Melvin Benn: 'Leeds Festival is a joy for me'

Now, talking to The Yorkshire Post, the managing director of Festival Republic, whose other events include the Great Escape, Wireless and Latitude, says: “I am fortunate to have lots of highlights in my year, but Leeds is a joy for me.”

When planning such a large event – which is staged alongside its twin, Reading Festival, between August 21 and 25, and is second only in scale in the UK to Glastonbury – Benn says his intention is to “reflect the audience’s desires (and) interests”, adding: “That’s at the core of Leeds Festival, really, and I think we’ve done that pretty well”.

He’s particularly pleased this year to add two new stages, The Aux and The Chevron. The first, devoted to digital creators, is a novel development for a music festival in the UK and will tap into the interests of Generation Z. Among those confirmed for the stage are The Useless Hotline, Antics With Ash, In Ayamé We Trust, and the M1Podcast.

“It’s perhaps even overdue but I didn’t think we were quite ready for it last year, but I definitely think we’re ready for it this year because that is what is relevant to the audience, what they’re watching, listening, participating in,” Benn says. “These online platforms, these podcasts, the output of these content creators is remarkable stuff and it’s very accessible. You don’t have to be the best singer or the best guitarist in the world, you’re actually just reflecting who you are as a personality. You become a content creators and suddenly you’ve got millions of viewers. It’s an important part of young people’s culture now.”

The Chevron stage will be a 40,000 capacity open-air venue, featuring the world’s first floating video canopy made up of hundreds of thousands of programmable LED lights. “Dance music has grown again and it feels to me like I want to reflect that,” Benn says. “I thought with the demand for dance music, we need to get it back...but I wanted to present it really well, not just putting it in a stage or in a tent. I wanted to do something different, so the idea is that effectively we create a video wall which will be above people’s heads and the stage screens will literally project, so what you’re seeing in front of you you will also be seeing above you. It’s going to be absolutely amazing.”

Dance music’s renaissance prompted Benn to book Fred Again... as one of the festival’s headliners this year, alongside former Oasis singer Liam Gallagher, US superstar Lana Del Ray, pop-punk group Blink-182, indie band Catfish and the Bottlemen and Glaswegian singer-songwriter Gerry Cinnamon. “Never before had I considered having a DJ headliner at Leeds or Reading, but again it felt like it was the right time,” says Benn.

The sheer diversity of the bill mirrors the eclectic tastes of a young audience in an era of streaming. “People are not boxed into pigeonholes any more, that’s the reality of it,” says Benn. “People are loving Fred Again… and Liam Gallagher – you would not have thought that 10 or 20 years ago. (Then) people were ‘oh no, I’m not going to listen to that dance music, I like guitars’ or ‘I’m a dance music fan, I can’t stand guitars’. Now people are happy to embrace all forms, I think, so the festival is clearly reflecting that.”

After criticism of the lack of female artists on previous bills, this year it seems that change is finally in the air there, too. Benn points to Ellur and Delilah Bon, two singers from Yorkshire who were performing at the press event at Bramham Park, as an indication of where the festival is heading. “For me, the thing is to make sure that women have got the opportunity, but not put them in the wrong slots,” he says. “It would be really bad for their career if they were put in a position on a stage that the audience didn’t feel they were ready for because then there would be a bad reaction to them. We’re in this place, I think, where women are having an increasingly important and growing role. It’s not where we want it to be yet in terms of 50-50 or 55-45, we’re not quite in that position yet, but we’ll absolutely get there.”

It is, he says, something that Festival Republic have been trying to address through its ReBalance initiative, which launched in 2017 and is “very much about elevating young women and giving them the chance to make their first EP in a professional studio with female engineers”. He adds: “For me, you have to start at the bottom and build them up and we’re doing that exactly with these young acts that are playing today.” From this year’s bill, he believes Raye and Renee Rapp could ultimately become main stage headliners one day. “There’s no question Raye will headline festivals in the future, whether it will be Leeds and Reading I don’t know, it depends which way she goes and which way we go, but she’s an extraordinary talent and will be one of those music influences on the world, I think, in the way that Adele has become. Renee Rapp is an extraordinary talent, too. But Last Dinner Party have just burst through as well and everybody loving them, and there’s other acts, like Nia Archives, who I absolutely adore. So there’s lot of talent. Who makes it through? It’s not a lottery but it’s about an act finding the right pulse and keeping on that pulse and that list of relevance for people that want to go and see them.”

