James Barton started the Cream club night at Nation, a venue in Liverpool city

centre, in 1992, with his friend Darren Hughes, who has since left. Since 1992,
the Cream club night has become Cream Group Ltd. - a large musical
firm. Together, Barton and Cream Group Ltd. were identified as a significant
site of local musical entrepreneurship that has brought music, money, and people
to the city. They have changed the city of Liverpool and the music business here
and wider and Cream Group Ltd. is Liverpool's largest home grown musical
organisation. Not many firms in Britain's music business present a similar
story. The site was chosen, purposively, in light of this and the sites of
musical entrepreneurship already involved: the electronic and dance-oriented
nature of Cream Group Ltd., as well as the roles performed by Barton and the
size, high visibility, previous rapid growth, and current position of Cream
Group Ltd., provide a unique site in contrast to others already involved.

Cream is famous for being one of the world's largest clubs and for being one of
the most successful electronic and dance music oriented brands. Cream Group
Ltd.'s flagship project, Creamfields, is one of the world's biggest musical
events – the “biggest party on the planet” according to the world's biggest DJ,
David Guetta (cited in a local review, Falkner 2010) – and it attracts customers
from around the country to gather and see the world's biggest electronic and
dance-oriented music acts every August bank holiday weekend. Back in 1992, Cream
opened doors in an area of the city centre that saw little in the way of
entertainment: an old derelict industrial warehouse block, with Wolstenholme
Square in the middle, that there was no point going to. During the 1990s, the
Cream club night then grew rapidly to become one of Liverpool's most visible
cultural brands and played part in the global popularization of electronic and
dance music. The night received awards from the dance music press, punters got
tattoos of the Cream icon, and the brand, back then, became a coffee table name.
A popular myth even exists that research undertaken by John Moores University in
1994 discovered Cream to be one of the most highly cited reasons why people
chose to come and study in Liverpool. Over time, with all the other
'redevelopment', the area around Nation has become known as part of the
'Renaissance Quarter' and other clubs and bars have moved in, but, Cream was the
largest and remains the most well known in a city known for music and clubs. The
Cream night closed in 2002 and the popularity of electronic and dance-oriented
music in Britain wained, but, today, Cream and Creamfields are global brands,
and Cream Group Ltd. is a multi-million pound organisation and manages and
collaborates on various other smaller entertainment venues (i.e. the relatively
exclusive bar and restaurant, Baby Cream, on the Albert Dock, which is a joint
venture with a local restaurant and bar group), and events held around the city
like Liverpool Music Week ('Britain's biggest indoor winter music festival' that
caters for grass roots musical entrepreneurs), other music festivals across the
country, and regularly releases compilations of music iconic of the Cream brand
in it's role as a record label. The Creamfields festival is now rolled out in
ten different global locations (in the past, including Abu Dhabi and Buenos

Aires), was voted 'Dance Music Festival' of the year 2009- for the 3 rd time -
and Cream at the Amnesia club spot in Ibiza is marketed (and largely known) as
the Island's greatest club night. Still, every year in October, Cream birthday
parties bring the club night back to Liverpool and tickets sell out again for
top-name global DJ's, and Nation opens to special nights organised by the group
at various other times of the year. Today, Cream Group Ltd. is one of Britain's
largest electronic and dance music oriented organisations, being relative really
on to Ministry of Sound, which is the London equivalent to Cream and a long time
competitor.

