Monday, 8 August 2022 | 21.8°C Dublin

T hree years after the last festival, promoter Melvin Benn is counting the cost of showbusiness

Electric Picnic 2019 at Stradbally. Photo: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile.

Melvin Benn. Picture by Marc Sethi

The cost of putting on a concert or music festival has tripled in the past three years, according to Electric Picnic boss Melvin Benn.

D escribing the effect of the cost of living crisis on the live event industry as “scary”, the festival director said that despite the increased costs, the show must go on.

“The cost of everything has gone up,” he said. “Everything. The cost of labour has gone up. What a staging company charges me to build a stage is now substantially more because the cost of labour has gone up and the cost of transport has gone up because the cost of fuel has gone up and lorry drivers’ wages have gone up.”

Benn, the managing director of Festival Republic — which runs Electric Picnic along with Latitude, Reading and Leeds festivals in England and Lollapalooza Berlin in Germany — said from his office in London: “A staging company, for example, has to charge me more because the cost of fuel has gone up. They can’t bear the cost of fuel on the 2019 prices. And that goes for every single piece of the Electric Picnic.

“The Electric Picnic sits on a very beautiful piece of grass at Stradbally Hall. There’s nothing there. Nothing.

“Every single thing has to be delivered. And in order for it to be delivered it has to incur labour and transport costs as well as putting the stages up and dismantling them.

“The cost of bringing power in across the site, generators, to provide sound, lighting, emergency lighting, has tripled between 2019 and 2022. Not 10pc or 20pc. It’s three times what the cost was in 2019. It’s really scary. And when we as promoters say buy a ticket at a tier one price, trust me, it’s worth it.

“Because there’s nothing stable in the world at the moment. We’re very confident about making events happen but, Jesus, fuel is not going to go down.”

Not all costs have been passed on to concert-goers.

“Across the UK this year, my costs have gone up between 28pc and 30pc and I put my ticket prices up around 11pc,” Benn said. “I haven’t passed on all those costs at this point in time because I didn’t think the public could afford to bear the cost. I haven’t settled on a ticket price for 2023 yet.”

Of the six main headliners at Electric Picnic, there is one woman, Megan Thee Stallion, next to five male acts — Dermot Kennedy, Snow Patrol, Tame Impala, Picture This and Arctic Monkeys. There are many female performers on the bill, including Lyra, CMAT, Joy Crookes, Wolf Alice, Sorcha Richardson, Tolu Makay and Denise Chaila, but the optics still point to a gender imbalance at the festival.

“Until there is complete 50pc representation, there will be never be enough women playing,” Benn said.

“We have to put a bill together that people want to listen to and the artists that are available to us and we work really hard to get a good spread. I think the Picnic bill is pretty decent.

“Do we want to do better? Of course we want to do better. But when you think in the top 1,000 songs written every year, only about 12pc to 16pc are by women. If you look at the Billboard charts year on year, less than 20pc tend to be made up of women. What people are listening to is what we as promoters largely try to represent on our stages.”

Returning from September 2 to 4, this will be the first Electric Picnic since the Covid-19 pandemic shut down live shows in 2020.

“I was absolutely devastated when Electric Picnic didn’t happen in 2020 because of Covid,” Benn said. “My life was just empty, utterly and completely empty, because I spent my life creating and producing and putting on festivals — 2020 was the first year since 1969 that I hadn’t been at a festival.

“The music industry, like the film industry, is made up of people who create and do and self-start. And when there’s nothing you can do to influence what you want to do most of all — which is bring together large numbers of people in a wonderful music environment like the Electric Picnic — you really do tear your hair out.”

Benn feels it is “extraordinary” it is three years since the last Picnic.

“What is even more extraordinary is we went on sale immediately after the Picnic of 2019 and most of the ticket holders attending in 2022 will have bought their tickets then, three years ago. Some of them may have become parents in that period. Three years is a long time,” he said.

Asked who he is most looking forward to seeing at the festival, he said: “It would be impossible not to say The Arctic Monkeys. They’re a Yorkshire band. I’m a Yorkshire lad.

“Also, of course, Fontaines DC on the Friday night will go off big time. They’ve had an incredible summer. The bill is always about being relevant.

“To be honest, I’m as excited about the new theatre tent as I am about almost everything else. We have Ballet Ireland doing Rooster with The Rolling Stones songs as the soundtrack and the amazing Belfast Ensemble doing Abomination, a DUP opera.

“It’s a must see, but that’s what the picnic does — it breaks new ground every year. It’s why it stands out as Ireland’s best and most culturally important music festival. It’s the best craic too.”

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