I'm going in. This time I'm looking for tracks by the Honey Smugglers, for My Jealous God, for anything by Syndicate* (don't look for a footnote, that's how they wrote their name in 1989) for Swimming With Sharks 0r maybe for Airhead. Perhaps I'm even looking for Ultrasound or Gay Dad. Actually, I've found Gay Dad! Result! But the others... no, they're not there and most likely never will be.
I was trying to make a Spotify A&Rmchair playlist which would have given you a go on loads of bands who were good but never made it. Some of them (Ultrasound for example) you may have heard of, most of them (Airhead?) you probably won't have unless you've been paying too much attention. And while everyone goes on about how you can't get Pink Floyd or the Beatles on Spotify - as if anyone needed these artists on any more formats - I think it's much more of a shame that you can't get all the flawed greats that have been lost over the years.
Relax, I'm not going to bang on about Spotify again here. Actually, no, I was going to say one thing; make one frankly and possibly foolish admission: I quite fancy Roberta from Spotify. Have you heard her yet? She voices their adverts, sounds in her late 20s maybe early 30s, is quite well spoken and sounds intelligent and genuine. I want to believe her when she says she hopes I'm enjoying Spotify. But wait, The Word magazine have gone and ruined it for me - they too (well, Andrew Harrison) are taken with Roberta and they've gone and interviewed her and got her photo. Yes, she is very attractive but no, she is not, as I thought, a voiceover artist who was picked by Spotify's ad agency to represent the brand values of the company - she actually does work for Spotify. I feel ashamed of being so cynical.
The last couple of times I've listened to iTunes at home I have genuinely missed her voice popping up every four or so songs. But that is probably more a sign of the fact that I haven't listened to iTunes hardly at all since Spotify.
But onwards to the playlist. I was looking for all these long forgotten bands because last week I went to a see a group fronted by a guy who used to be in an act I once signed to Indolent. Westpier were not one of the bands who made it big in the wake of Britpop. I seem to recall they once played a show at the Falcon where they were supported by Embrace. Anyway, there was an intial buzz possibly caused by the fact that the debut single was pretty good - I can still hear Jo Whiley's voice on daytime Radio 1 straight after having given it an exclusive, saying, "That moves me!" I still haven't worked out what she could have meant but I took it as a positive. Unfortunately, it didn't move many punters into record shops and after doing a short tour and recording some more tracks my memory of their career gets hazy. I know that the ridiculously handsome guitarist Carl went on to play in Kylie's band on a world tour but I only kept in touch with the manager.
So there was Carl, still handsome, up on stage last week with, somewhat bizarrely, the former manager on keyboards. It was a fine show and one I am ashamed to say I left early because I had another show to attend which seemed important at the time. But it got me thinking, not only are there all the groups who never got a deal - and I'll be doing a blog on those very soon - there are all the bands who make up the 90% of record company signings who never make money.
Common wisdom has it that the artists who get record deals then go straight to the bargain bins are by definition not very good. But this is myopic. Quite often they aren't very good, it's true, but some of them are there due to bad timing, bad luck, wrong single choice or simply that Jo Whiley's producer decided they didn't like the record. Or in Westpier's case did.
So who would be on the A&Rmchair playlist of bands who never made it but deserved to? Well, I could put a whole load of stuff I signed, which I think might be cheating. Having said that there are a couple who must be included. I'll include one I think should have made it and partly because I don't feel fully responsible for signing them - I picked them up after they'd been dropped by Go Beat - Wubble U. Their single A Bit Like U - was actually championed by Steve Lamacq on his show who played it on advance release. As it turned out, it was in advance of them being dropped and the single never got released. In my more positive moments I imagine it being used as the soundtrack to some cutting edge witty TV advert and netting everyone involved unlimited shedfulls of cash. Then I come back down to earth and remember that last year when Isosceles' track Get Your Hands Off was used in an Oxy spot cream TV advert the money paid would just about have covered a weekend family break.
I'll start this playlist now - where there are no existent links I'll try and upload the song if I have it. And of course, anyone reading this list thinking "Hey I know the guy who used to play vibes in My Jealous God!" is advised to be in touch immediately. Incidentally, I've had so many mails and Facebook messages from people saying they can't work out how to leave Comments here that I suspect there might be something wrong with the software. Again, anyone more intelligent than me (clearly not difficult) please leave a message explaining how to do it.
