Festival Republic MD Melvin Benn

The driving force behind some of the UK’s biggest and most successful festivals including Latitude, Reading & Leeds, Wireless and Wilderness, Festival Republic managing director Melvin Benn is the latest festival supremo to take the seat for an AAA Backstage podcast interview.

The podcast series explores what lies behind festivals and their instigators, and this episode finds Melvin discussing his eventful decades of experience in the industry, from sleeping under the Reading Festival main stage to saving the event from bankruptcy. 

Recorded ahead of the Event Production Awards, the interview finds Access All Area’s Chris Barrett and Melvin dressed to the nines in evening suits, but the conversation is anything but stilted. Melvin opens up about a wide range of topics from staging political festivals, setting up the Workers Beer Company and being chased by skinheads to his role as director of the Glastonbury Festival.

The conversation also takes in pertinent industry-wide issues including him playing a leading role in working with Government to get the live events industry up and running post-Covid, the pressures currently faced by independent festival operators, his advice for budding festival bosses, and his creation of benchmark sustainability guidelines for Live Nation globally.