Board

Jazz Summers turned to management in the early 80s and publishing in the late 80s. 25 years on as CEO of Big Life Group Of Companies , Summers has been responsible for managing Wham!, Lisa Stansfield, Yazz, Soul ll Soul, The Verve, Badly Drawn Boy, Nigel Kennedy, Snow Patrol , Klaxons and the Futureheads.

Between them these artists have sold over 40 million albums and 47 million singles around the world, including 95 top 40 hits over the past 18 years. Big Life Music has grown to become one of the most respected independent publishers in the UK, recognized as the largest independent publishing company in the last two quarters of 2007.

In 2003, as a member of the Music Managers Forum, Summers was awarded the prestigious Peter Grant award and in December 2004 was elected chairman of this organization. At the 2007 Music Week Awards, he was honoured with the Strat Award.

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Melvin Benn had a ten year background of producing political and campaigning festivals throughout the UK before establishing The Festival Office Ltd in 1989 to create and produce festivals for the Mean Fiddler.

This was the same year that the Mean Fiddler took over the Reading Festival, which has sold out ever since. In 1999, Benn took the event to Leeds. In 1996 Benn took ‘The Festival Office’ to be part of the Mean Fiddler Music Group and became Managing Director. In 1999 he became Group CEO taking Mean Fiddler and its associated companies into a plc structure. This made Mean Fiddler the first publicly quoted music company on to the UK Stock Exchange.

Benn is also the licensee for all Finsbury Park outdoor shows and sits as a representative on the Concert Promoters Association (CPA). He was influential in re-writing the Guide to Health and Safety at Outdoor Events (‘the Pop Code’), and regularly makes presentations to the Emergency Planning College, the police and other bodies.

In August 2007 Benn sold the majority of the Mean Fiddler Music Group venues as well as the Mean Fiddler Music Group name to concentrate on the full festival portfolio ; Carling Weekend Reading & Leeds, Latitude, Rise, St Patrick’s Day, Fleadh and the involvement with Glastonbury Festival under the new name of Festival Republic.

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Ben Challis is a UK lawyer specialising in music and entertainment law. A graduate in law from Kings College London and the City University, Ben also holds the degree of Master of Arts in Mass Communications from the University of Leicester and is is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ben acts as General Counsel for 3A Entertainments, one of the UK’s leading concert promoters, and is Executive Producer for television of the Glastonbury Festival. Glastonbury is the UK’s leading music and arts festival attended by over 177,000 people. For Glastonbury, Ben combines the role of managing the Festival’s broadcast and other media rights alongside acting as General Counsel for the Festival. Ben’s other clients have included the Prince’s Trust, the Granada Media Group, Pioneer LDCE and British Telecom.

Ben regularly writes articles and other material on music business and intellectual property law, contributes to books, teaches law and is a regular conference speaker in particular on the live music industry. Ben sits as a magistrate in Cumbria, England. Ben is also co-founder of A Greener Festival which was set up in 2006 to champion sustainable events and promote environmentally friendly practices at music and arts festivals.

A Greener festival promotes an annual awards scheme (The Greener Festival Awards) for green festivals in association with the UK Festival Awards and they also endorse a discount insurance scheme for green events provided by Robertson Taylor insurance brokers. AGF also have ongoing training and research activities.

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Ayesha Hazakira was a founding member of the Julie’s Bicycle Board while Vice President of Government and Industry Affairs at EMI. In August 2007 she was appointed Special Advisor to The Rt Hon Harriet Harmen QC MP, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

Ayesha first joined EMI in 2005 as business co-ordinator in the Group Chairman’s office working for Eric Nicoli and was seconded to the Labour Party in April of that year to work on the then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s campaign during the general election.

Prior to joining EMI, she spent seven years in Westminster including four years as chief press secretary to Patricia Hewitt, then UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Ayesha has also worked in other Government departments including Downing Street, the Home Office and the Ministry of Agriculture. Ayesha studied law at university and completed a postgraduate diploma in journalism and politics.

Ayesha is a stand up comedienne in her spare time.

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Neil Johnston has worked in creative industries in the UK, US and Europe all his life. Now Chief Executive of Paddington Development Trust he works in creative regeneration in some of the poorest neighbourhoods in London.

He is also Director of London Westside, an agency supporting new business and is involved in a number of other charitable and business initiatives in the UK. He operates an organic smallholding from his home in Northamptonshire and grows thirteen varieties of English apple, as well as plums, pears, quince and French walnuts.

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David Joseph recalls that given the amount of time his father, an artist manager who handled acts like Billy Ocean, spent away from home, he decided “the music industry was not the life I was going to choose for myself”. But try as he might, including successful stints in advertising and games company Sega, Joseph was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. He started out as RCA’s chief of press relations. David joined Universal Music in August 1998 as general manager of Polydor UK before moving up in February 2002 to become managing director and later co-President of Polydor alongside Colin Barlow. In April 2006, Joseph was promoted to President, Universal Music Operations, overseeing Universal Classics & Jazz, UMTV and the launch of TV production division Globe alongside his Polydor responsibilities. In March 2008 he was appointed to the role of Chairman and CEO, Universal Music UK, overseeing all divisions of the UK’s leading record company. David became a member of the BPI Council in 2005 following two years on the Brits Committee.

