KRANKBROTHER to Finsbury Park, which was our first major outdoor site, and that has grown from a 3,000-capacity two-day event to a six-day 10,000-cap per day event; all still very much focused on underground electronic music, and all still delivered by a fiercely independent promoter. Our 30,000-cap show at Gunnersbury Park sold out in a matter of hours. It was a real spectacle and the jewel in our crown.
How have you gone about building the community of ticket buyers who have helped drive Krankbrother’ s growth?
It is the quality of the delivery of our shows. We aim to deliver a premium experience as a standard, so if you walk into any one of our sites it looks and feels great. Our focus on the F & B side means there ' s hardly any queuing, and from an aesthetic standpoint there are many creative features that we ' ve invested lots of money into, and that means fabricating and owning elements as opposed to hiring.
Can you give me an example of key infrastructure you have created in-house?
One of the main things is our custom fabricated stage roof, which is an identifiable unique piece. The quality of the event delivery is underpinned by things like the stage structure and the very coherent creative approach across the site, which has helped us build a community of like-minded people who are after good quality experiences. That ' s been a key element of our success.
What drove you to fabricate your own stage and what advantages has it brought?
There were two things. The first reason is cost. I was spending a lot of money each year on hiring a structure that looked okay, and then the money was gone, but if I spent three years of that money on fabricating our own structure it makes way more sense financially in the longer term. Secondly, it meant we had a unique piece that nobody else could use on their festival site, and that has more capability
“ OUR 30,000-CAP SHOW AT GUNNERSBURY PARK SOLD OUT IN A MATTER OF HOURS.”
than a lot of the other roofs that we see out there. It ' s got a clear roof and it’ s a huge black steel structure that while being big doesn ' t meet the eye in an obtrusive way. You can almost make it disappear or make it obvious depending on the desired aesthetic. The primary goal was for it to hold a lot of weight in the roof, so we fly both of our front of house PAs off of the front corners of the roof, which makes the whole thing look really unique. The weight capacity of that roof far exceeds any stock we might be offered, which has been amazingly beneficial for us, because we ' ve been able to fly screens and all sorts of lighting fixtures. It’ s a cantilever structure, so there ' s no upright legs right in front of you, and it looks like it ' s floating. I get so many enquiries about hiring it out.
Is there an ambition to expand your reach beyond London?
In many ways what we do currently has a very London-centric audience but there are plans to go further afield, both domestically and internationally. We are looking into delivering other genres of music, and in different areas of the UK and Europe. We are not necessarily focused on growing the size of the events, because we feel that we have found a sweet spot with a 10,000 capacity, but we are focused on expanding the show portfolio. Over the next two years, we ' ll see a lot of new and exciting things coming out of Krankbrother.
You oversee production, does that involve working with a third-party agency?
We don ' t tend to go for a production agency but for a lot of our custom fabrications, and other assets, we tend to use a couple of contractors. For example, the stage roof structure that we built involved a principal designer which was Design Craft. While they were the principal designer, we still directly contracted each individual contractor to deliver on elements such as the metal cutting and the welding. We like to retain a lot of that control in-house because that enables us to get the creative outcome we want.
How big is the core Krankbrother team?
We staff up from the beginning of the year, I ' ll pull in my site manager, production manager, and build out the whole team from our office in Farringdon, and then we deliver internally. The majority of our team are on a freelance contract from the beginning of each year for nine months. There ' s around 20 of us that delivered our shows, and we come back down to a skeleton crew of six of us for the remainder of the year.
What challenges and advantages are there to being an independent promoter?
The challenges are extremely apparent, and we must be very dynamic to counteract a lot of them. It ' s massively challenging from an infrastructure availability point of view, but the main challenge is that larger promoters can afford to pay the fees to the artists that get them talking to them instead of us. We ' ve lost a lot of talent to the likes of AEG and Live Nation because of that. It ' s not necessarily the competition of ticket versus ticket, it ' s about the availability of the talent. We try and stay in our lane with the more credible, slightly more underground, talent. But major promoters are picking up on the high ticket, slightly underground, calibre of talent and that’ s really putting our programming at risk. Having said that, we still have some very good relationships with management companies, agencies and artists who will choose to take that slightly lower fee and slightly better event. We ' re literally five doors down from Live Nation, I used to work there.
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