So here's a short playlist we shall, of course,call: Now That's What I Call Unrecouped
1990 Honey Smugglers - Listen
Fronted by a genuine talent called Chris Spence, the HS were touted by the folks who ran The Sausage Machine and who went on to form PJ Havery label Too Pure. It's a shame that the HS signed to Fiction and never really cracked it. This track is worth the cost of admission alone, though. You can read all about the making of this demo and lots more about the band on drummer Steve Dinsdale's blog. Clearly he's either got a better memory than me or he was keeping a diary during those late 80s early 90s days. The demo that Steve writes about was paid for by me with East West's money.
1989 Syndicate* Baby's Gone
This Scottish band were on EMI in the days when EMI boasted Talk Talk and River City People and were enjoying success with Food signing Jesus Jones. And talking of Food, one half of that label, Andy Ross, was still occasionally writing about music for Sounds as Andy Pert. He wrote an absolutely raving five out of five for the Syndicate* album which I immediately went out and blagged off a friend at EMI. He was right - and it still sounds great. I know nothing about them and I'm afraid to find out more in case it puts me off them.
1987 Swimming With Sharks - Careless Love
This was sisters Inge an Anete Humpe who sang mellifluous German ballads without sounding mawkish. And there are two words I don't often use. Inge was onto her solo career by the time I joined WEA which had released SWS. She didn't have any solo success either. By the way, did you know that the current overused term du jour Ear-wormy is originally from the German Ohrwormig
1989 Boys Wonder - Goodbye Jimmy Dean
Another Warners family act, this time twins Ben and Scott Addison. What were WEA doing wrong in the 80s? Did they not listen to me when I said "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Tikaram"? Boys Wonder were originally signed to Warner's imprint Sire, which as anyone vaguely interested in pop knows, was run by legendary artist collector Seymour Stein. He is still around - I last saw him in a Kensington pub, deep in conversation with the man who signed the Enemy. My good friend Michael and I saw them in Manchester when we were students and I can still remember two of their songs (Lady Hangover and Elvis 75) from having heard them only once. They were dropped and then picked up by Rough Trade who put this out in 1990. It predates the rock pastiche of the mid nineties by five years but manages to rise above it like to exist in a world of perfect pop. Ben and Scott went on to have success with Corduroy but for my money - and I'm not just saying this - they never bettered their Boys Wonder songs. Oh and they were in the year above me at school. How cool is that? Well, OK, but I think it is...
1999 Gay Dad - To Earth With Love
A lot of you will remember this lot as they're existence wasn't that long ago (only 10 years ago. Arghhhhhh!) And indeed a lot of you may have dismissed them as hugely hyped and massively disappointing. Wrong, wrong, diddly wrong. This is the opener from their debut non-selling album Leisure Noise (they signed for two albums FIRM so London Records had to pay for album number two - ouch!) and remains their finest hour - not a million miles away from Boys Wonder in its flagrant referencing of classic rock, it has a nobility to it which, as I wrote here a few weeks ago, still gets those back of neck hairs going.
1991 Airhead - Funny How
This lot were originally called The Apples then Jefferson Airhead but had to change their name when they signed to Warners in the early 90s. They didn't do as well as another major label 'Head' band who changed their name, though. Also unlike Thom Yorke and co, Airhead decided that a sense of humour was the best way of ingratiating themselves with Radio 1. But their big hope Funny How, didn't make the charts and they were dropped shortly after releasing their debut album. But despite its humour, Funny How's hookline contains just as much self deprecating poetry as Creep: "Funny how the girls you like never fancy you, funny how the ones you don't do."
1986 Salvation Sunday Cold Grey Eyes
Weird another family outfit, namely Joanne and Steve Winterbottom. They were signed to Polydor in 1986 years before I started in A&R and I saw them live by accident at the Tunnel Club in Deptford - normally the venue for Malcolm Hardee's comedy club where hecklers from all over South East London would roll up for their cruel sport. Salvation Sunday were not great live but this odd riff-based single is a genuine classic, and I defy you not to get a shiver down your spine as the singer hits that final note on Eyes.
1993 Honky - The Whistler
Ok, a confession, I did actually sign this lot. Although, when I signed them they were called Club St Louis and we dropped them after one single. I discovered them in the unsolicited tape box and immediately drove up to Doncaster to meet them. They turned out to be two lovely chaps just out of their teens one white, Matt and one black, Kye who were making very melodic hip hop. Let's Go Lazee flopped and so I was never allowed a chance to release the follow up which was mixed by none other than Mark Stent (the man who mixes everyone from KLF to Madonna to Oasis) and sampled Breakout by Swing Out Sister. After ribbing me for how bad my label was ("East West? More like Least Best!") they went on to sign to .... WEA - effectively the same company. And while this time they did get on The Word (click that link) and release an album, they still never had the success they deserved.
