Christopher BarrettSome 16 years after he gave Far And Beyond (FAB) founder Jess Shields her first job in the events industry, former Live Nation UK COO John Probyn is once again working alongside her having been appointed head of event operations at FAB. They tell Access what their reunion means for the company.
Back in 2008 recent archaeology graduate Jess Shields had a very down-to-earth first taste of working in the live events industry, a kind of trial by accreditation, thanks to John Probyn.
The pair went on to work together for eight years at Live Nation during which time they experienced the many highs and countless challenges of working together on large-scale and complex events including Download, Wireless, Hard Rock Calling, Creamfields, Electric Daisy Carnival, Global Gathering and Oxegen.
In 2016 Shields launched event production company Far And Beyond and has since built a thriving business working in the UK and the Middle East. At FAB Shields has continued to work on numerous major Live Nation events along with projects such as Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool and the BLAST TV Major in Mexico, Denmark, Mongolia and France.
“We’ve come full circle. It’s a really positive thing for FAB. – Jess Shields
Shields grew up on the edge of the Download festival site at Donington Park in Leicestershire, and it was at Andy Copping’s hugely successful rock extravaganza where she first met Probyn. Years later Shields would be appointed Downloads’ festival manager by Live Nation, and her enduring relationship with the event continues to this day with Copping having recently appointed FAB to operate it.
“Jess’s father owns some of the land where we do Download Festival, so I’d known her mum and dad for some years, but I’d never met Jess,” says Probyn. “Her dad contacted me one day and said, ‘would you give my daughter some work experience?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, God, do I have to?’. The way we ran things back then was that if you could work in accreditation for a festival and come out the other end with a smile on your face, you were worth holding on to. Jess not only had a smile on her face but she asked all the right questions; she was so keen to learn about everything we did.”
John and Jess at Download festival, with the team, in 2010
Recalls Shields, “It was really lucky for me, Live Nation used to take on a student every summer who was studying event management, and they’d start off doing accreditation in the summer and then do a year in the Live Nation offices. At that point I had finished university with a degree in archaeology, which wasn’t much use. I can remember the moment I was walking through the dust of Download when John pulled his car up right next to me and called through the window, ‘What are you doing after this? Do you want to stay on and do the year because the student that we’ve got just hasn’t worked out’. I was delighted. After Download I went on tour with Madonna, and I did the staging tours with John’s operations team. I was meant to stay for a year at Live Nation and ended up staying for eight. I grew up there, and learned everything from working with John and being at that company.”
“At Live Nation we formed a great team, with some amazing people,” says Probyn. “Jess was absolutely a key part of that team and looking at what she went on to do made me enormously proud. I have always followed FAB’s progress, and so when the opportunity came along to get involved it made perfect sense.”
For Probyn, joining FAB is something of a homecoming for the hugely experienced live events professional, but while it will see him return to work on festivals including Download and Creamfields, there are also numerous new projects in the pipeline. Among them is the launch of Come Together; a 45,000-capacity festival in Newcastle promoted by TEG Europe that is billed as the ‘largest outdoor music event the North East has ever seen’.
While Come Together is a new event, for Shields and Probyn it is familiar ground due to them having worked with TEG Europe MD Toby Leighton-Pope when he was at Live Nation.
Both Probyn and Shields express confidence about the future of the UK festival market despite the many events that have been forced to close in the past couple of years, largely on the back of costs having risen by around 30% since 2019.
“I really hope it has got to the point where the festival market is going to settle again,” says Probyn. “People still see UK festivals as value for money, and UK festivals still deliver a huge amount to the local economy. It’s such an important industry. I feel like we’re coming to a period now where it will start to settle a little, ahead of a couple of years of growth.”
Says Shields, “We’ve lost a lot of really cool independent events this year. My hope is that the ones that are left can be more robust and stand up against the market. Maybe having fewer events, events that can stand up against the times, seems sensible. It is exciting to see some of these reputable new events coming through, especially things like Come Together, in Newcastle City centre, which has never had an event of that scale.”
Live Nation is one of FAB’s biggest clients, but Shields says the company is also working with independent festival promoters and stretching beyond music into areas including brand activations and sport.
“Music is definitely our strength and what people know John and I for, but we’ve got some brilliant people in the team at FAB who aren’t from that background, and who bring a whole new dynamic,” she says.
While continuing to focus heavily on UK expansion and the work with Live Nation in the UK and Middle East, Shields says a major goal is to expand FAB into Asia: “We are looking to do a similar model to the one in the Middle East, and bring those UK standards to Asia. I think that will be a really exciting challenge for us.
“John and I have been friends for many years and it’s great to be working with him again. We’ve come full circle, it’s a really positive thing for FAB, and we’ve got some really exciting projects in the pipeline for next year.”
This article is included in the Winter edition of Access All Areas magazine, which is available here.