IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Superstruct has taught me a huge amount about how to structure, develop, grow and control a show. Right back at The Great Escape, Kat Morris was my first boss and she taught me to enjoy the challenge of the overall festival offering. If you have that, the problems look after themselves, because you don ' t get bogged down in the minutiae. Andrew Topham at Vision Nine was another influence. He was very pragmatic about how you grow a show, but he never lost sight of the customer experience.
What ' s the first career highlight that comes to mind? I ' ll take it back to when I started out. The first time we had a sold-out club night: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played Manchester Academy and we did the unofficial afterparty at a local club called Retro Bar. We were about a year into our club night career, career being a loose term, and it was the first night that fully sold out. We made a couple of hundred quid each, which felt like millions at the time. That thrill of everyone coming down, having a great time, everything just working. I ' ve never forgotten that feeling. It ' s part of what makes live events so addictive. No matter how challenging a show is to deliver, knowing people are out there having a great time is the thing I try to channel.
If you could change one thing about the events industry overnight, what would it be? Being able to book the weather! For a more serious answer: if you ' d asked me a few years ago it would have been greater transparency. I was fortunate to be an AIF member for a number of years, and now I ' m within Superstruct, a large collection of festivals. Joining Superstruct was the first time I ' d been somewhere with transparency about how each show was performing, which really helped you understand how your show was benchmarking. Before that it was all smoke and mirrors and you ' d think,‘ are we doing the right thing or not?’ As soon as you talk to other people, it either reassures you or pushes you to try something different.
So, it ' s not a call for huge change, more a continuation of honesty between shows, because we need a successful festival marketplace for everybody. Competition is good, but I ' m a bigger fan of friendly rivalry than anything more prickly.
How has your first year as director of Y Not Festival been? Brilliant. Y Not was a well established show, but operationally it had a few challenges, and issues with weather in 2017 and 2023. Post-Covid it was one of the shows that struggled with its bounceback— bluedot, another show I worked on, struggled too and unfortunately never quite made it back after 2023. Y Not held on, and the team really developed the operational delivery and shored it up. So, the brief this year was to continue that operational excellence but lay on top of it continued development of audience experience, creatively, aesthetically and operationally.
We were fortunate to have a positive onsale off the back of 2025. Nathan Harrison, who books the show, put together a
fantastic lineup that was received really well, and selling out by the end of February was completely unknown territory for Y Not and it ' s never happened on any show I ' ve worked on. The challenge then was making sure all those people had the best possible time, so they buy again. Now we ' re in the same position, if not better, for 2027. We ' re 19,000 tickets in the bag, which is phenomenal.
What ' s your favourite way to unwind? I ' m a tennis player, and there ' s a bit of therapy in hitting a ball really hard if you ' ve had a tough day. I also still really enjoy going to watch live music and the theatre. Even though I ' ve worked in events for a good while, I can still get lost in a really good show and don ' t start looking at the lighting fixtures or thinking about their ingress and egress models. That ' s important: we put on these brilliant shows for people to enjoy, but we shouldn ' t forget how important it is to go and enjoy live music and culture ourselves, because otherwise you get too far from your audience.
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