Vince Power went from a small village in Ireland to become a seminal figure in the UK and international music scene

FROM causing an earthquake in Finsbury Park to revolutionising the UK’s summer festival scene, promoter Vince Power’s four decades putting on gigs has made an awful lot of feet tap.

It was 40 years ago that Vince Power threw opened the doors to the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden – a spit-and-sawdust venue inspired by a trip to Nashville – and its success kick-started the promoter’s rise to becoming a seminal figure in the UK and international music scene.

His story is one of a teenager leaving rural Ireland for London – and how hard graft, savviness and a confidence that those two talents combined would lead to success would create a music empire.

He now runs the Powerhaus in Camden Lock, and the venues that have benefitted from his guidance are long and illustrious. From the Kentish Town Forum to the Jazz Café, the Clapham Grand and The Borderline, Vince has hosted some of the biggest performers in the world.

It is a far cry from the small village of Newtown, between Waterford and Cork, where Vince was born in 1947.

His father was a forester and Vince had 12 siblings: he was a twin, but his sister did not survive. Three other siblings also did not survive.

“There was just the midwife, no doctor,” he recalls.

“My dad had to cycle to the nearest town to call the midwife and she would cycle back with him.”

A shy, quiet but confident schoolboy, he grew up holding his own counsel, he says: “I always thought if you have nothing say, do not speak rubbish.”

He received a scholarship to go to an agricultural college with the plan to become a bull man – an artificial inseminator.

“I didn’t much fancy that, getting cows pregnant for a job,” he remembers.

Instead, he headed to England aged 16, to stay with an aunt and seek work.

Different jobs came and went: working as a shelf stacker at Woolworths, doing the night shift at the McVities factory in Park Royal – “I spent all the time eating biscuits” – while settling in north London.

Vince wanted to work for himself, and he saw an opening.

“I bought an old police van for £16. I put adverts in the Yellow Pages saying I’d clear houses, I went to all the estate agents and said to them to call me.”

Vince started making decent money. With good connections work flowed in – and he began to learn a bit about what furniture was valuable and what was tat.

It was a well-earned holiday to Nashville – prompted by his interest in country, rock and roll and Irish music – in 1982 that saw Vince change direction.

The 1989 line-up at the Reading Festival

“It is an Irish thing,” he says. “When I was young, I’d see touring show bands and I thought what they playing was original. They sang Elvis, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly. I loved it.

“After visiting Nashville, I came home convinced I wanted to run a honky-tonk bar.”

He looked for possible venues – and Harlesden was an obvious place to start. Almost all of the area’s pubs were run by Irish publicans and Vince knew there was the custom.

“I found a place owned by the boxer Terry Downes,” he remembers.

“He didn’t want to carry on. It had been raided because people sat there drinking all night.

“I got some funds together and bought the freehold.”

He brought in an architect who also loved country and folk, and described the vibe he was after.

The Mean Fiddler opened in time for Christmas 1982 and a new music landmark was born.

“The music was great, the system was great and it had a big dance floor,” he says.

Its country USP meant it became the haunt of UK-based US Air Force servicemen.

“You’d get these 7ft tall Texans coming here on a Friday night,” he remembers.

“The locals didn’t particularly like it much, mind – the air force boys were a hit with the Harlesden and Willesden girls. They’d come in and do line dances. They never caused any trouble. They were soldiers and very disciplined.”

Sunday afternoons were reserved for Irish music sessions and 600 people would show up, but the Mean Fiddler gradually widened its music policy. Vince hired young talent bookers to get rock and pop acts in too, and it would act as a springboard for a series of other famous venues, including the Powerhaus and The Garage in Islington.

From dark and sweaty indoor dance floors to magical moments under evening skies, Vince branched out in 1989 after being approached to help the Reading Festival. He saw how it needed to be revamped and his work created a template that inspired many others during the UK festival boom in the 1990s.

He would run his own event, the Phoenix Festival in Stratford Upon Avon, before returning to take full control of Reading. He also helped save Glastonbury from a period where fence jumping was making its future unsure, and poor organisation had turned the Worthy Farm site into a place of reckless abandon with a darker undercurrent of lawlessness.

“We had new ideas, different ideas, there were a lot people about willing to listen,” says Vince.

“We changed how festivals were run and what they offered.”

At Glastonbury, escalating problems started with a perimeter fence that was easy to breach. Security was almost non-existent, with drug dealers everywhere and low-level crime a problem.

Prince

Vince, to the disappointment of many a free festival-loving hippy, enclosed the site with an eight-mile-long steel fence that went a metre in to the earth to stop tunnellers.

“They told me they could not control the festival,” he said.

“My first thought was the need for a decent boundary. We spent millions on the infrastructure.”

Closer to home, Vince saw the need for a Irish music festival that celebrated contemporary acts. He recognised there were a string of traditional Irish music events, but he wanted to do something different.

“There was nothing that promoted contemporary Irish music – there were a lot of great rock and pop bands from Ireland but nobody had brought them all together.”

Finsbury Park was the venue, and it worked. In 1992, he put on Madstock – the Madness reunion shows. They were extraordinary, with 40,000 jumping around to Baggy Trousers, an earthquake was recorded in the area.

Persuading Madness to reform showed how successful they could be.

“I went to Madness and said: how about you do a show? I said I’d guarantee them £100,000. I gave them a deposit and we sold out two gigs. We caused an earthquake.”
But the first night did not end well.

The Fiddlers’ financial officer had a six-figure fee to look after in cash and cheques.

“She left the gig and thought – I’ll take this all home with me and sort it out in the morning,” recalls Vince.

“She went to Harlesden with all this money and got mugged by a kid on her doorstep. He got away with at least £150,000 in cash and we never got it back. He disappeared into thin air. She called me up, hysterical. I told her to calm down and we’d sort it. We cancelled all the bankers’ drafts but we never recovered any of the cash. That boy had a good night of it.”

The Park hosted numerous other big-name acts secured by Vince: Oasis, The Cult, Pearl Jam, PJ Harvey, Paul Weller, New Order, Primal Scream, Neil Young, Booker T and the MGs and even a Sex Pistosl reunion gig – Holloway saw the lot.

Vince has watched as the music scene around him has evolved – and played his part in it.

“There are very few small grassroots venues left,” he says.

“And I do not see A and R people coming into venues like they used to. I’d have three or four in each week in times past. Now a lot of that is done online.

“But we’re lucky here – there are still bars that have live music. Rock and roll is never given the respect it deserves.

“Live music makes a big, big contribution and that needs to be recognised.
Running a venue was and remains fun, above all.

“There have been so many enjoyable moments,” he says. “I remember seeing Prince at a grand piano. I have never seen so many people crying with joy.”