By the mid-1990s, Vince Power, who has died aged 76, had become the biggest music festival promoter and venue owner in Britain. His Mean Fiddler Music Group encompassed such prestigious live events as the Leeds and Reading festivals and the Tribal Gathering, Phoenix and Fleadh festivals.
In addition it controlled the London Astoria and a clutch of other venues in the capital including the Clapham Grand, the Jazz Cafe in Camden Town, the Forum in Kentish Town and the original Mean Fiddler in Harlesden. Among the countless musical greats he brought to the stage were Prince, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Van Morrison, Joan Baez, the re-formed Sex Pistols and the Eagles.
Power was also involved with a string of successful London restaurants, including Odette’s in Primrose Hill, the Berkeley Square Cafe, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue (with chef Conrad Gallagher) and the Pigalle Club. The secret of his success was simple: “I think it’s about having ideas and carrying them through regardless of what anyone else thinks about it,” he told the Independent.
When he first came to London from Ireland as a 16-year-old in the 60s, Power lived with his aunt Kitty in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, and had a job as an assistant in Woolworth’s. He later worked for Wall’s ice cream and in a Heinz baked bean factory, before becoming a dealer in secondhand furniture. But music was his real passion, and after he had built up a chain of secondhand furniture stores in north London, he decided to put his money to good use.
Was there some hidden link between furniture and music? “If you book the right band, you won’t have much trouble getting customers in,” he pointed out. “And if you choose the right furniture, you won’t have much problem selling it.”
His career transformation began with his acquisition of “a grotty old club in Harlesden” which became the Mean Fiddler, named in memory of his fiddle-playing grandfather. He paid £125,000 for it. A fan of country music who had spent time in the bars of Nashville, where he noted the importance not only of the music but of serving ice-cold beer, he opened the venue in 1982 and began booking country and folk artists, before casting his net wider to embrace a variety of up-and-coming acts, among them the Pogues, Los Lobos, Lloyd Cole, the Pixies and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
In the fullness of time, Paul McCartney and REM played there, not to mention Power’s heroes Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, Orbison making his final UK appearance there in 1987.
A burly, crop-haired figure, Power was sometimes likened to a bouncer (although he was also described as “a fluffy sheep in a suit”), and his air of enigmatic self-containment proved a valuable tool in his business dealings.
As one former associate put it: “He gives so little of himself that people are always filling in the gaps. Hence the tough-guy reputation.”
Power was dismissive of the suggestion that he ran his own Irish “murphia” clan, let alone that he had Republican connections. “Just because I’m Irish, people said I was being supported by the IRA,” he told the Guardian in 1999. “That’s crap. I got where I am by sheer hard work and a bit of luck – nothing else.”
He claimed he always relied on his own instincts when making his business decisions. “I’ve never got involved in market research. Instead, I’ve gone out and got to know the area and the people myself.”
Born in Kilmacthomas, County Waterford, he was the son of John Power, a forester, and his wife Brigid. He was the fourth of 11 children, though four of them died at birth. He attended St Declan’s community college in Kilmacthomas, but although he won a scholarship to an agricultural college in Galway, he instead chose to go to Britain.
His relentless drive to expand his business interests inevitably caused conflict. In the late 80s he emerged victorious from a power struggle with the founder of the Reading festival, Harold Pendleton, who had recruited Power to help revive the festival but then unwisely tried to manoeuvre him out again.
Power, who had already created the rival Phoenix festival, near Stratford-upon-Avon, ended up running both events. In 1999 he established Reading as a twin-venue festival taking place in both Reading and Leeds (it was renamed the Carling Weekend), in direct competition with the similarly double-venued V festival, backed by Richard Branson’s Virgin.
This provoked a battle between Power and Branson for the licence to stage their events at Temple Newsam Park in Leeds, with Power again emerging victorious. The V festival had to find a new site in Staffordshire.
In 1993, Power was involved in an acrimonious spat over the Town & Country Club in Kentish Town, which ended with him taking control of the venue.
In 2001, Michael Eavis enlisted Power to handle security and logistics at the Glastonbury festival, after its licence was threatened following a spate of gate-crashing the year before, and the licence was duly safeguarded. In 2005, Power sold his stake in The Mean Fiddler Music Group to Clear Channel (now Live Nation), and subsequently created the Vince Power Music Group.
He remained entrepreneurial and inaugurated the annual Hop Farm music festival in Paddock Wood, Kent, in 2008, with Neil Young topping the bill, and also took on the Benicàssim festival on the Costa del Azahar, eastern Spain, a major destination for European festival-goers.
However, Power hit a bump in the road in 2012 when Vince Power Music Group went into liquidation. That year’s Hop Farm festival was left with debts. Power claimed that the whole catastrophe personally cost him £9m, and forced him to live temporarily on a canal boat.
In 2018 he was back, launching the Feis festival at the Liverpool Pier Head. Billed as “the biggest celebration of Irish culture the city has ever seen”, it featured Van Morrison, the Chieftains and Imelda May. However, the following year’s festival was scrapped following poor sales.
In 2020 he purchased Dingwalls club at Camden Lock, north London, seemingly because it was a famous venue rather than for its financial potential. “You’ve got to have a passion for it,” he said. “You’re not going make a ton of money out of it. The day I’ll make money is when I sell it to someone just as silly as me.” In 2006 Power was appointed CBE.
In 1968 he married Theresa Fitzgerald, and they had three children, Maurice, Sharon and Gail. Following their divorce in 1978, he had two children, Brigid and Patrick, with Patsy Ryce. They broke up in 1986, and he had three children, Nell, Niall and Evie, with Alison Charles. That relationship came to an end in 2003, and he is survived by his children.
• Vince (John Vincent) Power, club owner and live music entrepreneur, born 29 April 1947; died 9 March 2024
