a short bio.

I'm Ash. I work across live events.

I started because I loved music, and because at sixteen, in Devon in 2008, the events I wanted to go to didn't really exist where I lived, so I started putting on my own. Small things at first, the kind of nights you run because nobody else is going to, learning every part of the job by being the only person available to do it. I moved to London not long after and spent the next few years grafting through whatever work would have me, paying rent on jobs I won't romanticise and slowly working my way into the industry from the bottom up.

Fifteen-odd years later I work across operations, production, commercials, and touring, currently as Operations Director at Krankbrother. I've spent time inside the machine at most levels of the business, from carrying things across fields to building the budgets, from chasing suppliers at four in the morning to negotiating the deals that put the show on in the first place. I never specialised because I never wanted to. The job is more interesting when you can see all of it, and in my experience most of the problems worth solving sit in the joins between the disciplines, in the bits where production hands off to operations, or where the commercial deal quietly determines what's actually possible on site.

The part of the work I love most is the gap between the plan and the field. The pre-mortem nobody ran. The trigger point nobody set. The booking fee nobody could explain. The day rate nobody would publish. These are the bits the industry has historically agreed not to talk about, partly out of habit and partly because the opacity suits some people more than others, and they're where the actual work happens. So this site is where I write about them, as plainly as I can, from inside the room rather than outside it.

My day job is operational. My writing is editorial. I try to keep them honest about each other, which means writing about things I'm still in the middle of, and being careful not to let the writing tidy up problems that are still genuinely messy.

Based in London, working internationally, available for projects, writing, and the occasional panel.