Hearts & Harmony: How Chinenye Mbakwe Turned a Valentine’s Concert Into a Platform for Live Music

The strongest shows create a reason for people to gather. They give artists a stage, give audiences something worth experiencing and create work for the people who make live entertainment possible.

That was the ambition behind Hearts & Harmony, which took place in Northampton on 14 February 2026.

Headlined by Great Adamz and The 99 Band, the sold-out Valentine’s concert brought together music, performance, audience participation and a wider group of creative professionals. More importantly, it showed what can happen when a live event is treated as a complete experience rather than simply a headline performance.

Much of that work was driven by Chinenye Mbakwe, a UK-based Music & Live Events Executive, live music producer and singer whose career has developed from performing on stage to helping create the platforms around live music.

Mbakwe’s route into this work is important. She joined Great Adamz’s team in 2024 as a backup singer, giving her direct experience of performing and working within a professional music team. Her responsibilities gradually expanded into backstage coordination, artist support, audience engagement and live-event delivery.

She has since worked within UK festival environments, including Latitude Festival in 2025, where she performed as a singer on the BBC Introducing Stage while also supporting the production team around the performance. Her work at Music Barn Festival similarly combined her role as a singer with practical involvement in the live environment, audience engagement and artist interviews.

That experience became useful at Hearts & Harmony.

The first thing that stood out about Hearts & Harmony was its attempt to make the evening feel like a complete live experience.

The programme brought together artists from different musical backgrounds, with Great Adamz and The 99 Band leading the evening alongside other performers. The Valentine’s setting also gave the event a clear identity beyond simply being another artist headline show.

For Great Adamz, the concert represented his second sold-out UK headline show. That is significant in itself. For an independent artist, selling out a second headline event suggests that an audience is beginning to follow the live experience rather than simply individual releases.

But the performance on stage was only part of the story.

A successful live event depends on decisions made long before the audience enters the room.

Artist schedules have to work. Performers need to know where they need to be. The programme has to move at the right pace. The audience needs to remain engaged. Backstage activity has to stay organised while the people on stage remain focused on performing. Mbakwe was involved across these areas.

Her role included artist coordination, event planning, programme delivery and show-day coordination. She also hosted the concert, introducing performers, guiding the programme and maintaining contact with the audience.

Great Adamz also recognised Mbakwe’s contribution to the production, describing her as someone who understood the vision of the event and worked to bring its different parts together.

That assessment is consistent with the progression visible in Mbakwe’s career.

She understands the live environment because she has experienced it as a performer. She also understands the work behind it because she has increasingly taken responsibility for coordinating it.

That combination gave her a useful role in Hearts & Harmony.

The strongest part of the event, however, may have been what happened beyond the main performances.

Hearts & Harmony created opportunities for musicians, dancers, photographers, videographers, media professionals, promoters and hospitality businesses to participate in the wider production.

This is important because the value of a live music event does not stop with the person holding the microphone.

A photographer can build a portfolio. A videographer can create new work. A dancer can gain stage experience. A media professional can cover new artists. A promoter can develop relationships. A hospitality business can reach a new audience.

The event therefore operated as a small creative network around the music.

This is where Mbakwe’s contribution becomes more significant than simply organising a successful concert.

She helped create a platform through which other artists and creatives could also benefit from the event. That is a different ambition from managing one artist’s appearance.

Mbakwe’s career before Hearts & Harmony helps explain this shift.

She began as a singer and backup singer. She gained experience performing alongside an established UK Afropop artist. She worked within festival environments and learned the practical demands of live performance. She then moved further into coordination and event delivery.

Hearts & Harmony represents the point at which those experiences began to come together in a project she helped build herself.

Her work through 99PLUZ Media Ltd has also given her experience in entertainment media, artist interviews and audience-facing content. While media is not the central purpose of Hearts & Harmony, it strengthens her understanding of how artists, events and audiences connect.

It would be easy to judge Hearts & Harmony simply by the fact that it sold out. That would miss the more interesting point. The event demonstrated that Mbakwe could bring artists, audiences and a wider group of creative professionals together around a single live production.

The question now is whether that can be repeated. One successful event establishes proof of concept. A sustainable live platform requires consistency.

Can Hearts & Harmony return with equally strong programming? Can Mbakwe continue discovering and bringing together artists who make sense within the same programme? Can the network of photographers, videographers, dancers, media professionals, promoters and other creatives grow with each edition?

Those are the questions that will determine the long-term value of the platform. But they should be viewed as the next stage of the work, not a weakness in what has already been achieved.

Building an independent live music platform in the UK requires artists, audiences, venues, production, promotion and creative workers to come together at the right time. Hearts & Harmony demonstrated that Mbakwe can bring those elements together around a live music experience.

That is significant for an emerging practitioner. Mbakwe entered the industry as a singer. She has since worked within festivals, supported artists behind the scenes, developed experience in live-event coordination and helped create a platform of her own.

The most interesting part of her career may therefore no longer be the fact that she can perform on a stage. It is that she is beginning to create the stages on which other people can perform.

Hearts & Harmony was one night in Northampton. Its long-term importance will depend on what comes next. But as a first major statement of Mbakwe’s live-event practice, it made a convincing case that she is not simply working around music.

She is beginning to build something around it.