1996 Wubble U - Petal
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's another one of mine, OK?! But listen, I haven't uploaded that song I mentioned above so you'll have to do with Petal, which they were touting on former label Go Discs before I signed them. We remixed it and made this amazing video, which got constant play on MTV in the days when people actually watched the channel. Unfortunately MTV viewers probably thought: What a bunch of complete FREAKS and avoided making a purchase that week. Petal is lyric-free but does feature specially recorded guest vocals from Stanley Unwin who you might recognise from the Small Faces Ogdens Nutgone Flake album. But the band could write amazing Dury-like words when they put their mind to it and A Bit Like You proves that: "I like a girl who talks with her mouth full, who's clever and nubile and won't cane me mobile... " Produced by the Ben and Andy Boilerhouse, it's frankly miles better than their zillion-selling Texas album.
I'm going to stop for now because you're probably already full of unsuccessful music but rest assured, I will return with more of this so be warned!
Here's an A&Rmchair Playlist of some more successful things, which I'm enjoying right now.
Showing posts with label Isosceles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Isosceles. Show all posts
Monday, 6 April 2009
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
We've signed a fucking chicken!
I'm back in our office. No one else is here, it would be deathly quiet were I not listening to Anthony & The Johnsons: The Disco Album and I'm wondering where summer has gone - not only is it cascading with rain outside, but it's the third of September, my brother's birthday, always the start of autumn in my book, was yesterday, my daughter started big school today and Isosceles are mixing their next single as I write. I should be excited about everything but I've got that going-back-to-school feeling that I always get around this time of year.
It's an odd thing being your own boss. I mean, obviously I'm not really my own boss - that's my wife's job, she really the one in charge - but I mean, not having a permanent job other than the one of managing the bands and doing freelance writing means that it's very easy to suddenly discover I've spent two hours online finding out how many skinny tie albums from 1978 I still don't own ... (unbelievably I still don't have The Cars debut!). I'm back here after almost a month working on that music web site. I may be back there next week too because another thing I keep discovering as my own boss is that I'm not paying myself any wages. Meet the old boss, same as the new boss, as they say.
Back to school, back to work, it's the same deal - working to other people's agenda's. My daughter expressed the same feeling about going back to school: but the teachers will make us do things! (it was much better expressed than that, but like all child aphorisms, if you don't write it down immediately, the genius is gone). But it's true: the teachers will make us do things and sometimes, there's other things we'd rather be up to. Although obviously Maddy would consider surfing the web for new wave CDs a waste of time. How much has she got to learn?
But how much have I got to learn too? I'd love to make it being freelance, being my own boss, but increasingly I feel torn between getting a job so I can afford to carry on. I went out with my friend Tony Fletcher a couple of weeks ago, who as far as I know hasn't had a proper, salaried job since we first met 15 years ago while he was doing A&R for an American record company. Tony's a proper writer - always has been, even when he was an A&R man. When he was a teenager, inspired by his love of The Jam, he wrote a fanzine called Jamming, which ended up becoming a proper magazine and he now has a bestselling book about Keith Moon under his belt. He lives in the States and we don't see each other that often, so we were trying to catch up over the course of this one evening. The last time we met was about a year and a half before when a band I was A&Ring were supporting Radio 4, whom he was managing at the time. And of course, despite both of us having a good idea of the general content of our respective lives due to the blogs, (Tony's, iJamming, has been going since before they were called blogs) despite this, there was bloody loads to tell each other and added to this, I'd kind of double booked Tony with another friend I hadn't seen for ages. This friend, David, is a senior lawyer at a major record label who is one of the funniest men I know. Frankly, I think he's wasted in law and in an ideal world would be playing piano in a bar by night and writing poetry by day. He arrived in the pub where Tony and I were, accompanied by a beautiful Russian blonde. "She's not my girlfriend," he protested. Anyway, the girl wisely left us when we did what 40-something blokes do when they're having a night out: went for a curry.
