Antonia LeVay sits down with Conal Dodds, founder of Crosstown Concerts, as the company marks a decade of independence and prepares for their Bristol Sounds series of outdoor gigs this month.
A man responsible for promoting some 600 live music events annually, when Conal Dodds tells me, “I’ve got faith in my ears,” it might just explain his career better than any official biography ever could.
Even now, after nearly 40 years in the live industry, Dodds doesn’t talk like a corporate executive – rather, someone who still can’t quite believe he gets paid to spend his life around music. After all, his story starts not with a business plan, but with a hitchhiked trip to Monmouth to knock on Robert Plant’s front door.
“I was 22 and living in Hereford. Me and my mate had watched [1980s Khmer Rouge docu-drama] The Killing Fields and ended up going to this Oxfam talk about Cambodia because it was free. They were trying to raise money to build a well, and my mate just said, ‘Robert Plant lives in Monmouth, why don’t we get him to do a gig?’ We literally went around Monmouth asking in pubs if anybody knew where he lived. Eventually we found his bass player, who told us where the house was. We kept going back because he wasn’t in… then one Saturday morning he invited us in.”
That became Dodds’ first promoted show: a Robert Plant benefit gig at Monmouth Leisure Centre, in 1989. “We had absolutely no idea what we were doing! But afterwards one of the guys said to me, ‘You’re good at this – you should be a promoter or a manager.’ I didn’t even know those jobs existed.”
It was a moment which proved to be the catalyst for his future career. (“Life swings on tiny little hinges,” he says later in the conversation. “Every single day something can change your direction.”) At the time, though, it simply felt exciting, and soon Dodds started promoting gigs at Newport TJ’s, helped by owner John Sicolo.
“They were incredibly welcoming – John said, ‘Bring the bands, bring a PA, you can have the venue.’ It was all very DIY back then.” That spirit hasn’t left Dodds, either: despite the scale of Crosstown now, there’s still a deep affection for independence and community things he worries can easily disappear when industries become too corporate.
After COVID, in particular, that independence became fragile. “There were definitely moments where smaller promoters felt vulnerable,” he says. “We knew the bigger companies were circling because independents had taken such a financial hit.”
During lockdown, a network of promoters regularly spoke online about protecting themselves and the wider live ecosystem. “People like Stuart Galbraith at Kilimanjaro did amazing work lobbying the government,” Dodds says; “the Culture Recovery Fund genuinely saved businesses. It saved mine! It kept people employed.” Here, the tone briefly shifts from warm nostalgia into something more serious – behind the romance of live music lies a difficult industry, one built on risk, exhaustion, financial pressure and instinctive decision-making.
As Dodds notes, “There’s still a dark side to the music business – people who are only interested in money.” But he remains idealistic about the good side of it too: “I’m a bit of a hippie really!”
Crosstown recently celebrated 10 years in business, having been founded on St David’s Day 2016. Dodds has also bought out the company’s original investor and began transitioning the business into an employee benefit trust, effectively giving staff ownership within the company. “It just feels like the right thing to do,” he says. “The people who work here help build everything. It shouldn’t just belong to one person.”
He still does around 95% of Crosstown’s booking himself – “that’s still the bit I love” – and his personal tastes and instincts are reflected in the annual lineup of Bristol Sounds. Held on Bristol’s harbourside each summer, the event has become one of southwest England’s most distinctive music festivals over the past decade, prioritising atmosphere, setting and curation over gimmicks or upscaling.
“It’s such a special site,” Dodds says. “You can see Bristol’s history all around you – the cranes, the industrial buildings, and St Mary Redcliffe Church lit up at night. It’s a proper backdrop.” He’s been a Bristol resident for 30 years now.
“When I first started promoting there in the early 90s, it wasn’t necessarily seen as this massive musical hub – but it became this really creative city where lots of promoters figured out how to coexist. There might be 20 gigs a night happening there at different levels. Lots of independent promoters, lots of venues, but people generally find their niche.”
This year’s Bristol Sounds lineup includes Wales’ own Super Furry Animals – long-awaited by many after a decade dormant, and by no-one more than this promoter. “The Beatles and the Furries!” he says, by way of contextualising it all. “Obviously The Beatles don’t exist anymore, so I get to promote the best band in the world.”
Despite having worked with the band since the mid-90s, Dodds certainly sounds more like an excited lifelong fan than a promoter when he gets to wax lyrical about SFA. “The breadth of what they do is astonishing – they can go from folk music to baroque stuff to complete psychedelic techno madness! They’re humble people. Genuine people. They don’t really realise how good they are.”
That human connection seems central to how Dodds approaches artists generally: he repeatedly returns to the idea that the best musicians often remain grounded despite success, using Paul Weller as an example. “He still gets nervous before every single gig. His dressing room will be full of people until half an hour before stage time, because he needs distraction. He cares about doing a good job.”
For Dodds, those are the artists worth working with – talented people who never lose the emotional connection to what they do – and the same probably applies to him too. After decades in the music biz he still sounds faintly amazed by certain moments, talking about seeing old touring crews reunited, musicians chatting in hotel bars after shows and fans unexpectedly crossing paths with bands they love.
“There’s a real extended family feeling in live music,” he adds. “A lot of touring people don’t necessarily live near their actual families, so those relationships become incredibly important.”
Dodds turns 60 next year, and a sense of longevity and memory clearly means more to him as he gets older (“I love having all those memories and experiences”); he jokes about eventually retiring, but there’s little sense he truly wants to step away. Especially not from the thing that still excites him most: discovering artists and sharing them with audiences. “That’s always been my thing – finding quality.”
Bristol Sounds, Canons Marsh Amphitheatre, Bristol, Tue 23-Sun 28 June.
Tickets: prices vary per event. Info: bristolsounds.co.uk / crosstownconcerts.com
words ANTONIA LEVAY
