Vince Power
Promoter who opened the Mean Fiddler and went on to become the king of pop festivals in Britain
VINCE POWER, who has died aged 76, was the founder of the Mean Fiddler chain of music venues; he also took on the flagging Reading Festival, transforming it into a mainstay of the summer music calendar and heralding a move into other events including Leeds, Latitude and Hop Farm festivals.
Once described as “a 6ft lump of Irish meat and gristle”, the aptly named Power, who had cropped hair, a stubbly beard and a twinkle in his eye, had been running a chain of second-hand furniture stores in north London in the early 1980s when he visited Nashville, Tennessee. Having enjoyed the music and hospitality, he was inspired to open his own honky-tonk bar. “I just thought, wouldn’t it be great to have my own place, with a house band and a cold beer?” he recalled.
He bought a former gambling den that had once been frequented by the Krays and Richardsons in the rundown Irish enclave of Harlesden, north-west London. On December 9 1982 the Mean Fiddler opened its doors, the name being a tribute to the many musicians in his family. Many of the acts were Irish, such as the Pogues. Eric Clapton was known to chat with strangers at the bar, while Sting, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello enjoyed the music in virtual anonymity.
Customers flocked there at weekends, but less so during the week, when on one occasion only nine punters came through the door, and Power was forced to broaden his range of music.
“Once I’d got rid of my own personal tastes, it began to work very well,” he told The Independent. Clubbers and critics were soon making the trek up the Bakerloo Line, and over the years the Mean Fiddler played host to such high-profile musicians as Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, who played his final British gig there in 1987.
Some events were less successful. Power once found the American country singer Dwight Yoakam having a fit of nerves by the stage door and had to coax him on stage. On another occasion the singer-songwriter John Martyn was due to play at 10pm but did not emerge until midnight, when he was promptly sick over the front row; Power recalled that he “had to give a lot of people their fivers back”.
Always socially conscious, Power laid on fundraising gigs to support the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, Irish people who were convicted – wrongly, it subsequently transpired – of terrorist offences. This led to suggestions that he was a supporter of the IRA, though he insisted that he was against any kind of violence.
In 1990 Power agreed to help Harold Pendleton revive his flagging jazz festival at Reading. Within three years it was back on track, but Pendleton then ended their arrangement. A furious Power bought the
rights to use the field and his Reading Festival soon became a highlight of the summer music scene. The Leeds Festival joined his portfolio in 1999.
On occasions he flirted with the stock market, though the City did not know what to make of him. In any case, he had little trouble raising cash when it really mattered. In 2000 a member of staff at his Madstock festival in Finsbury Park, north London, was mugged while carrying a five-figure sum of cash, leaving him unable to pay the headline act, Madness. He rushed around the festival site, calling in cash and favours from stall holders, and hours later handed Madness a bin liner containing £25,000. The show went on.
John Vincent Power was born in Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford, Ireland, on April 29 1947, the fourth of 11 children of Jack Power, a forester, and his wife Brigid. Four siblings died at birth, including his unnamed twin sister, who was denied a
Catholic funeral because she had not been baptised. He described how his childhood made “Angela’s Ashes look like good bedtime reading”, adding that there was no hot water and the lavatory was “any field you like”.
Educated at Kilmacthomas village school and Dungarvan Vocational College, he won a scholarship to study artificial insemination at Galway Agricultural College. But, unable to face three years of study, he instead went to live with his aunt, Kitty Barry, in Hemel Hempstead.
She found him work at Woolworths but he loathed both the job – and his manager, who insisted on calling him Paddy. He also hated life in England, returning home six times in his first six months.
Gradually things improved. He moved to Kilburn with an Irish friend and started selling beds at Whiteleys shopping centre in Bayswater. He then worked on the biscuit line at Mcvitie’s and the baked-beans line at Heinz before joining Wall’s, from where he was sacked after falling asleep and leaving hundreds of ice-cream bars to land in boxes unwrapped.
His next job was demolishing roofs for £2 a time on building sites, which got him into household effects. “There was so much furniture left in these old Victorian houses people were abandoning for their high-rise blocks. I’d restore it and sell it through ads in the newsagent,” he told the Telegraph.
At 19 he rented his first shop and before long had a chain of furniture shops across north London. His most lucrative find was an oil painting that he bought for £10 from a house in west London and sold a couple of weeks later at Sotheby’s for £7,000.
By the turn of the century Power’s Mean Fiddler group owned some of the bestknown music venues in the capital, including the Astoria, Subterania, Point 101, the Jazz Cafe and G-A-Y, though the original Mean Fiddler in Harlesden closed in 2002. He took on Home, the eight-storey superclub in Leicester Square, and expanded into fine dining, including Michelin-starred Conrad Gallagher’s eponymous restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, though they soon fell out.
He also started the Phoenix Festival near Stratford-upon-avon, which featured David Bowie, Björk and the reformed Sex Pistols, but it struggled in the face of competition from the Glastonbury Festival and was cancelled in 1998. Four years later Power took operational control of Glastonbury under a three-year deal signed with Michael Eavis, the organiser.
By 2005 Power had sold a controlling stake in the Mean Fiddler Group to the American media group Clear Channel. The following year the company, which became known as Festival Republic, started to reduce its clubs to concentrate on festivals, including the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Through his Vince Power Music Group he moved into upmarket West End clubs, including the Pigalle in Piccadilly.
While his focus was always on Britain, he also staged festivals in the US and Spain. The headline acts at his 1993 Fleadh Mór festival at Tramore racecourse in Waterford included Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Joan Baez and Van Morrison, though “I lost over £1 million on that gig,” he said ruefully. Undeterred, he was part of a consortium that later bought the racecourse.
Power, who was appointed honorary CBE in 2006, was far removed from the stereotypical rock promoter. He was a staunch vegetarian, devoted to yoga, and never tried drugs. He did, however, have eight children by three partners, but insisted that they would not benefit from his millions, telling “I’d rather give all my money to charity than my kids.”
Vince Power, born April 29 1947, died March 9 2024