David, of course, has a salaried job and is doing very nicely, but ultimately he and everyone at the label is in some way beholden to X-Factor and the whims of Simon Cowell. Cowell's empire Syco is one of the few record labels which doesn't seem to be affected by dwindling sales. A friend of mine at Sony told me that Cowell stood up in a recent meeting and, with his usual iconoclasm, suggested that he had no idea what all this fuss about illegal downloads was - his sales were not affected in the slightest. I suspect this is because the demographic who listen to Leona Lewis et al are either children or middle aged parents who haven't fully grasped the potential of the Internet yet. David told us - possibly ironically - that he has to organise his holidays around the periods of the year when X-Factor is not happening. The rest of the year is kept busy because he has to do deals with every single one of the finalists so that Syco have the rights sewn up for the winners. And remember, X-Factor is now a global phenomenon and Sony/BMG have the international rights to it - so all of David's colleagues around Europe are doing the same thing. Apparently someone in France had called David earlier to compare notes on how they were getting on. "Signed anyone interesting?" he asked, the word out was the French favorite was some sort of poultry-themed act. "we have signed nothing!" they lamented,"apart from a fucking chicken!" Now there's job satisfaction for you.
When I was at RCA, I ended up in an office next to Simon Cowell. This was before he was Simon Cowell, of course, but even back in the 1780s he was riding high in the charts with Robson & Jerome as well as scraping the bargain bins with Steve Coogan. And he always knew what he was doing. Once in an A&R meeting he played a single (possibly by Zig & Zag, I can't be certain), and possibly because these were the days when singles were format crazy, with 2 CDs being the mode du jour, I asked him what he was going to put on the b sides, "I don't know, darling, but let's be honest, who cares?" he answered quite reasonably. He was always a very polite man - never the bad-tempered tyrant he plays on the telly.
So Tony, David and myself finished the vadai, the dosai and the vases of Cobra and wandered off down Cleveland St to find a tube station. Not that it's a question that anyone could reasonably answer but I wondered who is happier?- David, being an important lawyer but wanting to write poetry and or Tony, being a published writer but, like all writers, not knowing if the next book will be as successful as the last. The security of a salary versus the freedom of self-employment.
One thing I've noticed is if you are your own boss, things tend to grind to a halt if you don't constantly MAKE STUFF HAPPEN. You have to be permanently phoning and emailing and well... selling. Occasionally someone will return you call, offer a gig and occasionally send you a cheque. I invoiced that advertising agency yesterday - you know, the ones who are doing the acne ad with Isosceles' song. It felt bizarre - to be invoicing somebody else as opposed to be weeping over piles of unpaid invoices from others. It was such new territory that I forget to even put in an address. They phoned me today asking where they should send the cheque.
If my wife was here, she would probably have spotted my kindergarten error. I wasn't joking when I said she was the boss - it's not that she's always right, it's just that she has sufficient distance from the stuff I do to see the wood from the trees. It would of course be a nightmare if she really was my boss - my hairdresser mate told me about a colleague of his who went out with the female owner of the salon where he worked: his girlfriend was literally his boss. He was, apparently, a bit too fond of the old Charlie & Lola and prone to being a bit moody as well. After one particularly shouty day, she summoned him into her office and told him that his work was less than satisfactory, his client-base was dwindling and the other stylists were finding him hard to be around - in short he should find another job. He was speechless, and just as he was about to walk out of her office, she added, "Oh, and by the way, I'm pregnant - see you back at the flat."
There's another story about the same hairdresser and a ill-fated weekend trip to Spain with 'the lads' but I'll save that for another time. I've got to go off and make some things happen...
It's an odd thing being your own boss. I mean, obviously I'm not really my own boss - that's my wife's job, she really the one in charge - but I mean, not having a permanent job other than the one of managing the bands and doing freelance writing means that it's very easy to suddenly discover I've spent two hours online finding out how many skinny tie albums from 1978 I still don't own ... (unbelievably I still don't have The Cars debut!). I'm back here after almost a month working on that music web site. I may be back there next week too because another thing I keep discovering as my own boss is that I'm not paying myself any wages. Meet the old boss, same as the new boss, as they say.
Back to school, back to work, it's the same deal - working to other people's agenda's. My daughter expressed the same feeling about going back to school: but the teachers will make us do things! (it was much better expressed than that, but like all child aphorisms, if you don't write it down immediately, the genius is gone). But it's true: the teachers will make us do things and sometimes, there's other things we'd rather be up to. Although obviously Maddy would consider surfing the web for new wave CDs a waste of time. How much has she got to learn?
