JAMES KING: THE HITS INTERVIEW (PART ONE)

“It’s been a crazy busy week,” says AEG Presents’ CEO of European Festivals James King, apologetically. Yesterday, in the midst of frantically firming up the final headliner for this summer’s BST Hyde Park Festival, he tried keeping our interview appointment. “I scheduled time for us between meetings, but I was having to call you from a shopping center in London, and I couldn’t get on the fucking Wi-Fi. It was one of those days.”

For U.K. concertgoers, the last-minute machinations will be well worth it, as chart behemoth Morgan Wallen rounds out the 2024 Hyde Park lineup, taking his place alongside Stevie Nicks, SZA, Kylie Minogue, Andrea Boccelli, Kings of Leon, Shania Twain, Robbie Williams and K-poppers Stray Kids. Following a wildly successful 2023 festival that featured Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, P!nk, BLACKPINK and Lana Del Rey, 2024’s star-studded lineup proved a trickier puzzle to piece together. We’re knackered just thinking about it.

How did booking the 2024 Hyde Park lineup differ from previous editions?

First, let’s look at 2022 and 2023. 2022 was the first year back after 2020 and 2021 were canceled due to COVID. There was huge pent-up demand in the industry; people wanted to go back out and embrace live music again. Artists had not been touring for two years, so everyone was out. And we came back with a massive lineup: The Rolling Stones, Elton John, the Eagles, Pearl Jam. After speaking with Adele’s team for years about how it’d be amazing if she could come play Hyde Park, she did two shows. It was the biggest year we’d ever had.

And then in 2023, we topped it: Two P!nk shows, two Springsteen shows—everybody wanted to come and play. Everybody wanted tickets. We sold every ticket that we could possibly sell, 555,000 across the nine shows. We pushed the boundaries. We had BLACKPINK, the first K-pop band ever to headline an outdoor show of this nature in the U.K. Hyde Park 2023 was beyond big: huge sponsorship metrics, huge average net ticket price.

2024 has been a different year generally in the market. Fewer artists coming through, fewer stadium shows, fewer major tours. These things tend to be cyclical. This is one of those catch-up years. Fewer headliner acts touring, particularly American acts, brings greater demand for those artists, and in turn they have more choices than usual, which leads to a delayed process and delayed announcements.

And presumably, when there are fewer acts to choose from, that drives up the price of these artists?

Well, most talent buyers will say it’s impossible for the prices to go any higher.

How are 2024 sales thus far?

Kylie Minogue’s doing the show as a one-off; it sold out almost immediately. Robbie Williams, again, a one-off, show is already sold out. Stevie Nicks will sell out this week. Shania Twain, who often comes to Hyde Park as a fan, is playing this year, and we’ll sell it out. Morgan Wallen is a pivotal moment for us, the first true country act to headline Hyde Park, on July 4th, no less. It’s come about later in the booking cycle than we originally planned, but that’s been the ’24 season.

I imagine that Hyde Park will be the only festival with SZA and Morgan Wallen as headliners.

The event is for all artists and all music fans, and there are many people for whom BST Hyde Park is the only live-music experience on their calendar. Something magical happens when huge artists play their music in the middle of London in the summer in Hyde Park. I think that’s why we have this very broad church of artists who want to play, and a very broad church of fans who want to experience those moments with them.

How did Hyde Park become the crown jewel (no pun intended) in your festival portfolio?

Hyde Park had been a Live Nation contract for many, many years, and it was coming up for renewal. This is 2011, ’12. And I said to [AEG Presents chief] Jay Marciano, “If we’re serious about being in the music industry in London, we should be operating serious events, and there’s nothing more serious than operating and producing the outdoor series in Hyde Park.” And he said, “Great, let’s get some time and tell me what your vision is for it.” Which I duly did, and I remember it very clearly to this day: I did a short presentation deck, and we were idly chitchatting through the first two slides, and then my computer froze. It just froze up, and Jay could see me increasingly and aggressively trying to push the button, over and over again, to no avail. Finally he just said, “Okay, okay, forget the deck, just pitch it to me.”

So what had Hyde Park been, and what was on your vision board for Jay?

