Every so often a piece of work lands that reminds you why you do it. Helping Shambala move into employee ownership was one of those, and the response it drew has been a quiet joy of its own.
For those who don’t know it, Shambala is one of the UK’s most loved independent festivals, run for more than two decades by Kambe Events, and a fixture for anyone who cares about music made on its own terms. This year its founders did something genuinely rare. Rather than selling up to a venture capital fund or one of the big promotion companies, they handed the business to the people who built it, through an Employee Ownership Trust. It is the first UK festival to take that route.
I was lucky enough to act in that transition. The mechanics of an EOT are, on paper, a fairly dry affair: trusts, valuations, structures, the careful plumbing that moves ownership from a handful of founders to everyone who shows up and makes the thing happen. But the intent behind it was anything but dry. The founders were clear from the start that independence wasn’t something to be cashed in. The festival’s ethos, its creativity, its environmental conscience, its sense of community, had to be protected, and the surest way to protect it was to put it in the hands of the team. To help carry that across the line was a privilege.
What I didn’t anticipate was where the story would land.
I have spent a good part of my life as a musician, and the magazines that mattered to me were never the business titles. They were Rolling Stone and the NME, the ones I read for the records, the gigs, the arguments about what was any good. So to open those pages and find a deal I had worked on written up there, rather than buried in the trade press alongside acquisitions and balance sheets, was a strange and lovely feeling. It is not often the worlds of contracts and culture overlap quite so neatly.
There is a nice symmetry to it. Shambala chose a model that values the people who make the music possible over the people who would simply own it. And the coverage came from the publications that have always cared more about the music than the money. The work and the coverage, in that sense, were singing from the same sheet.
I will go back to the ordinary run of things soon enough. But I will keep this one. Not because of the headlines, but because every now and then you get to help something good stay good, and, just occasionally, the right people notice.
