I have been an Artist Manager since 1988 managing first The Levellers who achieved 1 Platinum, 5 Gold records. During my tenure the band headlined the Glastonbury Festival before starting their own 20,000 capacity Festival Beautiful Days Festival. I went on to manage The Longpigs (1 Gold record and Brit Award Nomination), and current clients include Grammy and Ivor Novello winning Matt Hales / Aqualung / (1 Gold record), Duke Special (1 Platinum record), and Sweet Billy Pilgrim (1 Mercury music prize Nomination.) I was the Vice Chair of the Music Managers’ Forum from 1997-2007. I co-founded The Great Escape Festival and now run Pathways Into Music and the MIME (Music Industry + Music Education) conference with Chris Cooke of CMU. Pathways is a not-for-profit organisation launched to support music educators and music talent development programmes around the UK and beyond, and to help early-career music-makers plan their personal pathways into music. I am passionate about the artist/fan relationship and have done much research on this subject. I am Principal Lecturer for the MA in Popular Music Practice at BIMM University, London. I am a lapsed bassoonist.