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Big gigs in a small pub
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The former chairman of Parlophone Records/Warner Music, Miles Leonard, who signed Coldplay more than 20 years ago, shares how he brought his music connections to a small village pub he ran for nine years in Somerset Taking on The Ring O’Bells pub was hugely
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exciting. We had some experience but not a great deal of it – we just jumped in and learned quickly on our feet. It came about when me and my business partner, Matthew Fisher, were concerned that our village pub was going to close. We had a chat with the man who ran the brewery that owned the pub about some ideas over lunch and, two hours later, he said why don’t you have a go at it. And that’s what we did. We just knew it was a beautiful pub and could see the potential in it. Community is vital for a pub, so we did a lot of work speaking to the village and finding out what people wanted. We thought the pub should be the hub of the village and ended up hosting events from local weddings to book clubs. Over time, we also put on gigs with a number of names through my connection to music. We had artists like Kylie, Stereophonics, Paul Weller, Coldplay and Tinie Tempah, and those were just fantastic. You’ve got to imagine we’re in a small country pub and you’ve got 120 people there with some of these artists who regularly play in front of 70,000 people in a stadium, so that was really memorable. I’d say to these artists to imagine the gig is going to be like when you didn’t have a record deal and you were playing gigs in pubs. Of course, they’d laugh and then turn up with these big trucks because they’d have just come off tour. They’d ask which one is the room with a stage and I’d say there isn’t a stage, you’re playing in the corner on the floor. It was quite amusing. But it was always packed and everyone would
sing along to every word, and you could see the joy in the artists’ faces. They loved being that close to their audience again after years of bigger
“I’d say there isn’t a stage, you’re playing in the corner on the floor. It was quite amusing”
l From top: Miles with Chris Martin and Jonny Buckland from Coldplay; Kelly Jones from Stereophonics; and Kylie
gigs. A lot of them – including Kylie, Duran Duran and Coldplay – all came off saying they’d love to do that again. Once they had done their gig, they would hang out in the bar chatting to locals – it was heartwarming to see. But it was also important to me to get the balance right between these big names and the smaller local bands. I come from artist development and supporting new artists within the music industry, so being able to give new artists a stage or a corner was really special as well. We put on open-mic nights and also had local folk or jazz bands in. The brewery that owned the pub wanted it back in 2021, I think after seeing the success that we’d made of it, which was a shame for us after we’d put nine years of real graft into it. I’m still working in music, now for an NFT marketplace I co-founded called Token||Traxx. An NFT is not just one product, it can be formed into anything. So, an artist could work with a small intimate pub – similar to what we did – and then package that as an NFT. I think Web 3.0 is going to revolutionise not just the music industry, but the hospitality industry as well. It’s really exciting.
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