But how much have I got to learn too? I'd love to make it being freelance, being my own boss, but increasingly I feel torn between getting a job so I can afford to carry on. I went out with my friend Tony Fletcher a couple of weeks ago, who as far as I know hasn't had a proper, salaried job since we first met 15 years ago while he was doing A&R for an American record company. Tony's a proper writer - always has been, even when he was an A&R man. When he was a teenager, inspired by his love of The Jam, he wrote a fanzine called Jamming, which ended up becoming a proper magazine and he now has a bestselling book about Keith Moon under his belt. He lives in the States and we don't see each other that often, so we were trying to catch up over the course of this one evening. The last time we met was about a year and a half before when a band I was A&Ring were supporting Radio 4, whom he was managing at the time. And of course, despite both of us having a good idea of the general content of our respective lives due to the blogs, (Tony's, iJamming, has been going since before they were called blogs) despite this, there was bloody loads to tell each other and added to this, I'd kind of double booked Tony with another friend I hadn't seen for ages. This friend, David, is a senior lawyer at a major record label who is one of the funniest men I know. Frankly, I think he's wasted in law and in an ideal world would be playing piano in a bar by night and writing poetry by day. He arrived in the pub where Tony and I were, accompanied by a beautiful Russian blonde. "She's not my girlfriend," he protested. Anyway, the girl wisely left us when we did what 40-something blokes do when they're having a night out: went for a curry.
David, of course, has a salaried job and is doing very nicely, but ultimately he and everyone at the label is in some way beholden to X-Factor and the whims of Simon Cowell. Cowell's empire Syco is one of the few record labels which doesn't seem to be affected by dwindling sales. A friend of mine at Sony told me that Cowell stood up in a recent meeting and, with his usual iconoclasm, suggested that he had no idea what all this fuss about illegal downloads was - his sales were not affected in the slightest. I suspect this is because the demographic who listen to Leona Lewis et al are either children or middle aged parents who haven't fully grasped the potential of the Internet yet. David told us - possibly ironically - that he has to organise his holidays around the periods of the year when X-Factor is not happening. The rest of the year is kept busy because he has to do deals with every single one of the finalists so that Syco have the rights sewn up for the winners. And remember, X-Factor is now a global phenomenon and Sony/BMG have the international rights to it - so all of David's colleagues around Europe are doing the same thing. Apparently someone in France had called David earlier to compare notes on how they were getting on. "Signed anyone interesting?" he asked, the word out was the French favorite was some sort of poultry-themed act. "we have signed nothing!" they lamented,"apart from a fucking chicken!" Now there's job satisfaction for you.
When I was at RCA, I ended up in an office next to Simon Cowell. This was before he was Simon Cowell, of course, but even back in the 1780s he was riding high in the charts with Robson & Jerome as well as scraping the bargain bins with Steve Coogan. And he always knew what he was doing. Once in an A&R meeting he played a single (possibly by Zig & Zag, I can't be certain), and possibly because these were the days when singles were format crazy, with 2 CDs being the mode du jour, I asked him what he was going to put on the b sides, "I don't know, darling, but let's be honest, who cares?" he answered quite reasonably. He was always a very polite man - never the bad-tempered tyrant he plays on the telly.
So Tony, David and myself finished the vadai, the dosai and the vases of Cobra and wandered off down Cleveland St to find a tube station. Not that it's a question that anyone could reasonably answer but I wondered who is happier?- David, being an important lawyer but wanting to write poetry and or Tony, being a published writer but, like all writers, not knowing if the next book will be as successful as the last. The security of a salary versus the freedom of self-employment.
One thing I've noticed is if you are your own boss, things tend to grind to a halt if you don't constantly MAKE STUFF HAPPEN. You have to be permanently phoning and emailing and well... selling. Occasionally someone will return you call, offer a gig and occasionally send you a cheque. I invoiced that advertising agency yesterday - you know, the ones who are doing the acne ad with Isosceles' song. It felt bizarre - to be invoicing somebody else as opposed to be weeping over piles of unpaid invoices from others. It was such new territory that I forget to even put in an address. They phoned me today asking where they should send the cheque.
If my wife was here, she would probably have spotted my kindergarten error. I wasn't joking when I said she was the boss - it's not that she's always right, it's just that she has sufficient distance from the stuff I do to see the wood from the trees. It would of course be a nightmare if she really was my boss - my hairdresser mate told me about a colleague of his who went out with the female owner of the salon where he worked: his girlfriend was literally his boss. He was, apparently, a bit too fond of the old Charlie & Lola and prone to being a bit moody as well. After one particularly shouty day, she summoned him into her office and told him that his work was less than satisfactory, his client-base was dwindling and the other stylists were finding him hard to be around - in short he should find another job. He was speechless, and just as he was about to walk out of her office, she added, "Oh, and by the way, I'm pregnant - see you back at the flat."
There's another story about the same hairdresser and a ill-fated weekend trip to Spain with 'the lads' but I'll save that for another time. I've got to go off and make some things happen...
Monday, 25 August 2008
Toads, Dressing Rooms and Acne.
