During this year’s Women In Music Awards, we inducted a host of trailblazing industry executives into the Roll Of Honour, in association with TikTok.
They join a huge list of previous honourees, including some of the leading names from across the business like Kanya King, Sarah Stennett, Emma Banks, Charisse Beaumont, Rebecca Allen, Stacey Tang, Shani Gonzales and Mary Anne Hobbs, who have been selected since the awards began in 2014. The Roll Of Honour aims to shine a spotlight on the variety of individuals who are leading the charge in the music industry and consistently using their platforms to support women, or focus on empowerment and gender disparity.
Following the Women In Music Awards ceremony, Music Week is running Q&A interviews with all of this year’s Roll Of Honour inductees.
Kat Kennedy is managing director at Big Life Management, where her roster includes Kate Nash, We Are Scientists and Liz Lawrence, who she co-manages with Big Life’s Colin Roberts. Kennedy also co-manages Skunk Anansie with Jeremy Lascelles of Blue Raincoat Artists.
Kennedy has risen through the ranks at Big Life, where she was initially put forward for a job on the switchboard by Jim Fletcher at Sony/BMG and hired by founder Jazz Summers, who passed away in 2015.
She learned the art of management through her work with Summers and his partner Tim Parry, representing artists including Scissor Sisters, Badly Drawn Boy, London Grammar, Boy George, The Futureheads and Emeli Sandé. She was promoted to managing director in 2024, becoming a partner alongside longstanding colleagues Claire Kilcourse and Roberts. Big Life is now part of Reservoir Media and will celebrate its 40th birthday next year.
Beyond her day job, Kennedy took part in the 2020-21 Keychange programme and was honoured in the shesaid.so Alternative Power List 2021.
How do you feel about joining the Roll Of Honour?
“I am deeply honoured and still quite emotional about it! So many incredible women who are inspirations to me have previously been recipients and to join their ranks is the kind of honour that I barely even allowed myself to dream about at the start of my career.”
Speaking of those days, how do you look back on your early years in the business?
“It feels like a different world, even though I’m still at the same company where I got my break. I had very mixed feelings in those early days. On the one hand, it was so exciting, I came straight from uni where I’d spent all my time watching bands I loved like Snow Patrol and The Futureheads, and then all of a sudden I was working for their management. We always had an open plan office so I could hear conversations at every level of the business, and I learnt so much from Jazz and Tim. But I also had a lot of self-doubt – I didn’t feel then like I’d ever be able to do what they did. They had this incredible gut instinct for what made a hit song, and they were full of stories of the madness and brilliance of the music industry in the ’80s and ’90s. I loved it, but I also wondered for a good few years if I’d made a mistake and that an unassuming, studious person like me just wasn’t cut out for it. To this day I don’t know what made me stick with it, but somehow I found a way to just dig my heels in and have a go.”
Did you have a mentor at that stage?
“I have two people to thank for encouraging me to stick with it. Firstly, Michelle Hudson, who taught me how to value myself and my time, and secondly Gill Massey, who changed my life when she joined the company. Gill gave me my first artists to look after on my own as a day-to-day manager and had far more confidence in me than I had in myself. She was the best line manager ever - generous with her knowledge, great fun to be around and deeply caring about all the staff and the artists. I’ve always aspired to be the kind of manager that Gill was to me.”
This event shines a light on inequality and deep-seated issues around the subject in the music industry. Can you share any personal experiences or points of view on this topic?
“I feel like things have come a really long way since I started in management. I remember feeling quite depressed at awards ceremonies in the early years as I never seemed to see any women getting accolades. I knew there were successful women in the industry, but they all seemed remote and fearsome, and frankly, very unlike me. The Women In Music Awards has always been very inspiring as it showed me loads of ways in which women were doing incredible things in the industry, and made me feel like maybe I wasn’t going to have to fundamentally change who I was to be successful. Later on, a big turning point for me personally was when I participated in the Keychange programme. I was in a networking space full of smart, interesting women who were all doing exciting things in their field, and instead of it feeling competitive, the atmosphere was entirely collaborative and respectful. That chimed so well with my approach and also encouraged me for the first time to think about my own career goals, separate from those of my artists, all of which I think has made me a better manager.”
Kate Nash has enjoyed a successful period under your management. There are obviously many more examples of your work in action, but what would you say Kate’s campaign says about your approach?
“Working with Kate has been an absolute dream. She is so creative and fun and full of ideas, and she’s an incredibly smart and driven businesswoman who knows what she wants to achieve. My job is basically to enable her to feel supported and safe to make all those bold moves, and to be a trusted sounding board for her while she’s working out how to make them. The key has been putting a really great team around her, all of whom she fully trusts. I took time when we first met to listen to Kate and what had worked for her in the past, and what hadn’t, and I really thought about what, and who, she needed in her corner. She already had an incredible live agent in Jamie Wade, who was the person who introduced us, and excellent publicist Sinead Mills who has continued to do a fantastic job. She also had a great band, tour manager and live crew who had all been with her for years. Teaming up with Kill Rock Stars felt like the missing piece of the puzzle. It was a huge decision for Kate, who had been an independent artist for ten years, to sign to a label, but it’s really paid off. They support Kate’s activism as fervently as they do her music and it’s a brilliant partnership. We took on Olli Dutton whose enthusiasm and drive really opened doors for Kate at UK radio that maybe had felt closed to her for a while. Together with a very solid and trustworthy business management team at SRLV, an amazing lawyer in Helen Searle and fantastic promo teams in the other key territories, she’s experiencing growth in her career that she perhaps hasn’t felt since her meteoric rise at the very beginning. It’s a testament to the power of building a great team, which is the bedrock of any good campaign.”