James Barton, one of two people who started the Cream club night, was contacted
through email. All contact with Barton was mediated through his Personal
Assistant, Gill Nightingale, who first replied stating that Barton thought the
research sounded “interesting”. Barton already speaks regularly around the
country at conferences and events as a successful 'musical entrepreneur' and is
involved in national schemes that promote 'grass roots' musical
entrepreneurship, like Bedroom Britain, and Liverpool Music Week, which offers
musical entrepreneurs the chance to play to packed venues across the city. Some
insight into Cream and Barton's business life was developed through reflecting
upon personal experience and secondary documents like interviews with Barton.
These characterise Barton as a successful musical entrepreneur and re-tell a
'proper' entrepreneurial narrative in which notions of masculinity and
successful labour plot the emergence of successful enterprise. They recount
'determination' and 'working twice as hard' as everyone else, 'despite of it
all' [i.e. coming from Liverpool back then], and having the tenacity to endure
the hard times. It's a narrative that warrants insight into actually how things
'get done'. Talks Barton has given to budding musical entrepreneurs and uploaded
to the online space, and online dedications by fans and various articles in the
local press were also reflected upon continuously throughout case study. People
tell of the significance of attending Cream in their lives and of Cream's wider
impact in the local area. The online space is also well colonized by Cream Group
Ltd. today too. It has a well-established website and marketing network and
videos, website design, and various kinds of communication and networking made
between other businesses, customer and others through Myspace,
Facebook, and Twitter, were all reflected upon before initiating any contact.
Talking to locals on a day to day basis and the other cases involved in this
research about Cream in Liverpool was also invaluable in contextualising Cream
Group Ltd. in the city of Liverpool and in the discourse of musical
entrepreneurship. Early on, it seemed that, in a small city like Liverpool,
Cream is a monolith difficult to ignore: you would be hard pressed to find
someone from 20 to 35 in the city who's life has not been impacted, somehow, by
Barton and Cream Group Ltd. Usually, people, have opinions on Cream, and Barton.
Sometimes, people love them or hate them for the impact they had on the city and
electronic and dance-oriented music business. Throughout field work, social
memories and attitudes like these were remembered and recorded in real-time
field notes. As Barton and Cream Group Ltd. were then inducted into the
research, these sweeps of Cream Group Ltd.'s online space and personal
experiences were reflected upon theoretically and developed iteratively as aide
memoire. As the case study then proceeded, some personal memories of attending a
diversified musical service provided by Cream Group Ltd.- an award-winning and
more 'alternative' dance and electronic music club night, Bugged Out!,
previously held at Nation every month in the past and organised by Cream - meant
the kind of service Barton and Cream were involved in could be appreciated: a
hedonistic, sometimes booze and drug fuelled, late night involving some of the
nations most rapidly growing, popular, or novel dance and electronic music DJ's
and acts, set in a venue with some of the nation's best sound equipment playing
at full volume to one of the largest capacity (3000) club night crowds. Memories
of coming to Creamfields in 2000 and 2001, with family and friends, when it was
smaller, crazier, and still held in Liverpool, meant it was easy to relate to
the kind of market and customer experience Creamfields offers too, although,
today, the festival is much bigger (66,000 in 2009), has swayed much more
between the mainstream and the specific electronic and dance-oriented music
market niche, and has had time to define it's image and services. Coming to
Liverpool as a fresher in the past, it's also hard to not have some knowledge or
experience of Cream at Nation, or, at least (if you were unlucky enough), to
have been to the student-oriented club nights held at the Nation venue only 5
minutes walk from Bold Street. Personal experience, as well as traditional field
work, then, both played part in deciding to invite James and Cream Group Ltd.
into this research and was valuable in determining at an early stage the kind of
services and business strategies likely to be concentrated on and their social
value and hermeneutic significance.

At first, requests for James' involvement were kept minimal as it was expected
any requests for deep and lasting engagement in this kind of project would
likely ward him off. One unstructured interview with James was then arranged for

