Why does a festival group need six new bosses in nine months?
Since October 2025, Superstruct Entertainment has installed a new chief executive, a new chief commercial officer, a new chief operating officer, a new chief financial officer and a new chair. On 3 July 2026 it added a sixth name: Jacqui Harris, who spent almost two decades at AEG Presents UK, most recently as vice president and general manager of UK touring, takes over as Superstruct's UK managing director.
Harris's CV reads like a roll call of AEG's biggest outdoor franchises: All Points East, Eden Sessions Cornwall and American Express presents BST Hyde Park. At Superstruct she inherits a UK book that includes Field Day, Boiler Room and Lost Village, inside a company that owns more than 80 festivals and live brands across Europe and Australia, among them Sonar, DGTL and Flow Festival.
The rest of the boardroom churn: Alex Mahon left the top job at Channel 4 to become Superstruct's chief executive last autumn; Christoph Homann, a Ticketmaster veteran, joined as chief commercial officer in November; Rebecca Kane Burton, previously of Oak View Group and London's O2, became chief operating officer in January; Nick Priday, out of Dentsu, is chief financial officer; and Andrew Fisher, who also chairs Rightmove and once ran Shazam, took the chair. Five outside operators dropped into one PE-owned group inside nine months is not a normal hiring cycle. It is a company rebuilding its top table almost from scratch while the business underneath it sits under sustained public pressure.
What does a debt raise have to do with a boycott?
The hiring wave is not happening in a vacuum. According to leveraged-finance trade title 9fin, KKR has been seeking additional debt financing for Superstruct, reporting in May 2026 that the boycott campaign against the group is weighing on the business. KKR bought Superstruct from Providence Equity Partners in 2024, and the campaign that followed, organised in part through BDS and PACBI, targets KKR's own investment portfolio, which campaigners say includes holdings tied to Israeli settlements and the arms industry, not Superstruct's festivals themselves.
Superstruct's own defence, offered through 2025 statements from several of its festivals, was that ticket and event proceeds stay inside the operating company rather than flowing up to KKR. That argument has not stopped the withdrawals. More than 50 acts pulled out of Sonar Barcelona in 2025, roughly half the Field Day lineup, 19 of 42 artists, walked the same year, and Spain's Culture Ministry went as far as calling KKR "not welcome" in the country. A debt raise while your artists are boycotting your festivals and your own government is publicly hostile is the kind of financing conversation that gets harder, not easier.
Is the pressure campaign still working in 2026?
Yes, in places, though it is no longer a single unified front. Sonar 2026, held 18 to 20 June, again saw more than 50 artists sit it out, with PACBI renewing its call for the festival to "publicly oppose KKR's complicit investments." Sonar itself changed hands internally in 2025: founders Enric Palau, Ricard Robles and Sergio Caballero, who built the festival from 1994, and partner Ventura Barba fully disassociated from it, handing the chief executive role to Brunch Electronik co-founder Francois Jozic.
Elsewhere the campaign is fragmenting into settlements rather than standoffs. Helsinki's Flow Festival struck its own agreement with the Flow Strike campaign in June 2026, pledging to keep excluding performances funded by Israeli state bodies in exchange for an end to that specific boycott. It is a template other Superstruct brands may end up copying: negotiate locally, keep the ownership structure intact, and let each festival cut its own peace.
A new UK boss can run a calendar of shows. It cannot make an ownership boycott disappear, and it cannot replace debt a lender has grown nervous about extending.
