This one is different.
The first two episodes of All Gone Wrong were about public collapses - moments that make headlines and haunt careers. Leena Sharma-Spring’s story is warmer than that, and in some ways more important.
If you’ve spent time in the world of We Love... at Space or on the Tisno festival site in Croatia, you probably know Leena. She’s the warm, familiar presence who always seems to be everywhere at once - at the gate, backstage, checking in, keeping things moving. What you probably don’t see is what’s actually running underneath all of that.
For two seasons - 2012 and 2013; she was right at the heart of We Love... at Space. Fifteen hour Sundays. Seventeen weeks a season. An operation she describes as being run like an office block in central London, complete with its own staff canteen, hundreds of dedicated employees, and its own hospital behind the back entrance. Qualified paramedics. Every night.
She has now run Barbarellas - the club at the heart of the Tisno festival site, for the best part of sixteen seasons. Open air. Generator-powered. No fixed water or electricity. And where Adriatic storms arrive in seconds, with no warning, and everything from the staging to the DJ booth is at their mercy.
We talk about what the industry got right early and has struggled to hold onto. About the shift in crowd welfare - what it looks like now versus fifteen years ago, and what it costs the person managing it night after night. About the internal monologue of being the calmest, most prepared person in the room at 4am. About the years of being everyone’s unofficial in-house psychiatrist - though as Leena makes very clear, she still loves every single one of you.
This episode exists because All Gone Wrong isn’t just about the moments that go wrong. It’s about the people who make sure they don’t. And what that work actually looks like from the inside.
Thanks for listening, Angie.
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