What can I say? It's the longest gap between posts I've left it since I started this blog. The fancy dress party I wrote about last time feels like it happened in the nineties. Maybe it did. Anyway, for those of you who read this - and last time I looked there were people in St Laurant Du Var and Vincente Lopez, as well as folk in Adelaide, Bangkok and Helsinki - there was even one visitor from Islamabad last month (hopefully wearing a skinny tie and listening to The Knack) - yes, for those of you that read this, I humbly apologise. It's not like I've been on holiday either - quite the opposite in fact, I've been working. The toad is squatting.
Not that managing a band isn't work, or indeed writing articles (incidentally, here's one I wrote last week about band names) but crucially none of this brings in that much cash at the moment. Actually, let's be honest, none of is bringing in any cash right now. OK, so occasionally, I get paid for something - but it does feel like the work you get paid for when you are freelance, particularly a freelance writer, isn't the actual work but the work you put in trying to get paid. So with savings running at an all time low, I suggested to some of my mover and shaker friends that whilst I may superficially appear to be a flourishing and rather important band manager, my wife is beginning to look at me rather sternly; could they put their considerable feelers out and if they hear of any freelance work popping up, get on the phone to me immediately? I sent this out as a lighthearted, amusingly-written email and by the end of the day my inbox was full to the brim with job offers.
If only that were true. No, apart from a couple of well-meaning responses of the 'I'll give you a shout if anything does come up...' nature, it was the deafening sound of Gmail Tumbleweed, which greeted me. Oh well, I thought, at least I tried. I returned to the drawing board, wondering if in fact, I did have as many actual friends out there as I thought. Maybe everyone was on holiday, maybe their silence was meant to convey a vociferous 'I hear ya!' Whatever the reason, their silence spoke pamphlets.
Then, about a week later, I got a call from a friend - "would you like to help out the online team of XXXXXXX, while one of them is away on jury service?" I jumped at it. I haven't done any online editorial since my days at AOL Music and despite the work at first glance being of the desk-bound screen-staring variety, I must confess to really rather enjoying it. I'm not going to tell you where it is, suffice to say that there are worse music websites out there and due to the unique way it's funded, everyone seems to be there for the right reasons - IE they love music and want to make great content - rather than the situation at AOL Music where any decent editorial ideas would be swept away in a sea of boring demands from sponsors. Actually, the last I heard, since being bought by Carphone Warehouse a couple of years ago, the remaining editorial staff at AOL were given the final ignominious task of flying to Mumbai to teach the call centre staff there how to do editorial. Talk about digging your own grave.
But don't think that I've thrown in the management towel to purse the Internet dream - oh no, my friends, I am still chipping away at the coal face of rock and pop and things are very gradually beginning to hot up. The Scottish band - let's for the sake of it call them Isosceles, shall we? - are coming out of the woodwork. They've been slaving away over a hot rehearsal room stove to come up with the next single and there's a 20 date tour being prepared for the autumn. I went up to see them play at The Edge Festival (the music part of the Edinburgh Festival) last weekend and it's sinking in that they are actually beginning to command a bit of an audience. In the Caberet Voltaire, bang in the middle of the city, surrounded by clowns, jugglers and motionless, silver-painted men, the band unloaded their gear and I noticed for the first time that we had some A4 love. Getting the A4 is something I've always subconsciously known is a sign you are going somewhere - it's when the promoter prints a number of sheets with your band name on it to make the venue seem like its yours for the night - a couple with 'Isosceles - Dressing Room Upstairs' on them, and a handful with stage times and Isosceles at the top. Small and insignificant this may sound but it's a deeply satisfying thing after always being first support and not getting your name on the sheet or getting it on but woefully misspelled. Don't get me started on the various spellings of Isosceles, by the way, suffice to say it's easy to remember once you've heard their chant-along song of the same name
It was good to see the fellas again, it had been a while and there was much catching up to do. We kicked back in the dressing room - a room, it must be said, that looked like it had been designed by someone with the wrong brief. Normally dressing rooms are breeze-blocked, graffiti-heavy, damp and shabby - the furniture is the worst sort of student landlord mouse-nibbled sofa carcasses and the toilets barely a latrine above an open sewer. The only respite is the rider - a case of beer and softs or as one promoter on the forthcoming tour describes it: 'ice cool imported beer' (just the wrongness of the expression 'ice cool' sets off alarm bells). The people who designed the dressing room at the Caberet Voltaire had obviously believed they were designing a Green Room for a national TV show - instead of breeze block there is a very tasteful feature wall with flock-effect wallpaper, instead of a burned-out three piece suite from 1983 there are leather sofas and wooden chairs which look as if they're from Heels. There is also a serious Air con unit which, on a day like today, brings a tear of joy to the eye. There is tea, coffee and of course there are beers as well as softs - plus chocolate too. I get to the dressing room before the band arrive and do the most important thing a manager can do - put the choc in the fridge. Job done, I sit back and wait for my 20%.
