Artist Spotlight Mati Simcox

Mati Simcox recently co-organised Sonic Aid Sheffield 2025, a student-led charity gig and live music event created in collaboration with fellow WaterBear students, raising funds for War Child UK. What began as part of a second-year module evolved into a fully realised grassroots event at The Dove & Rainbow, bringing together local Sheffield artists, audiences and industry support. The project gained coverage in The Star, highlighting how collaborative student initiatives are making a real impact in the city’s live music community. 

In this Q&A, Mati reflects on building her identity as an independent artist, the value of collaborative projects, and how organising a live charity concert has strengthened her creative and professional ambitions.

Music is something I chose to pursue as an artist because I’ve never really cared enough about anything else to risk failing at it. I could fall flat on my face a thousand times trying to write or perform and still be in awe that I get to do it. I formed my band Shwlw at WaterBear, before that I didn’t really know where I fit into the musical landscape, or if I even fit at all. I also have so many industry connections and clearer aspirations due to WaterBear’s opportunities and mentoring. 

Sonic Aid Sheffield is a direct product of one of my second year WaterBear modules: ‘Your Events’. I collaborated on it with Alex Maud and Miles Middleton (also WaterBear students). We initially just wanted to pull off an event and get a decent mark on it, but we ended up really enjoying overseeing something like that.

We split into 3 main roles: Planning (Alex), Finance (Miles) and Marketing (myself). But practically speaking we did hand off tasks to each other if one of us was drowning a bit with the workload we had. I’m lucky, they’re both incredibly competent and humble people, so we were able to have fun while also doing the work. 

We definitely developed communication skills. It’s intimidating at first but learning how to professionally and respectfully communicate with people in the industry (and your teammates) puts you so ahead of the curve. Also, problem solving. It was a challenging project at times, but pushing ourselves to find solutions and compromises was great because they made us better at our roles.

Leonie Sloots was the tutor for that module, and she’s obviously experienced in event planning, so she was very helpful to us throughout. I think she also helped us gauge how realistic we should be about the practicality of our ideas. We definitely started out imagining something like Glastonbury, but she helped us plan a more realistic event that was still ambitious and exciting. 

I think I’ve learnt a lot about effort and creative initiative. Projects like ours definitely take a lot of initiative and effort, which are always things you want to practice as often as possible. This opportunity also taught me a lot about sustaining my independence and managing my own portfolio in the music industry. Thanks to the events module, I now have my own event that I could resurrect annually to gain more contacts in the industry, more exposure in the local scene and more experience in a side of the industry I never knew I’d be interested in.

Part of our motivations for this project was to connect with the local scene. To us that meant hosting in a local venue (The Dove & Rainbow) and promoting local Sheffield acts (leo hc, Nap Hotel, Shwlw and Poison Dart). We felt very supported by the community, we had coverage from local press such as The Star, Forge Press and Mark Makers Magazine, which just felt amazing.

Our relationship with The Dove & Rainbow definitely benefited us hugely during this project. Getting to use a venue for free and not even having to find a SE made the project much more manageable.

I know we’ve spoken about doing it this summer, since we’ll have the time to do whatever we want. I think we just want to have fun with it and engage the local scene with a charitable, grounded and fun event. I remember it feeling really cool to look around on the night we had the event and think: “we did this, we brought all these people here and we helped raise this money”. Yeah, it’d be amazing to get to do that again.

My advice would be:  

• Be communicative – Send emails, DM’s whatever but always be reachable to people. You want people to know you’re serious about what you’re doing, and that you care enough to respond to people who are helping you out within a reasonable time frame. 
• Take initiative – Follow up with people who said they’d get back to you but haven’t, make suggestions and ask people for the info you need instead of expecting them to know you need it. 
• If you’re doing it in a group, do it with people you think you can actually count on. Teamwork is a huge part of events work, and you really don’t want to be doing all the work so that they get to just ‘read off the slides’.