What is the biggest issue facing music managers at the moment?
“How long have you got?! Music management is very challenging because there are so many pressures on artists. Our job as advisors is to help them to navigate a challenging political and economic landscape to try to build a sustainable career which is not only successful but also fulfilling and healthy for them. And that isn’t easy!
“I think the pressure to be constantly available and to be immediately up to date and informed on every single current issue is causing a real crisis of burnout amongst managers. So much of the business has moved to messenger apps like WhatsApp that the constant notifications and the expectation that you’ll answer straight away at all times of the day or night is not only bad for our mental health but is also setting an unrealistic expectation of how much information we are actually able to process sufficiently to be able to advise upon effectively ourselves. In order to be good advisers, we need to be well informed and well researched and quite often there simply isn’t time to do that to the extent that I would like. I’m not sure what the answer to that is!”
How would you sum up your values as a manager and music business executive?
“They’re the same as my values as a person, to always be trustworthy, well informed and hardworking. I think I’m pretty straightforward – what you see is what you get. I don’t give anyone any BS. I joke with my team that my most overused phrase is, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out,’ because you never stop learning in this business!”
Can you pinpoint your biggest achievement so far?
“There have been loads of incredible moments. Hometown shows or campaign-ending London shows are always a real high – We Are Scientists were my first artist to headline The Roundhouse in 2019, and that’s a night I’ll always remember as that’s such a special venue. There may be some recency bias here, but helping Skunk Anansie to achieve their highest ever chart position this year when The Painful Truth hit No.7 was awesome. It was a real honour for me when Jeremy Lascelles invited me to co-manage Skunk Anansie, whom he had known since the ’90s. The idea that I had earned the respect of someone outside of my own company to that extent was very meaningful to me, and I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved together so far.”
Is there any advice you would offer young women about enjoying a successful career in music?
“Work hard, trust your gut instincts and be yourself. Find people who share your values, whether it be clients or co-workers, and keep checking in to make sure you’re all pulling in the same direction. Be a mentor and a mentee, we all have so much to learn from each other that both roles are rewarding at any stage of your career.”
What’s the best advice you’ve ever had?
“If you’re working harder than the artists, then there’s a problem. That’s not to say you shouldn’t work hard, but if it feels like you’re constantly pushing a boulder up a hill to get them to do anything, then they’re probably not the right people to be working with.”
Is there a young woman you'd like to shout out who you think is a rising star in the industry?
“If it isn’t too indulgent I’d love to take this opportunity to shout out our incredible team at Big Life. Our young managers Natalie Hutton and Dana Landman both took on extra responsibilities last year. I was dealing with my husband’s [journalist James McMahon] illness and they both navigated the pressure with complete grace under difficult circumstances. I couldn’t have got through the year without them. I’m excited that we’ve recently added Stephanie James to our team, who brings with her a wealth of experience as a day-to-day manager, having worked with artists like Sam Fender, and her own burgeoning roster of clients. They all have great managerial instincts and I’m excited to watch them grow with the company. Outside of my team I rely on Reservoir’s Tiff Czech to keep me current. In 20 years in the business I’ve never met anyone who goes to as many gigs as Tiff and still gets excited about new songs on a daily basis. Her dedication and enthusiasm is inspiring.”
Similarly, is there a young woman artist whose music you're enjoying right now/excited about?
“I’m really excited for the world to get to know Eaves Wilder. She’s had a couple of great EPs out already but I’ve heard some new music that’s in the pipeline and it is brilliant. She’s both fierce and adorable, with a unique voice and bucketloads of great ideas. My colleague & friend Ros Earls at 140db manages her. Ros is another massive inspiration to me in my career, and I’d love to see the two of them have some well-deserved success together.”
Finally, what’s your biggest lesson from 2025 so far?
“I lost my husband to cancer last year, so I’ve unfortunately learnt a lot of lessons I wasn’t looking for. Mainly, that it’s later than you think. So say yes to opportunity, even if you doubt yourself, think you don’t know enough, think you aren’t ready, think you need more experience. If it’s right for you, you’ll work out how to do it. You know more than you think you do, and you can do difficult things. We work in music, so don’t forget how to be a fan. Don’t miss a chance to tell the people who made the art that you love, that you love it. And don’t waste time working with people who don’t respect you or your team. Life is, quite literally, too short.”
PHOTO: Em Marcovecchio