As with most of the band's shows, I'm almost disappointed that there is not more A&R advice I can give them - they are so near to being brilliant it's criminal. One time on the last tour I commented to Jack about communicating with the audience more and by the next time I saw them he was engaging everyone. This time they play two brand new songs and one of them - Andy, You're Just Like Clockwork feels like it's potentially the next single.
After the show we retire to finish the rider (chocolate included) and after a quick vegetarian haggis (I kid you not) we're in a bar and downing pints of Tenants. It occurs to me, as I hear myself blathering on to some girl in German that I have work the next day, not work as in talking to the agent about the tour, trying to get through to the PR guy or worrying about how much money we have for diesel, no - I have to be somewhere at a certain time, to do a specific thing to a specific deadline - how odd does that feel? Suddenly there can be no impromptu meetings in the middle of the day, no quick forays to Amazon or Ebay - it's all suddenly very grown up and serious and I'm not sure I like it. I throw the thought from my mind and down another pint. We're celebrating another thing too, we've been offered what is known as a sync - that is, someone wants to use one of the band's songs in an advert (it could be a film or TV soundtrack but often it's the advertising agencies who have the bigger budgets). I'm going to write more about syncs in another blog because we've got offers for a number of our bands right now and I think there are things to said about the idea of letting your songs be used to advertise, say for example - the Danish equivalent of the AA.
In Isosceles' case, we have been approached by a Scottish agency who've made, not surprisingly, ads for Iron Bru and Tenants. They also made the one with the bottles of Bulmers cider swimming through the sea like dolphins. Everything sounded amazing - they want to use the band's first single Get Your Hands Off, which is an under-exposed classic, the director is the same guy who did the dolphins ad, the agency is hip and Scottish, the ad will run for a year and go to air around the release of our new single. What, as we managers say, could possibly go wrong? The only issue is the product - what is it that Isosceles' song is going to endorse - is it a car? some jeans? a hair product? Nope. It's Oxy. You know, the spot cream. When I had spots (about a million years ago) it was called Oxy 10, I think - now they've streamlined it for the noughties. Initially, we wobbled but then we thought - hey, what's the worst that can happen? We'll have a song that people associate with an ad. Then we thought... well, I thought - money! I could do with some of that, bet those spot people are loaded. Er, no. If anyone tells you that the future for artists is not about record sales but getting your songs placed in adverts, they are probably a music journalist and not in the business. There is not much money for a new band but there is, as we decided, that magical thing: Exposure. And that for us, is what hit the, er spot.
Not that managing a band isn't work, or indeed writing articles (incidentally, here's one I wrote last week about band names) but crucially none of this brings in that much cash at the moment. Actually, let's be honest, none of is bringing in any cash right now. OK, so occasionally, I get paid for something - but it does feel like the work you get paid for when you are freelance, particularly a freelance writer, isn't the actual work but the work you put in trying to get paid. So with savings running at an all time low, I suggested to some of my mover and shaker friends that whilst I may superficially appear to be a flourishing and rather important band manager, my wife is beginning to look at me rather sternly; could they put their considerable feelers out and if they hear of any freelance work popping up, get on the phone to me immediately? I sent this out as a lighthearted, amusingly-written email and by the end of the day my inbox was full to the brim with job offers.
If only that were true. No, apart from a couple of well-meaning responses of the 'I'll give you a shout if anything does come up...' nature, it was the deafening sound of Gmail Tumbleweed, which greeted me. Oh well, I thought, at least I tried. I returned to the drawing board, wondering if in fact, I did have as many actual friends out there as I thought. Maybe everyone was on holiday, maybe their silence was meant to convey a vociferous 'I hear ya!' Whatever the reason, their silence spoke pamphlets.
Then, about a week later, I got a call from a friend - "would you like to help out the online team of XXXXXXX, while one of them is away on jury service?" I jumped at it. I haven't done any online editorial since my days at AOL Music and despite the work at first glance being of the desk-bound screen-staring variety, I must confess to really rather enjoying it. I'm not going to tell you where it is, suffice to say that there are worse music websites out there and due to the unique way it's funded, everyone seems to be there for the right reasons - IE they love music and want to make great content - rather than the situation at AOL Music where any decent editorial ideas would be swept away in a sea of boring demands from sponsors. Actually, the last I heard, since being bought by Carphone Warehouse a couple of years ago, the remaining editorial staff at AOL were given the final ignominious task of flying to Mumbai to teach the call centre staff there how to do editorial. Talk about digging your own grave.
