Ruth Sophia Murray Interview – Neck Of The Woods Festival

Mike Bennett interviewsRuth Sophia Murraythe co-founder and co-organiser of the Neck of the Woods Festival. She launched the independent grassroots music event alongside Sam Brunt (of SM Presents) to showcase emerging alternative, rock, and punk music in the Manchester community. Running the festival is tied to her wider work with her music community promotion platform, We Are Manchester.

The festival recently celebrated its fifth anniversary in late September 2026, which also marked the first year her own band, Dig Up Her Bones, performed a live set at the event.

MB: Hi Ruth, I had the privilege of seeing your band Dig Up Your Bones, at your very own festival Neck of the Woods. Before we go in to the creative side, it’s the fifth anniversary of the festival. Why did you change the venue from the legendary Star and Garter to the venues in Withington the Blah café and Fuel cafe? Where I saw your band’s excellent show.

RSM: Neck of the Woods was created with the aim of building a community-focused festival that champions grassroots culture and showcases the very best music Manchester has to offer. Since launching, we feel the festival has built a reputation as an exciting independent music event. It was important to Sam and I, that it’s known for its welcoming atmosphere, and close connection between artists and audiences.

We would’ve loved to have continued with Star and Garter this year, but unfortuantely, it was not to be. We were very excited to be running the event across two venues. We felt was the right development for the festival in creating a real “two stage” feel. The staff at Blah and Fuel have been incredible and a delight to work with. Withington is an area particularly rich in musical heritage and it has some incredible, creative spaces. It seemed like the most likely next step!

Both Sam and I had our bands playing, and it can be difficult to balance that with running the festival. However, we just love running the event. For us, it can be a bit of a reunion of the music community! Sam has a very successful band, called Big Cat Chic and is a phenomenal musician and very busy. Dig Up Her Bones played fairly early, which meant I was free to help run proceedings with Sam, afterwards.

You opened your set with flashing images of tough women such as Madonna and Dolly Parton. It was highly effective. What was the purpose behind this?

It was an overlapping audio file. On Saturday, we started with a tribute to L7, after the recent loss of Jennifer Finch. L7 are an important band for me. So we had the engineer play a little of L7’s track: Shitlist. Our set opened with an audio track featuring local voices and their feelings on ‘being a woman’. It also featured Madonna, Dolly Parton, Shirley Manson and clips from some films such as Ken Russell’s ‘Whore’, ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Barbie’

We use it to open the discussion about what it’s like being a woman in a man’s world, expectations, pressures and the assumptions about what I call: ‘The Plasticine Girl’. ‘Plasticine Girl’ is our oldest track. It describes the way the male characters perceive a woman, on a night out.

For me your set had the dna of Divynals, Hole and Bikini kill whilst remaining tricky to categorise due to the original fusion. Can you tell me a bit about the band members involved and the meaning of the songs?

We’ve been told we could describe our music as follows:”If Courtney and Korn made a baby”. “If Rage had Shirley Manson on vocals”

I’ve always been active in music, since my sister and I started piano lessons at a really young age. I was trained in theatre performance, but music has always been important to me. This project has been brewing for many years. As any musician knows, the search for the ‘right fit’ in terms of musicians can be a long and arduous one. In the last two years, things finally came together when I found Simon (guitar), Reuben (bass), and Karim (drums). Although Simon and Karim are sadly stepping away, after working in the band for a while, we’ve had the most fruitful period, creatively.

When considering the meaning of the songs, I would return to the beginning. Dig Up Her Bones, began life with my reflection, through an alter ego (Jude) on a journey into feminine energy, from childhood to adulthood, love, desire, through pain to acceptance as a Plasticine Girl: unfinished, malleable, a work in progress, versions of a girl, pictures of what a “girl” should be, the people we were and the bodies we left behind or carry along the way.

Can you tell me a bit about the detailed dummies you pertain to during the set. Is there an intrinsic meaning behind them and did you create them yourself through diy art?

I’m inspired by the Riot Grrrl scene. Also a substantial influence on the music, are strong female voices, such as as Kat Bjelland, Donita Sparks, Shirley Manson, Kathleen Hanna, Katie Jane Garside, Nina and Louise (Veruca Salt) and Allison Wolfe.
As well as finding myself absorbed in their incredible music, some of the visual palettes used by these artists both on stage and in media, spoke deeply to me and my musical vision. Being from a theatre background, I always wanted to develop a really strong visual image for the live performances.

I have collected lots of dolls, and would like to develop this further by creating more with artists and creatives. The dolls, for me are a direct representation of the ‘Plasticine Girl’, as a starting point for discussion, representing memories, roles, parts of ourselves we leave behind, who we were, are and who we’ll become.

Moving forward what are your plans for the festival and excellent band?

For the band, I’d just really like to keep playing live and building on what we have. There are some local festivals like MPF, I’d like to play. We also hope to play live in London next year.

Sam and I love the Manchester scene. It’s a really beautiful community. We want all creative voices to be heard and we want to continue to represent as many voices as possible. For the festival, we are fortunate enough to have a wonderful team of people around us, who give their time for the love of the grassroots scene. We simply couldn’t do it without them!

These are difficult times for the grassroots scene. We’ve lost so many venues and incredible creatives, you never know when your time is up. All we hope, is to continue the work we love, build on this year and keep enjoying what we do.

Our applications will open again before Christmas. We can’t wait to see who applies!

~

Mike Bennett is lead singer of The Blockheads and writes for Louder Than War. This is his author profile. Neck of the Woods on Facebook.