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Jeremy Lascelles started his career in the music industry in the early 70’s as a band/tour manager before joining Virgin Records in 1979 as an A&R Manager. He spent 13 years there in various A&R, Marketing and MD roles before joining Chrysalis as MD of Chrysalis Music in 1994.

He has overseen the growth and expansion of the publishing company which has now become the leading UK independent music publisher. Appointed as Managing Director of the Echo Label in 1998, he was then promoted to Chief Executive of the Music Division in 2001 before, being appointed CEO of Chrysalis PLC. In 2003 he was elected to the council of the BPI, and also to the board of AIM where he was made vice-chairman in 2004.

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Diana Liverman is Director of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and holds a university Chair in Environmental Science in the School of Geography. As director of ECI, Dr. Liverman co-ordinates the work of 80+ interdisciplinary contract researchers and doctoral students who work primarily in the areas of climate, energy and ecosystems with a strong applied and policy focus. ECI hosts or co-hosts national and international projects that include the UK Climate Impacts Program, the Oxford node of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the U.K. Energy Research Centre and the ICSU/ESSP Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) programme.

Her research focuses on the human dimensions of global environmental change including climate change policy and impacts, the social causes and consequences of land use change, and environmental management in the Americas. She has made substantial contributions to our understanding of vulnerability to climate change and to developing larger research agendas on the social science of global change.

Dr. Liverman’s leadership roles include chairing the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change and the science committee and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change (IAI). She has been a member of committees that include the UK Human Dimensions Committee, US National Academy of Sciences committee on the U.S. Climate Change Science Plan, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Social Science Advisory Board, and advisory boards for NASA, the NOAA Global Change Program, and the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research.

She is a member of editorial boards of the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Global Environmental Change, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Climatic Change and was a contributing author and reviewer for three intergovernmental panels on Climate Change assessments.

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Emma Pike is VP Communications & Artist Relations for Sony BMG Music Entertainment UK and a key supporter of Julie’s Bicycle at its inception. Emma practiced as a corporate and intellectual property lawyer in the UK and Italy before joining the music industry trade body IFPI in Brussels in 2002 to help advise the European Union on copyright law reform in the light of new technologies.

From there she took on a similar role in the UK, heading up British Music Rights which liaises between the songwriting and music publishing community and the UK government. She moved to her current role at Sony BMG in 2007.

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Martin Talbot is the Managing Director of The Official UK Charts Company, providers of the most accurate intelligence data on the British video and music industries – and the most sophisticated chart system anywhere in the world.

Talbot joined the OCC in October 2007, following several years as Editor of Music Week, a trade paper for the UK music industry. Martin started his career in local news at the Hackney Gazette, where he reported on crime, politics and entertainment. His time at Music Week began in the early 1990s, interrupted by a spell as a staff writer at the NME. Stints as News Editor, then Launch Editor of Fono (MW’s European sister publication) led to his promotion to Executive Editor in January 2002 — overseeing the editorial team behind the magazine-to-web business information service — before taking on the title of Editor in January 2005.

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Tony Wadsworth was Chairman and CEO of EMI Music UK & Ireland from 1998 to 2008. In a 26 year career with the UK based company , he held many roles including Managing Director of the Parlophone label , a label which he relaunched in the 1990’s achieving sustained hits with artists such as Blur, Radiohead Crowded House , Pet Shop Boys , Tina Turner and Queen .

His subsequent move to running all of EMI’s UK labels saw a period of global success with artists such as Robbie Williams, Coldplay, Kylie Minogue,the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Tony oversaw the combination of the Virgin label with the UK company, and achieved recent worldwide chart profile and multi million sales with brand new signings such as Lily Allen, KT Tunstall, Corinne Bailey Rae and Kooks.

Prior to joining EMI, Tony gained a degree in Economics from Newcastle and spent the following 3 years playing in a band with his college friends. He later worked for various record labels before joining EMI.

He is currently Chairman of the BPI and on the board of the Brits Trust. He is a trustee of the Music Sound Foundation , a charity devoted to improving young peoples’ access to music education , and a trustee of the EMI Archive Trust.

Tony holds the post of Visiting Professor in the music and business schools of the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne. At the 2008 Music Week Awards he received the Strat Award, one of the most coveted awards in the UK music industry.

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Jon “Webbo” Webster has worked for two people most of his life - himself and Richard Branson. The former paid better.

Most of his career was spent at Virgin, both retail where he began as a shop assistant in 1975, and at Virgin Records where he started in 1981 as Sales Manager where he progressed to Managing Director in 1988. In 1983 he was instrumental in devising the Now! That’s What I Call Music brand. He was a member of the BPI Council from 1985 – 1992.

Following the EMI purchase of Virgin in 1992 Jon left corporate life, set up his own company, and worked with Virgin acts Genesis, Peter Gabriel, UB40, Mike and the Mechanics and others. In 1992 he founded the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. From 1992 – 2002 he wrote the “Webbo” column for Music Week.

From 2000 Jon moved into management with D*Note and Francis Dunnery (former singer with It Bites) setting up the internet sales label Aquarian Nation.

In May 2005, after 13 years working for himself, Jon was appointed Director, Independent Member Services at the BPI, the UK record industry trade body. In October 2007 he embraced the artist centric future when he was appointed CEO of the Music Managers Forum.

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