JJ Summer break out their Sunday Best for this Saturday's Icebreaker Festival in the Albert Road area

​With 80 acts covering a wide variety of genres across eight stages in Southsea – from The Wedgewood Rooms at one end to The Deco at the other – there is plenty to choose from.

The music kicks off from 1pm in The Deco with the other stages following from 2pm, until late – with Unmade Radio hosting the after-party in The One Eyed Dog.

Among the many acts playing are JJ Summer, who are stepping up to headline in The Vaults.

Led by Jim Harding on guitar and Summer Sprake on bass, the two share vocals while drummer and producer Jon Callender stays in the background.

Sporting a fresh take on the dream-pop/shoegaze sound, the band came together during 2020 when Jim was lodging with Jon. The latter is a scene veteran, who has a stint in Portsmouth legends Cranes under his belt and also currently drums for electro-rock act Curl. And in his back garden is a small recording studio where many local acts have laid down tracks.

Jim moved in after splitting with his girlfriend, and then found himself furloughed. ‘I came here and with there being no work and no gigs, or anything like that, we had a lot of spare time,’ he recalls.

‘Before that I was making some music of my own for about 18 months. I wasn't really pushing it myself – I showed it to Jonny and he saw something in it and he started helping me with it.’

Jon, who also teaches music production at Havant South Downs College, had been working with Summer in the studio as one of his graduate students, which is how she crossed Jim’s path.

‘Summer got involved in some of my tracks,’ says Jim, ‘putting some vocals on, and then we started actually writing songs from scratch together. We had all this time to do it, so the stars aligned quite well for something to start.’

And when it came to giving the new project a name: ‘When you start something like this, you need to organise yourself, particularly with file management [on the computer], so I put all of the songs in one folder under J for Jon, J for Jim and then Summer, and that was kind of it. We were trying to think of a name but it kind of stuck.’

‘It could be a person, or it could be something else,’ adds Jon, ‘like Mazzy Star for example, the singer’s not Mazzy Star, it's the band...’

The three of them soon realised they had something special: ’We were saying, this stuff's got legs. I got more and more involved in playing drums and the production, but staying in the background with those two pushing it along with the writing. It was something that was too good to waste.

Jon explains: ‘I produce a lot of bands who come to me, but from a personal perspective, I never thought I'd be as involved again, or have that close-knit thing with something really beautiful that means so much and defines your creativity. All three of us have those feelings about it.’

The various lockdown rules meant the band had to wait for its live debut, which Jim admits was ‘frustrating,’ but it turned out to be a blessing in hindsight.

‘It felt incomplete at the time,’ he says, ‘but it bought us some time. A big part of being an artist now if you're independent, is you have to shoulder responsibility for things like creative content for social media, video, and things like that. The amount of things you've got to do is insane. It gave me time to work on those skills because I didn't have them before. In previous bands I'd just play songs, drink beer and eat the rider!’

They are now starting to work on their debut album, but as Jon says: ‘We want to take our time, and create something that's right. We're proud of this and want to push it as much as we can. I suppose world domination isn't what we're chasing but every artist needs to feel loved a little bit.’

The EP Constructs is out now. They play The Vaults, Stage 2, at 10.30pm.

Advance tickets for Icebreaker are £15. Go to icebreakerfestival.com.