Benn, who is originally from Hull, has himself been an avid festival-goer for more than 50 years. His first one, he recalls, was Reading in 1972. “It was extraordinary. I hitch hiked down from Hull. I’d only ever been out of Yorkshire once before on a school trip and we had no idea what we were doing, we didn’t even take a tent. I didn’t even know you needed a tent, there was nowhere you could look online and check it out. So I remember rather a lot about it.”

Having been involved in promoting festivals for 45 years through first the Mean Fiddler organisation and then Festival Republic, Benn likes the “rawness” and unpredictability of music in the open-air. “But the thing that I like most about them is it engenders a sense of community,” he says. “For me, camping festivals in particular, they’re weekend-long, it gives you a sense of community that going to Leeds Arena for a couple of hours to watch a band, it’s fantastic but you don’t quite have that sense of community that you do in a field. I’ve always liked festivals, I’ve always liked bringing people together, I’ve always liked being part of that community – and I still feel part of that community even though I’m separated a little bit by having to organise it and put it all together.”

For 20 years Benn was a business partner with Vince Power. Paying tribute to the late Irish promoter, who died in March aged 76, he says: “We learnt together. We went into Reading Festival for the first time when Reading went bankrupt in ’88 and Vince had never been to a festival and I’d been to lots of festivals and the way it developed I principally looked after the festivals and he looked after the venues (that Mean Fiddler also owned), but we were great together, we worked really well together. In many ways we helped to create what the modern outdoor festival industry is. It didn’t exist when Vince and I went into Reading Festival there were only two festivals around – Reading and Glastonbury​​​​​​​ – and that was ’89. In 1990 we created an Irish music festival (Fleadh) in London and then in 1991 and ’92 we started creating more and more festivals. It was incredible that Mean Fiddler had as a company and that was a great platform​​​​​​​, and we worked very well together.”

Leeds Festival runs from August 21-25. For tickets visit https://www.leedsfestival.com/

ELLUR

Among those appearing on the BBC Introducing stage at this year’s Leeds festival is 23-year-old singer-songwriter Ellur, from Halifax.

“I’ve been doing pub gigs since I was 15 or 16 but I’ve been doing performance stuff since I was four or five, just because I’ve always loved being the centre of attention,” she quips.

She is just back from her first headline tour. “We did London, Leeds and Manchester. London was amazing, people really brought the energy. I’ve done a couple of support shows in London as well. I supported Embrace at Kentish Town. I spend quite a lot of time down there writing as well.”

Ellur is full of praise for BBC Introducing. “They’ve supported me since my first single and every single since then. Emily (Pilbeam) and all the team are really great, they’ve always had my back and have championed me. I really appreciate it and I really don’t know where I’d be without that support.”

She says she has been “coming to Leeds Festival a really long time – a couple of highlights were seeing Sam Fender and Stormzy, which was unreal – I was actually working in a burger van that year just so I could get a free ticket because I love it so much.

“It’s been a real part of my music journey and has influenced my music and how I write. I’m just always thinking about that festival moment whenever I write songs because I like that arms-open, everyone singing along thing.”

DELILAH BON

Barnsley-born singer Deliah Bon, 26, was formerly frontwoman with the punk rock band Hands Off Gretel. This year she will be appearing solo on the BBC Introducing stage.

“I’ve done this since I was 16,” she says, “but it was the live circuit that pushed me to go solo because I was playing a lot of shows and at the shows it was a majority of guys. It wasn’t a problem that they were men, but a lot of the men that came to gigs were inappropriate with me. As a teenage girl at first I would be sweet about it but then I would be getting groped.

“Then when lockdown happened my gigs stopped so I thought I could really reflect now and write music about how that made me feel and then I started doing that on my own and produced my own music and I realised this is easy, I can do it all myself. I didn’t orioginally think I would do it instead of my band, I was hoping to do both at the same time but it’s taken off and I just love it. I get to be creative and use my voice to empower girls as well.”

Musically, she says her sound has changed. “I think it’s evolved. I’ve still got the rock element, I’ve still got the punk grit in my voice, but now it’s mixed with a bit of hip-hop and rapping, which is new to me. I’m from Barnsley – people don’t do that in Barnsley!”

She sees the opportunity to play on the BBC Introducing stage at Leeds as “super important”, adding that it was “such a surprise when they asked me”.

“Growing up, I’ve never really had support from school or anything like that, it’s always been me in my own lane doing my own thing,” she says. “I kind of got used to to it always being me and having no help, but then BBC Introducing, with this opportunity it’s just crazy. It reminds you that people out there do care, people are wanting to help you and it’s wicked.”