profile cuffe & Taylor TWO’S COMPANY
Friends turned business partners Daniel Cuffe and Peter Taylor hadn’t promoted a single show prior to forming Cuffe & Taylor in 2009, but since then their firm has worked with the likes of Rod Stewart, Tom Jones and Ray Davies - and it sounds like they’re only just getting started...
Daniel Cuffe (left), with Peter Taylor
LIVE ■ BY JAMES HANLEY
L
ytham St Annes, Scarborough, Betley, Wigan, the Scottish Highlands; it’s not quite an A-Z of musical hotbeds. Yet those locations have provided a winning formula for Cuffe & Taylor’s rapid rise in the promoting world.
Focusing on some of the UK’s less fashionable regions has enabled Daniel Cuffe and Peter Taylor to find their niche in an otherwise congested market. What started out as a hobby for the music-loving pair has evolved into a successful business, capable of staging concerts by acts of the calibre of Rod Stewart, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Neil Diamond, Olly Murs and Rita Ora. One of the UK’s fastest-growing promoters,
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2016 is shaping up to be the Preston-based outfit’s biggest year yet, led by an eight-date Rod Stewart stadium tour and their flagship Lytham Festival. Before the year is out, they’ll have worked with artists including Bryan Adams, Simply Red, Will Young and Jools Holland And His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra. It’s been quite a ride for the north west duo, who had unwittingly been promoters for six months by the time they realised that’s exactly what they were.
Taylor, the firm’s main mouthpiece, explains: “I was a trustee for a theatre and I’d started programming, so I had some experience, and Dan was doing a degree in sound engineering, so we had an interest and a bit of an idea, but we didn’t really know what the word ‘promoter’ meant. “When we set up our company, it was as Cuffe & Taylor Event Management because that’s what we thought we did. Then, about six months in,
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somebody said to us, You’re promoters now, and we were like, Oh right, is that what it’s called? “We do a bit of event management as part of the job, but predominantly our work is promoting our own shows.”
The duo’s first taste of the music industry came in 2010 when they partnered with Fylde Council to revive their local classical music-oriented festival, Lytham Proms, in Lancashire, headlined by soprano Lesley Garrett. Cuffe notes: “The council wanted to bring it back and Peter and I famously said, How hard could it be to do it again?”
So how hard was it? “It was all right the first year,” he refelects. “One night in 365 days is quite simple - it’s when you’ve got to put on 100 nights in 365 days that things become more difficult.” Billed as a one-night commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Battle Of Britain, the 5,000-capacity event sold out, turning a modest
MUSIC Week
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