Striking a new balance with Melvin Benn

Just before the start of Electric Picnic in 2017, your Hot Press correspondent spoke to Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac about her appearance at the festival. One of the most articulate voices in the music industry, our conversation invariably expanded beyond her own music to to an issue which the Dublin DJ had been vocal about for a long time – the under-representation of women on festival line-ups.

“It’s very slowly improving,” she told us at the time. “Although I wouldn’t consider it being anywhere close to being fully addressed. Interestingly, Melvin Benn has announced that he’s making efforts to do something about gender imbalance. He’s launching a new programme that aims to give opportunities to female artists and bands.”

Back then, Melvin Benn’s ‘ReBalance’ scheme was in its infancy. Benn – head of Festival Republic, a company that oversees numerous festivals, including Reading & Leeds, Wireless, Latitude/Longitude and Electric Picnic – partnered with a music charity called the PRS Foundation. ReBalance aimed to give a different female artist, or female-led band, a week’s worth of studio time every month (they would also be provided with travel and accommodation). The initiative was met with tentative approval when it was announced, even though the full details hadn’t been ironed out.

At the Electric Picnic 2018 launch, back in March, Hot Press attended a press conference with Benn, and we talked to him briefly about the project. As a man who spent his youthful years protesting against Thatcher’s Tory government, and who has championed equality since he became a festival organiser, Benn has a track record of supporting progressive causes. But, as a businessman, he was conscious of the simple, possibly damaging, tokenism that might have come with running a 50: 50 line-up just for the sake of it – and which didn’t reflect what people were actually listening to. This, he argued, didn’t address the root of the problem.

“If you take 2017, of the top 600 songs on the Billboard Charts, 83% came from men,” he told us. “And what we do as music promoters is reflect what people listen to. So there’s always going to be that imbalance, until we get women recording music. And when more women are recording music, at that point, the balance will start to change.”

GAINING TRACTION
Shortly aftewards, the ReBalance initiative started to snowball. On top of the news that one female musician/band per month (over the course of three years) would get a week’s recording time in Old Chapel Studios in Leeds, Festival Republic and the PRS Foundation also announced a partnership with Music Managers Forum, to give ReBalance candidates access to a network of mentors, with each act getting one-to-one contact with industry specialists.

They would also get editorial support from music outlet Record Of The Day. In addition, Simkins LLP, a leading media law firm, agreed to provide each candidate with a free, one-to-one overview of recording, publishing, and management deals. Finally, each of the selected acts will get a chance to perform at a Festival Republic or Live Nation festival. What started off as an idea had been turned into a comprehensive programme, with legal and industry support.

“People are suddenly embracing this after having resisted it for so long,” says Benn, speaking from his offices in London. “And it’s terrific that people are embracing it. The reaction from the artists that we’re putting through is incredible. And it’s a constant reminder of how difficult things are, but when you read the response from the artists when I tell them that they’ve been confirmed, it’s an indicator of how important this project is.”

For years now, festival announcements have been met with initial joy, followed by a rumbling of discontent at the lack of a significant female presence. Almost every line-up is now met with scrutiny, not to mention the inevitable ‘What this line-up would look like without men’ photos. Melvin Benn was well aware of the criticisms that met his own line-ups.

“I had about three years of pressure from journalists and various other people about the imbalance in festival line-ups,” he admits. “And I could do nothing but agree with them. It just took me time to actually think about it and say, ‘How the hell can I sort this out’?

“Obviously I’m in a relatively advantageous position in my role as Managing Director, in that I can go back and look for the root of this problem. On top of that, one of the things that I’m able to do is go to somewhere like Old Chapel Studios in Leeds and say ‘This is what I want you to do’. I’ve had a relationship with that studio for a long time. It was a really easy ask.
“But I genuinely didn’t have a reference point for doing this scheme. I just knew that if I didn’t do something, no one else would.”

While the programme is based in the UK, Dublin alternative-pop band AE Mak were the first act to be selected for ReBalance. They “slipped through the cracks”, as Melvin puts it – but Festival Republic are now keen to expand the programme to Ireland.

“I’ve committed to trying to do 12 UK acts per year through ReBalance,” says Melvin. “And actually I’m thinking that I should commit to three Irish acts as part of that activity.”
With the amount of female talent in Ireland, there’s no doubt ReBalance’s expansion would be well-received.

ALL FEMALE COMEDY STAGE
Festival Republic have enjoyed considerable success in Ireland, with Electric Picnic and Longitude among the biggest dates on the domestic festival calendar. They work alongside MCD, the biggest concert promoter in the country, on a range of different events.

It can really make a difference, then, that Melvin Benn has put progressive politics and the equality agenda at the heart of what Festival Republic do. He had previously called for drug-testing facilities to be implemented at UK festivals – it almost worked at Leeds Festival in 2017, before licensing laws prevented the initiative proceeding. It will happen at Electric Picnic.

In a similar vein, when Hot Press photographer, Emily O’Callaghan – also a booker – spoke to Benn at an Electric Picnic press conference back in September about the fact that there were no women comedians on the line-up, it led to a rapid exchange of emails and ideas, before Emily found herself curating her own all female line-up at this year’s Electric Picnic, on the Hazel Wood Stage on Thursday, August 30.

“There are so many amazing female comics in Ireland at the moment,” Emily confided last month. “So I knew there was a massive pool of talent that I could advocate. Melvin was immediately receptive to the idea of an all-female bill. He’d already been running the ReBalance programme in the UK, so this was right up his street. I think he was ready to go with something like this. All it took was for someone to approach him with the local contacts.”

“Emily picked up the baton and ran with it,” Melvin explains. “That was something I was grateful for. I think maybe the curating of the comedy stages had been overlooked, but she was able to arrive with a problem, and then offer the solution.”

LONG TERM
By his own admission, the ReBalance initiative is only a small part of what is needed to improve an industry which has systematically worked against women. But the fact that it acknowledges this systemic problem, rather than painting over the cracks, makes it a great starting point.

“I guess the most important thing is that it’s put the issue of gender imbalance on the stage into the public consciousness,” says Melvin. “Now what I’ve also been grappling with is the fact that there is a lack of female engineers and that studios themselves are incredibly male-dominated. And so, just by the nature of the circumstances, if you’re a young woman and you go into a studio environment, it’s incredibly male. And it’s going to be harder than men realise, if you are a woman in that environment.

Especially if some of the men have a patronising attitude, which some men of course do have. So I set about changing that attitude as well.

“Where will it go eventually? Hopefully one or two of these acts – if not all of them – will end up making a career for themselves out of it. And then they will go on and support other initiatives. I’d like to think it would grow to other countries, and other parts of the world. But that’s something that we can only look at down the line.”