Three Names For Saturday: Ultrabeat, Phats & Small and Bradley McIntosh

There is a specific moment at a festival that you cannot manufacture. It is not the headline act walking on. It is the four or five seconds before the first bar of a song everyone in the field already knows, when a few thousand people work out at the same time what is coming next and the noise arrives before the chorus does.

We have booked Saturday 12 June 2027 around that moment happening as many times as possible.

Three acts are confirmed for the Family Festival day at Leigh Miners Welfare: Ultrabeat, Phats & Small, and Bradley McIntosh of S Club. All three are on the same bill, on the same day, on the same ticket. Here is who they are.

Ultrabeat

If you were anywhere near a dancefloor in the North West in 2003, you do not need this paragraph.

Ultrabeat formed in Liverpool in 2002, and their cover of “Pretty Green Eyes” went to number two in the UK in the August of the following year. It was kept off the top spot by Blu Cantrell, which is the kind of detail that still gets argued about in Leigh on a Saturday night. What followed was a run of records that defined a particular strain of hard, bright, unapologetic scouse house: “Feelin' Fine”, “Better Than Life”, “Elysium (I Go Crazy)”. The album went top ten in 2007.

Ian Redman co-founded the group and has never really stopped. He plays well over a hundred shows a year. He is bringing MC Cover with him, and anyone who has seen that pairing knows what it does to a crowd that has been in the sun since midday.

For a lot of people coming to Leigh Miners next June, Ultrabeat is not nostalgia. It is the music they were actually there for, played by the man who made it.

Phats & Small

“Turn Around” is twenty-seven years old next year and has not been out of a UK wedding reception, holiday rep set or Saturday night playlist since.

It went to number two in 1999, built on a sample of Toney Lee's “Reach Up”, and it remains one of those records that reorganises a room within about eight seconds. MTV Dance put it at 38 in their hundred biggest dance anthems of the nineties. Tomorrowland included it in the Ibiza 500.

Ben Ofoedu is the man who fronted it — in the video, and on stage ever since. He also sang lead on the follow-ups, “Feel Good” and “Tonite”, which reached number seven and number eleven, and he has been singing these songs live for a quarter of a century. He is a better live vocalist now than he was in 1999, which is not something you can say about everyone from that era.

He is the act on this bill most likely to be responsible for someone's dad doing something regrettable in front of their children. We have accepted that.

Bradley McIntosh

S Club were assembled in 1999 and spent the next four years being genuinely, enormously popular — the television series, the singles, the lot.

“Don't Stop Movin'” is the one that outlasted all of it. Released in 2001, it went to number one in the UK twice in the space of a month, won the BRIT Award for Best British Single, took ITV's Record of the Year on a public vote, and has sold over a million copies here. Bradley McIntosh sings the verses; Jo O'Meara takes the bridge and the choruses. It is a properly good disco record that happened to be made by a pop group, and time has been very kind to it.

Bradley is one member of a seven-piece, performing a set of the songs he made with them. We want to be straightforward about that, because it matters: this is Bradley McIntosh, not a reunion. What it means in practice is an hour of songs that everyone from about eight to forty-five knows every word of, delivered by the person who was actually on the record.

If you have children who have discovered “Reach” through a school disco, they are going to lose their minds.

Why These Three, And Why Saturday

The Family Festival is the day that has to work for the widest possible range of people at once. Grandparents in deck chairs. Teenagers who want to be somewhere their parents are not. Seven-year-olds on their fourth ice cream. Adults who have paid for a babysitter for the evening and intend to get their money's worth.

Booking for that is harder than booking for a single audience. What these three acts share is that they cross generations without anyone having to compromise. A nine-year-old and their mum will both know “Don't Stop Movin'” and both mean it. “Turn Around” works on a five-year-old the same way it works on a fifty-year-old. Ultrabeat closes the gap between the family afternoon and the night everyone secretly turned up for.

That is the shape of the day: broad and bright early, harder and louder as the light goes.

What Happens Next

This is the first wave, not the whole bill. More Saturday acts are coming, and the Friday Country Music Day lineup has not been announced yet — those names will follow.

Tickets for both days and for the Weekend Pass are on sale now. Early bird pricing ended in July, so the prices you see today are general sale, and the Weekend Pass remains the best value on the site if you want both days.

One practical note, and we say it without any marketing sincerity: Saturday has a capacity and we are selling into it. The Garden Party in August sold to near capacity and roughly 350 people came through the gate on the day. Leigh Miners is a considerably bigger site, but a bill like this in a town like ours does not stay quiet for long.

Follow us on Instagram for the reveals as they land. The next one will not be long.