Melvin's festival career began with a hitch-hiking adventure

Having never left Yorkshire before, a young Melvin Benn pinned his hopes of getting to Reading Festival on hitchhiking the 220-plus miles from his home town of Hull.

- by Harriet Sutton

“Me and my mate went down in the clothes we were stood in because we didn't even know we needed to take a tent,” he remembers. “We had no idea what we were doing.”

They made it, though - to Melvin's first ever festival, back in 1972 - and little did he know what path it would lead him down.

He soon became an avid-festival-goer, and in the 1980s he began staging free political festivals up and down the country.

He's now been involved in promoting festivals for 45 years, first through the Mean Fiddler organisation and then Festival Republic, where he is managing director.

The leading event promoter is behind some of the UK's biggest music festivals, including Latitude, Wireless, and Reading and Leeds.

"I started Leeds [in 1999] because I wanted to create a festival in my home county and because I wanted that festival to become the North's festival,” he says.

“And it has. I also wanted it to last generations - and it has. I'm now meeting and doing business with people who are in their 40s who tell me about how they loved to go to Leeds when they were 18 and how important it was for them. That feeling of being in the North and part of the North is something that you very much get at Leeds Festival.”

Returning to Bramham Park this week and running until Sunday, Leeds, which is staged alongside its twin, Reading Festival, is being headlined this year by Chappell Roan, Hozier, Bring Me The Horizon and Travis Scott.