But none of that existed back in the 1970s when Vince Power was big in the furniture trade. By 1981 he had 10 shops, and a hankering to open a honky-tonk bar. Music has always been a passion. Although he did not play himself, there had always been music around when he was growing up - the songs written by his grandfather, fiddler John Barry, still feature in local songbooks.
Power himself spent any holidays in Nashville, Tennessee, indulging his love of country music, and the bar he opened in 1982 was styled on the kind of bar he loved there. It had a really good house band, served cold beer and had a name that gave a nod to his grandad and a nod to the expression `he's no mean fiddler'.
"It seems really obvious now but back then, all you could get was warm pints in shabby tired kind of places. The Mean Fiddler was kind of ahead of its time. It was sparkling." He seems as proud of his first bar now as he must have been back then.
It may have been ahead of its time but in London in the early 1980s, there was no real market for a country music bar. Power realised the minute he opened the bar that his interests lay in the music business, and to finance the Mean Fiddler, he had sold off parts of the furniture business. After 18 months, he decided that the bar would have to start making money in its own right. The country music ethos of Mean Fiddler was diluted and he started to book any kind of music as long as he thought it was good.
The Pogues did all their first gigs there - "I have a letter from one of the Pogues which says `we definitely want 25 quid and we're not going to play for anything less'. That was back in 1982. I was the one who paid the Pogues the most and the least - I once had them headlining Reading Festival which would have been £50,000 - from £25 to that."
In the period from 1985 to 1986 he made a lot of money and the venue was one of the busiest in London, with acts like Nick Cave, Billy Bragg and Eric Clapton all playing there. In 1988, it was joined by two more London venues, Powerhaus and Subterania.
All the time, Power was learning the ropes. When he first tried to book acts, none of the agents would return his calls, so he tried a different tack. "I did it the way I would if I was buying furniture really . . . they're not much different to be honest, although obviously people don't have egos if they're selling you a three-piece suite. I would go straight to the source, which in music is the act itself. I used to make myself a nuisance." It was not a policy that endeared him to agents, and he admits he has a reputation for not getting on well with them. "I always get on well with the acts, it's the whole structure surrounding them that gets to me."
In 1988, the Reading festival went broke and the man that owned the rights, Harold Pendleton, asked him to come on board. Again, Power was forced to learn on his feet and his research took him to the festivals of Europe. "What I realised was that they were so civilised over there. They had creches and laundries and showers. You could buy a bottle of wine. In Reading in previous years you could only buy beers in paper cups because if you got a bad band they'd fill a glass bottle with piss and throw it at the band. Murder. I needed to change that image."
That first year, having persuaded New Order to make a comeback as a headline act, the festival was a huge success. With the confidence and experience gained from it, Power decided to stage what he called a "credible Irish music festival" and the Fleadh in Finsbury Park was born.
At the time there was a wealth of Irish acts - from Van Morrison to Mary Black to the Cranberries - as well as a ready-made audience in the young Irish diaspora in London. The festival was a huge success and this year it celebrated its 10th anniversary. There are now a further four Fleadhs in the States, well-established despite the fact one American promoter threatened him with a baseball bat if he so much as got off the plane. There is also a Fleadh planned for Australia next year and Power talks of taking the idea into Europe.
Vince continued to run the Reading Festival in partnership with Pendleton for three years, until he was suddenly told he wasn't needed any more. This happened some eight years ago, but Power tells the story as though it happened yesterday.
Having been pushed out by Pendleton, he managed to track down the shipping magnate who owned the lease on the land on which the festival was held. "I said to him, `you give me a lease on this land and I'll give you whatever you want'. It didn't matter. I just wanted to get it. I wanted to do the same to (Pendleton) as he did to me." In the end that was exactly what Power did - "the day I got that piece of paper, I was the happiest man in the world". He has run it ever since. Such his delight in recounting the story, it seems interesting to ask whether getting his own back or getting the festival back was more important to him. He pauses for a long time before concluding, "I think it was more important for me to get the festival back. There was a lot of joy in getting my own back too, because I was very upset, very, very angry that year. I was going around like a headless chicken going `how am I going to get this festival back?' I had a whole staff of people who did it with me too. Some of them had divided loyalty and went off with him. It does tell you in life what loyalty is, it gives you some sort of idea."
Loyalty is something hugely important to Power, and one senses so too is winning. For at the time of the Reading festival dispute, Power had several more concert venues, bars and festivals, including the hugely successful Fleadhs and the Phoenix festival, under his belt, yet Reading was the one that mattered. Money too is a huge motivating factor, although Power is also renowned for having a very hands-on philanthropic streak.
Three years ago he responded to a challenge laid down by Jadzia Kaminska of the Bosnian children's charity, Cradle, when she said over a pint, "You don't know what it's like in Bosnia, why don't you come and see?" He went out with some of the huge lorries bringing supplies to the children in Mostar and the turbulent surrounding areas.
"She was right - once you're out there and see it for yourself, you can't not do something. So I gave some money and we collected at all our festivals - I think we raised over 100 grand - and we got an EU grant. We built a school. It's good to see something so concrete. You have to give something back." He was anxious too, to give something back to the area he came from and in 1993, he staged the Fleadh Mor in Tramore. Although the area did well out of the festival, it was financially disastrous for Power.
"For Irish people away there's always some need to prove yourself. There is for me anyway. I think I've done my bit now. My mind wasn't working right because I had this home thing in my mind, about doing it at home, like bringing something back or something stupid like that." He jokes now that with the million pounds he lost he could have bought two thirds of the businesses in Tramore, that he would have been better off handing everybody in the town £100.
He has no resentment that he had to go abroad to make his living. "I still consider myself to be very, very Irish and I'm proud to be Irish but it's never given me a problem working in England. I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity in England to do what I've done . . . They're still a very superior race but it's never bothered me."
He has always kept a foothold in Ireland. There is the Mean Fiddler bar on Dublin's Wexford Street, which after a very public fight with former business partner Kieran Cavanagh, he now owns. Despite claims last year that he was going to sell it, it's recently been remodelled. Waterford is the place he calls home, despite living in England, and he wants his children to feel their roots are here.
He has eight children in total - Nell (7), Niall (4) and Evie (3) by his present partner, Alison, and then there's Bridget (13) and Patrick (11) by a former partner, Patsy, who recently moved back to Galway. He separated from his first wife when he was 30; "you grow and you become a different person to the one you were when you got married and you don't always have something in common any more." Fatherhood, he says, just keeps getting better.
Ask him what he's proudest of and he will say Reading: "When I go to a festival like that and there's 70,000 people having a great time, I like to just stand there and quietly know that I'm responsible for that." Ask him if he's happy and he's not quite so definite: "Am I happy? Yes, I suppose I am. As long as I keep busy and don't really think about it, I am. Idleness, that's the thing to avoid." Somehow with Vince Power, idleness seems unlikely.
Homelands takes place from September 25th to 26th at Mosney Holiday Centre, Co Meath. For further information call 01-4758555
