New CEO Simon Wales on The Bristol Beacon and building community through music

In this edition of our Bristol Initiative member spotlight series, we’re thrilled to introduce Simon Wales, the new CEO of Bristol Beacon. Since joining in August 2024, Simon has taken the helm at Bristol’s iconic music charity and performance venue, which holds 800 events and community programs annually across the city.

We spoke with Simon about his role, his vision for Bristol Beacon, and his ambitions for collaborating with the Bristol Initiative to support the city’s cultural and economic growth.

Tell us about your role – what do you have responsibility for? What does a typical day look like?

I have overall responsibility for the work of our music charity and the successful delivery of the 800 events a year that take place here at Bristol Beacon in the city centre, and at our Beacon Music Centre in Southmead. I am still a newbie (I joined in August 2024) so there have been very few typical days to date, but they are generally a mixture of conversations with supporters, artists, trustees, partner organisations and staff, and getting to sit and listen to extraordinary concerts in one of our four main music performance spaces!

What does your organisation do? Why do you like working for them?

We are a significant cultural employer with 115 permanent employees, and we welcome over 300,000 audience attendees to our shows. We also reach over 30,000 young people a year via our music hub programme, which is delivered across 92% of Bristol’s schools. We directly promote over 50% of our own musical events (ie we take all the risk and pay the artist fees) and we are also an established touring venue for musicians including Jamie Cullum, Manic Street Preachers, Beverley Knight, The Pretenders and the London Symphony Orchestra. We are a commercial venue for conferences, weddings and graduations, and we are also well-known for comedy nights including Stewart Lee, Katherine Ryan and Chris McCausland.

I like working for Bristol Beacon because I am a lifelong passionate fan of all types of music – so this is actually my dream job….

Why have you joined the Bristol Initiative?

As a major music charity here in the centre of the City, it’s so important that we are collaborating in partnership with organisations across many sectors. We all need to work together to develop our City and make progress, and to date I have found the Bristol Initiative to be a very helpful and effective network of like-minded business leaders.

What are the key agendas you’re looking forward to getting involved with?

It is important that we are part of a thriving and successful city centre, and that the arts and culture are recognised and supported (and celebrated!). Transport is clearly a key issue for all venues, and we would love to be able to welcome more of our audiences to our events via reliable and efficient public transport. We also need to continually make the case for investment in music, and developing the artists of the future, as it’s pretty tough out there right now. There are already many musicians who can’t make music a financially viable career, and any sources of public funding support are increasingly hard to come by.

Where is your favourite place to visit in Bristol?

I’m still learning my way around but an early favourite would be the Lunita Pasteleria on Gloucester Road – amazing Argentinian brunches and pastries. I also really enjoyed a visit to Wake The Tiger, which was very inventive and trippy, and I enjoyed taking the small ferry across the harbour to visit SS Great Britain recently.

For more information on The Bristol Beacon, check out their website here. If you're a Bristol Initiative Member and would like to be featured in a spotlight article like this, get in touch with Jenny Ablett.