Video: Why Leeds ranks with the world’s top music festivals

A sell-out 75,000 crowd is expected to descend on Bramham Park, near Wetherby, for the annual rock music extravaganza and the job of transforming the tranquil surroundings of this country estate requires military precision.

As managing director of Festival Republic, the smooth running of the festival ultimately rests on Melvin Benn’s shoulders. But as the man in charge of numerous international events including the Big Chill, Hove Festival in Norway and Orlando Calling in Florida, he is well accustomed to the pressure that comes from organising these huge outdoor events.

Benn has been at the helm since he started the Leeds Festival back in 1999. “We had the Reading Festival and I wanted a sister event in the north,” he says, “and because I’m from Yorkshire I thought it would be the best place and Leeds was the obvious choice because it’s such a great city. But I never thought it would become as big as Reading and yet it has.”

When he first approached Leeds Council about the possibility of holding a rock festival he says he received a positive response. “They were very welcoming and very enthusiastic,” he says. All he had to do then was deliver what he’d promised. “When it first started I was a bit nervous because it was my own reputation on the line, but we didn’t have any problem attracting bands. In the first year we had Blur and they were right up there with the best at the time.

“This year we have Muse and the only two places you can see them play in Europe this year are Reading and Leeds, that shows the power this festival has - bands want to come and play here. Leeds Festival is one of the top four, or five, rock music festivals anywhere in the world, it’s massive. Glastonbury is the biggest festival in the world but Reading and Leeds combined are even bigger.”

Benn was born and raised in Hull. He grew up in the 1960s when The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were in their pomp and became a rock convert.

“The very first festival I went to was Reading in 1972 and I hitch hiked all the way from Hull with a mate. The Faces were playing and they were the reason I went there. I was 16 and I’d never been out of Yorkshire before,” he says. “I didn’t even have a coat and I went down with just what I was wearing. It was incredibly badly organised and it rained constantly but I had the most extraordinary time. You still had hippies back then and there were girls taking their tops off which was quite something for a young lad from Hull.”

He was studying to be an electrician at City and Guilds in Hull, but left his apprenticeship and moved to London. He got a job with the BBC working in television lighting and later on designed lighting for live music shows. With his interest in live music kindled by his teenage experience at Reading he started organising his own concerts.

“I began doing a lot of free events for left-wing political causes and I used to sell beer to try and pay for the bands,” he says. “The very first one I did was in 1979 with Shane MacGowan before The Pogues started. He was living in a squat with a mate of mine and the stage was the back of a lorry, it was pretty shambolic but that was where it all started for me.”

He continued doing fundraising gigs in support of the Miners Strike and organisations like CND and the anti-Apartheid movement. Surely, being the entrepreneur he is, he spotted a gap in the market? “Not at all, I never looked beyond what I was doing at the time. I never had the thought ‘here’s an opportunity.’”

He started organising festivals for Mean Fiddler in 1989 and later became the licensee at Glastonbury which coincided with an upturn in the fortunes of Britain’s biggest outdoor festival. There are many people, including some reading this, for whom the idea of going to a festival is about as appealing as a visit to the dentist’s. But Benn believes festivals have broadened their appeal in recent years.

“When I first started going you were seen as odd if you went to a festival, people associated them with drop outs, but that attitude has changed completely and festivals are now part of British culture. A lot of rock music festivals now have poetry and comedy, like Latitude, you have literature festivals like Hay-on-Wye, so there’s something to suit every taste.”

He rejects the idea that they have become too corporate. “Without sponsors, festivals wouldn’t be the same because they help pay for the bands, the key is not to allow it to go too far, as some have done.”

The Leeds Festival has grown steadily over the past decade but while it has become a huge success, establishing itself as a major fixture on Yorkshire’s musical calendar, this hasn’t always been the case. During its original tenure at Temple Newsam Park the festival was plagued by violence, culminating in 2002 when around 200 youths went on the rampage causing damage estimated at £250,000.

At the time some local residents and councillors called for an end to the festival, but Benn says he didn’t consider bringing the event to a halt. “It didn’t cross my mind, it was only a very small minority of people who caused trouble and why should they spoil it for the tens of thousands who behaved themselves and were a credit to society?”

Since switching to Bramham Park in 2003, the concerts have passed off without any serious incident and Benn believes the festival has found an ideal home in the stunning country estate. “There have been more than 600,000 people who have come to Bramham Park to see some of their favourite bands over the past nine years, it truly is a fantastic setting for a festival and the owners, the Lane Fox family, have been fantastically welcoming.”

He admits, though, that he went on a charm offensive in a bid to win over sceptical residents in the nearby villages of Thorner and Bramham who were concerned by some of the reports they’d heard about the goings on at Temple Newsam. Since its relocation, the festival has given more than £500,000 to projects in the two villages including a new football pitch for Thorner United FC and a new boiler for the local scout hut. Other projects part-funded by the festival include the refurbishment of Victory Hall in Thorner and the development of a new sports centre in Bramham.

There is also an agreement between the festival organisers and the two villages which sees a set number of tickets donated to a special committee which are then sold at a discounted rate to villagers.

“Members of the local cricket club can come and work at the festival and instead of getting paid they donate the money to their club,” he says.

For Benn, supporting good causes and charities, both local and international, is important. Among the organisations he supports is Action Aid and earlier this year he travelled to Africa with the charity and visited Kibera, the continent’s oldest and biggest slum which has around one million people living in an area that measures just one square mile. He also took part in a music festival to raise awareness of HIV and Aids in Mombasa.

“At the end of the day I think we in the UK have an obligation to try and help others and that is a core principle of mine and my company. Some people underestimate the music business, they think ‘oh, they’re just a bunch of old rock n rollers’ but if you look at Live Aid and you look at bands like U2 they’ve made a big difference,” he says.

It also highlights the unifying power of music. “Live music and people is a fantastic combination and the joy of opening the gates at the start of the Leeds Festival each year, and seeing the sense of excitement and anticipation on people’s faces will never leave me.”