Well, ever since the Stones played there in ’69, it had been the home of some amazing concerts—Pink Floyd and Queen and everybody in between. But I just felt that the time was right for a re-imagination of what live music in London could be. I wanted there to be unbelievable hospitality, great food and beverage. But more than anything, I wanted it to be an amazing production. I did some very basic sketches for Jay that eventually evolved into the Great Oak Stage. Glastonbury had the Pyramid Stage, and I’ve always been inspired by the environment at Coachella. I felt strongly that London deserved nothing less.

I’ll never forget the first time I presented it. Jay said, “I think it’s great, but I think it could be better here and here and here.” Jay is one of those people who sees the big picture and helps you realize your own vision. And then [artist and stage designer] Es Devlin took my very rudimentary sketch and turned it into something far more impressive than I ever envisaged it could be.

How did you get into the concert business in the first place?

I grew up in North London. It was a pretty average middle-class upbringing. But I was very fortunate that my older brother was really into the club scene. And I—annoyingly for him, no doubt—tagged along wherever I could, just as there was an explosion of electronic music in the U.K. in the late ’80s. So I went from sitting around my friends’ houses on a Friday night watching The Who’s The Kids Are Alright or the Woodstock documentary for the 5,000th time, to going out to see my brother’s friend DJ, which led me to running some parties when I was 16 or 17, still at the English equivalent of high school.

The first show I ever promoted was at the Palmers Green Athletic Social Club. Sold tickets at school, three pounds a ticket. At the end of the night we counted out; I think we had about 300 pounds on my mum’s kitchen table, all in coins. We thought we were the richest people in the world!

I then went to university in Liverpool, and within a couple of months there I met one of my great friends to this day, James Barton. James was a DJ and club promoter. We were all going to the Haçienda Club in Manchester and were inspired by what Tony Wilson and everybody was doing there. In Liverpool, there were a lot of empty garages, empty warehouses, and you could put things on for cheap. James started a club called Cream in 1992, and because we were friends and because I was doing a business studies degree at university, I was tapped to run the guest list, the coaches, the memberships. Anything to do with computers. And Cream, and the club scene in the U.K., was really taking off. Soon, on a Saturday, there’d literally be 3,000 people trying to get into a 600-cap club. It was groundbreaking. It was our punk.

We were very hungry and very driven, very naive as well. But we were fearless of making mistakes. It didn’t matter to us. We were writing our own narrative of what we wanted this industry to be. And Creamfields came from that mindset. We were asked to do the very first Creamfields, in 1998, by a big festival organizer, Mean Fiddler, which became Festival Republic. We didn’t really organize it—we kind of booked it and did a lot of the marketing—but I fell in love with that whole concept. We’d done arena-size shows before, but nothing of that scale. It was 28-30,000 people. But the relationship with Mean Fiddler didn’t work out. And to James’s credit, he said, “We should just do this ourselves.” We got a site in Liverpool, which was the famous old airfield where The Beatles landed after conquering America. At that point it was derelict. So 1999 was the very first year that we ran Creamfields, and the first year I ran a major festival. It was the single most terrifying experience I’d ever had.

When did AEG enter the picture?

I worked with Cream until about 2004. And even after that, I still produced Creamfields for a number of years through my own company, Loud Sound. I began to produce other festivals, including Bestival on the Isle of Wight and RockNess in Scotland, with Fatboy Slim. I eventually sold RockNess to AEG, and that started my relationship with them. And here I am, 14 years or so later.

Describe a typical day for you and your team.

We have 17 or 18 people who work in the European festival division. It’s not that many people for the volume of activity that we do. At this moment we’re in launch mode, so we spend a great deal of time reviewing our sales counts because we want to know if our pricing is right. We have a variety of different ticket types—standing, VIP, hospitality—and we want to make sure that we’re managing the inventory to suit the fan demand. So every morning, we’re monitoring our sales data, and we’re also doing a great deal of marketing analysis to make sure that our messaging is working effectively.

We do as much data analytics as we can, to allow the team to make good decisions. We want them to have the right information so that they’re confident to go out and be creative, to take risks, to be entrepreneurial.

And we spend a great deal of time on the customer experience. Everything we do is about that. It’s about trying to understand the fans: what they want, what we hope that they’ll want, and trying to marry those up.

(The complete interview will appear in next week's issue of HITS.)