Victorious Festival 2023: Portsmouth dream-pop act Frankie Knight prepares to make festival debut

But the Portsmouth-based artist is only making her Victorious Festival debut this weekend.

With the newly released Space Pop album under belt, Frankie is playing on the Beats & Swing Stage on Sunday at 2.10pm.

The album is a collaboration with Brighton-based artist Ink Project. It is the first new material from the performer since her acclaimed 2019 album Blue Marble.​

"It has been quite a long time,” says Frankie. “I guess the pandemic set me back a bit. The music was always there on the backburner – I've got loads of music backed up. I just didn't feel like it was the right time to be releasing stuff, but 2023 is my year again.”

Explaining how Space Pop came about, she says: “It's a slightly different approach – it was more collaborative, and I think it's what I needed, to work with someone else.

"I met Jez Lloyd, who's behind The Ink Project, when he was playing the World Music Stage at Victorious and I was helping out backstage and we just got chatting. We stayed in touch afterwards and I thought maybe he could do a remix of a single I was going to put out, but then I wanted to hold off on that. He works with some publishers and he got an offer from them to write an album, so that's what we did!

“I was actually making lots of instrumental stuff at the time, so it was nice nudge to get back into the vocals. But it was really collaborative – he'd send me some beats, I would send him some stuff and then we'd work on each other's things.”

The two have yet to play live together, but Frankie will be performing at Victorious with her long-term foil and best friend drummer Rob Swaine.

“I've integrated some of the album into my live set but kind of reimagined it a bit.”

And after several years of not playing live, Frankie has re-embraced it in 2023.

“I just really lost momentum with it, with so many gigs being cancelled or postponed, just the whole change in live music. it took me a while to want to get back out there - I was quite happy just making music, just writing. But I did a couple of gigs and realised: this is actually my happy place! The challenge of it, the buzz from it.

"I thought I really have to do more of this, so I put it out into the universe that I want to do more shows and any opportunity that came my way, I'd get right on that. And it's kind of snowballed – I'm going on tour with Kosheen in September, doing eight dates there, and I'm supporting Unknown Mortal Orchestra in Southampton, I’ve done Camp Bestival and then I’ve got Shambala festival Victorious in the same weekend.”

And she’s looking forward to her Victorious debut on the Beats & Swing Stage: “I think I was supposed to play it in 2020, but that obviously didn't happen, so I'm very excited for it, and really happy to be part of the Beats & Swing family because Luke (Fuller, Beats & Swing promoter) has been really supportive of me before.

"I played with Kosheen before and that was a Beats & Swing show – that was my introduction to (Kosheen frontwoman) Sian Evans and maybe that led to this tour support.”

There is also a new single pending.

“It’s called Mystic, which is a track I've been sat on since 2020, but it feels like the right time to put it out now – just independently by myself to celebrate Victorious and the tour with Kosheen. It's been part of my live show for the past year, it's a dreamy electronic pop track, quite ’80s – very colourful.”

Frankie Knight plays the Beats & Swing Stage at 2.05pm on Sunday.

Victorious Festival runs on Southsea Common from August 25-27. For tickets and more information go to: victoriousfestival.co.uk.