From a demolished Liverpool club night

Cream began in October 1992 as a weekly house music night at Nation, a Liverpool club in Wolstenholme Square, founded by James Barton, Darren Hughes, and Andy Carroll. It ran there until June 2002 and grew, in founder James Barton's own account, out of a deliberate refusal to lock into one sound: different DJs and different genres every week, reviving the inclusive spirit of the acid house era. Nation was demolished in 2016.

The festival outgrew the club

Creamfields launched as a separate festival in 1998 in Winchester, moved to Liverpool's old airport site the following year, and settled at its current home in Daresbury, Cheshire. What began as a one-day event with about 25,000 people is now a four-day festival with camping that draws roughly 70,000 people a day. Creamfields has won Best Dance Event at the UK Festival Awards multiple times, including in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, and 2011, and Music Week's Festival of the Year in 2010.

A brand that went global

Cream Holdings, the company behind Creamfields, was bought by Live Nation Entertainment in 2012, with founder James Barton becoming President of Live Nation Electronic Music. By then, licensed Creamfields editions were already running internationally, starting in Ireland in 2000 and expanding through the 2000s and 2010s into markets including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Poland, alongside the UK flagship.