin influenced him, Skag nods. “Majorly,” he says. “I remember being at a queer festival on the outskirts called Hole. Me and my pal Nikita were probably two of five straight people there. The people I met had gotten the worst hardship their whole lives just for being who they are. But the way they celebrate themselves, their individuality, it was so inspiring. I just thought: ‘yeah, fucking go get it.’”
That ethos clearly resonates with GAG, the queer, Irish, POC-led collective hosting tonight’s show. Their programming puts contrast front and centre: a punk set from Sheiva followed by Skag’s gritty, often comedic bars. Where Sheiva’s crowd was moshing, Skag’s crowd was bouncing, chicken-bobbing heads and shouting his punchlines back at him. The room is loud, loose, and locked in
SHEIVA
Fresh off her set, the venue still pulsing with energy, Iranian-British artist SHEIVA stepped outside to open up about the emotional and political architecture of her music.
“My music is a safe place,” she explains. “It helps me with my sanity. I write it for myself, but I think people use it the same way I do, something to explain how they feel.” SHEIVA wants people to walk away from her set “more energetic, refreshed, more confident in themselves… more vibrant. Maybe a bit melancholic. Sweaty.” The emotional range of her shows lean on intensity, physicality, and catharsis. The contrast between recorded music and the live show is crucial: “The music side is like a cocoon,” she says, “and the live side is more expressive. Kind of exothermic… but that’s the wrong word.” She smiles, searching for language to pin down something kinetic, felt rather than said.
I identified a sense of fury in her music, so asked her where it came from. She explained: ‘It’s rage that comes from being angry at the world. People not being kind enough, not caring enough. Too self-indulgent. Like, just look at all these fucking people around us. Are you going to give them a voice? Or even acknowledge they exist?”
She sees her job as partly about amplification: giving that mic to the unheard. That desire has roots in her own background. “I wasn’t born in Iran, and I never grew up there,” she explains, “but I spent every summer there with my family. It shaped who I am, how I hold myself. It gives me strength.” That connection with Iran shows up both in her language and in her politics. “It melts into my music. Into the ground, it melts.”
She’s written songs in Persian, and her recent set included a reference to Mahsa Amini, whose killing in police custody in 2022 triggered a wave of protests.
This outward-facing commitment – channeling grief and anger into music – isn’t in conflict with her inward-looking instincts, but it does reflect a tension she’s noticed in her work. On one hand, she talks a lot about community, on the other, there’s a strong emphasis on non-conformity. Is that tension difficult to hold?
“I think I balance it very well,” she says. “Because there is a community of people who are not conforming to anything out there, and I’m able to find them in whatever crevice they are in.”
She credits spaces like the Rising Sun Collective as having been crucial for her growth. “I started making music there,” she says. “I needed a space, and they welcomed me in. I was able to be free, to create, to meet other creatives, and to build my confidence.”
SHEIVA felt the same sense of support from GAG, the night’s organisers. “I see a little bit of myself in them,” she says. “They’re solid people. They’re here for the music. And they’re here for the right things, which I love. They treated us with the utmost respect. Honestly, you’d be lucky if you even get a meal in London – but GAG looked after us.”
Still, SHEIVA knows that love and care aren’t always enough to sustain scenes like this. “Yeah, we need more of this,” she says, “but money’s tight. If you’re able to look after your artists, that’s great. But we need more funding. We need more gigs. We need more shows. That’s just how it is.
The performances that evening reflected the politics of the space. During Lil Skag’s set, the Irish rapper had his bars about pissing on Israeli flags and Union Jacks shouted back at him. Sheiva, meanwhile, took time mid-set to speak about the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. “She was taken into custody, beaten to death, amongst other things,” SHEIVA said on stage. “It created a women-led revolution which resonated throughout the entire world. I’m just here trying to amplify their voices as much as I possibly can.”
As a group, the GAG organisers believe strongly in the power of live performance. “There’s a certain high that goes with live music,” says Tara. “You don’t need any kind of assistance or substance to be able to replicate it, and I think that’s a really precious thing.” She describes standing at the back of the room, watching not just the artist, but the audience. “It’s quite euphoric. There’s nothing like live music.”
Written by Hugo Harvey
Edited by Izzy Walter
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Photos by @imogens.jpgs