After recently receiving scrutiny over the lack of female artists represented on the Reading and Leeds Festival line up, Melvin Benn (organizer of the festival) has justified the controversial line-up in a recent interview saying, “the facts speak for themselves in terms of female acts that were available at that time and that fit the Reading and Leeds bill. There’s nobody more committed to gender equality than I am, but I can’t make an act that isn’t there”.
Benn then went on to add: “I can’t pretend we’re not conscious of it, but we can’t put a bill together based on gender, we can only put a bill together based on availability and appropriateness”. With also being the organizer of Latitude Festival, Benn explained the higher number of female artists on the bill compared to Reading and Leeds as being due to the different genre of music that the festival books, with Latitude having a more folk/indie slant which attracts the like of Laura Marling, Portishead, Le Roux, Lianne La Havas, Wolf Alice and Savages.
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