the 8th April 2010, with the possibility of organising more. Prior personal
experience, field work, and probes of the online space were iteratively
developed, although the interview remained attentive to emergent themes. This
first interview took place in a boardroom at Cream Group Ltd. headquarters in
Liverpool city centre- still based at the same, albeit very much developed,
venue Cream's first night was held in 18 years ago. Walking through Wolstenholme
Square today, massive colourful mushroom-like structures constructed by the city
council tower over Cream and a small, 'alternative', arts and music scene now
uses adjacent buildings. One of Liverpool's premier night spots today, The
Kazimier, stands next door to Nation too, and a nearby walk-through passageway
leading to Wolstenholme Square is a glittery, albeit grubby, art installation.
Then walking through the open plan office that included James' workstation, past
the massive archives presumably full of market data gleaned over the years, and
into a red brick walled room, presumably part of the old warehouse complex Cream
now takes up, we sat down in a meeting room with a large round table between us.
Across the walls are plastered the business accolades, awards, and silver and
golden discs that James and the Cream Group have collected over the years. The
room is regularly used for the formal marketing and operations meetings
organised every week. A well-ironed Fred Perry polo shirt is the attire of the
smart-casual Scouse businessman. It felt like it was time to get down to some
serious interviewing: no time for chit chat and forming an intimacy- this was a
busy man, although the suit and the rest of it associated with managing
directors of large businesses were not in place. A serious Scouse guy. Starting
the interview, James expected questions. I'd only come to appropriate his
'stories'. He didn't mind- James speaks with energy and the kind of confidence
evinced by a man who always knew he would make something of himself. In the
first interview, a more traditional 'rags to riches' entrepreneurial story that
seemed well-told was then recounted. Prompts had to be made to wrench Barton
away from enacting this narrative, but he had his story. For weeks emails were
then sent to Cream politely inquiring as to the possibility of working for Cream
Group Ltd., free of charge, at the flagship event, Creamfields, or at Cream's
birthday party held each October, as part of some participant/non-participant
observational ethnography. After 2 or 3 of these emails, James' PA said that all
job opportunities- even for unpaid and any kind of work – had been filled
already. There were no press passes left for Creamfields either (which was
probably a good thing). As soon as participant/non-participant observation
transpired as being impossible, a second interview was then requested. It was an
act of desperation and it took some weeks of emailing to obtain this second
interview, as James was usually “up the wall” either organising Creamfields
2010, Cream in Ibiza over the summer period, or collaborating on the London
Electronic and Dance festival (LED). It ended up being by phone and being short
as Barton limited our time to 20 minutes on answering the call (although it last
nearer 30). The aide memoire iteratively developed through interpretation and
more probing of the online space meant the interview was semi-structured. Soon
after the phone interview, polite requests to attend and observe one or more of
the 'operations meetings' James talked about in the second interview were made.
Despite requests being sensitive to issues of business privacy, they were
refused. As a reaction to being refused non-participant observation, requests to
interview Gill Nightingale, James' PA who had mediated our contact and who
seemed involved in the online space personally and who likely has a lot of
knowledge of Cream and a close relationship with James, and requests to
interview James' brother, who has been involved in Cream for a good many years,
were immediately made. After the phone-interview, Barton had also suggested
emailing him any leftover important questions, and the themes to be included in
this were then developed.

In the first interview, the emergence of the Cream club night, which occurred
around 1992 in the earlier years of James' business life, as well the running of
Creamfields 2010 as a well-established and large music festival, were
concentrated upon. A messy and shortened life-story account was provided, which
James had obviously recounted times before. Because the phone interview was
limited by Barton shortly before, it concentrated on specific moments of
organisation to develop more depthful re-descriptions of business strategy and
stereotypical appearance: the running of Cream Group Ltd. and organising
Creamfields in 2010 in particular. The final interaction through email, then,
would have operated as respondent validation, however, in light of time
constraints and opportunities to engage with Barton and Cream Group Ltd.,
subsequent interaction through email was re-designed to concentrate on moments
of organisation that were lacking in the current data and which operated well
with the theoretical interest and narrative being oriented by Certeau (1984) and
Certeau et al (1998). Other sub-strategies and manifestations of manoeuvring the
proper space of musical entrepreneurship then also emerged through hermeneutic
interpretation. As with the other cases, basic characteristics of experience
(temporality, relationality, spatiality, and corporeality) carried through from
the literature were useful in designing the semi-structured interviews and
subsequent questions sent by email and provide ways of relating Barton's
experience to the background neighbourhood of Liverpool and North West England
as a context for musical entrepreneurship. Throughout this narrative, as such,
Barton's experiences are related to the 'proper place' and to commonplace
'strategies' and ways of perceiving Liverpool and musical entrepreneurship.