But don't think that I've thrown in the management towel to purse the Internet dream - oh no, my friends, I am still chipping away at the coal face of rock and pop and things are very gradually beginning to hot up. The Scottish band - let's for the sake of it call them Isosceles, shall we? - are coming out of the woodwork. They've been slaving away over a hot rehearsal room stove to come up with the next single and there's a 20 date tour being prepared for the autumn. I went up to see them play at The Edge Festival (the music part of the Edinburgh Festival) last weekend and it's sinking in that they are actually beginning to command a bit of an audience. In the Caberet Voltaire, bang in the middle of the city, surrounded by clowns, jugglers and motionless, silver-painted men, the band unloaded their gear and I noticed for the first time that we had some A4 love. Getting the A4 is something I've always subconsciously known is a sign you are going somewhere - it's when the promoter prints a number of sheets with your band name on it to make the venue seem like its yours for the night - a couple with 'Isosceles - Dressing Room Upstairs' on them, and a handful with stage times and Isosceles at the top. Small and insignificant this may sound but it's a deeply satisfying thing after always being first support and not getting your name on the sheet or getting it on but woefully misspelled. Don't get me started on the various spellings of Isosceles, by the way, suffice to say it's easy to remember once you've heard their chant-along song of the same name
It was good to see the fellas again, it had been a while and there was much catching up to do. We kicked back in the dressing room - a room, it must be said, that looked like it had been designed by someone with the wrong brief. Normally dressing rooms are breeze-blocked, graffiti-heavy, damp and shabby - the furniture is the worst sort of student landlord mouse-nibbled sofa carcasses and the toilets barely a latrine above an open sewer. The only respite is the rider - a case of beer and softs or as one promoter on the forthcoming tour describes it: 'ice cool imported beer' (just the wrongness of the expression 'ice cool' sets off alarm bells). The people who designed the dressing room at the Caberet Voltaire had obviously believed they were designing a Green Room for a national TV show - instead of breeze block there is a very tasteful feature wall with flock-effect wallpaper, instead of a burned-out three piece suite from 1983 there are leather sofas and wooden chairs which look as if they're from Heels. There is also a serious Air con unit which, on a day like today, brings a tear of joy to the eye. There is tea, coffee and of course there are beers as well as softs - plus chocolate too. I get to the dressing room before the band arrive and do the most important thing a manager can do - put the choc in the fridge. Job done, I sit back and wait for my 20%.
As with most of the band's shows, I'm almost disappointed that there is not more A&R advice I can give them - they are so near to being brilliant it's criminal. One time on the last tour I commented to Jack about communicating with the audience more and by the next time I saw them he was engaging everyone. This time they play two brand new songs and one of them - Andy, You're Just Like Clockwork feels like it's potentially the next single.
After the show we retire to finish the rider (chocolate included) and after a quick vegetarian haggis (I kid you not) we're in a bar and downing pints of Tenants. It occurs to me, as I hear myself blathering on to some girl in German that I have work the next day, not work as in talking to the agent about the tour, trying to get through to the PR guy or worrying about how much money we have for diesel, no - I have to be somewhere at a certain time, to do a specific thing to a specific deadline - how odd does that feel? Suddenly there can be no impromptu meetings in the middle of the day, no quick forays to Amazon or Ebay - it's all suddenly very grown up and serious and I'm not sure I like it. I throw the thought from my mind and down another pint. We're celebrating another thing too, we've been offered what is known as a sync - that is, someone wants to use one of the band's songs in an advert (it could be a film or TV soundtrack but often it's the advertising agencies who have the bigger budgets). I'm going to write more about syncs in another blog because we've got offers for a number of our bands right now and I think there are things to said about the idea of letting your songs be used to advertise, say for example - the Danish equivalent of the AA.
In Isosceles' case, we have been approached by a Scottish agency who've made, not surprisingly, ads for Iron Bru and Tenants. They also made the one with the bottles of Bulmers cider swimming through the sea like dolphins. Everything sounded amazing - they want to use the band's first single Get Your Hands Off, which is an under-exposed classic, the director is the same guy who did the dolphins ad, the agency is hip and Scottish, the ad will run for a year and go to air around the release of our new single. What, as we managers say, could possibly go wrong? The only issue is the product - what is it that Isosceles' song is going to endorse - is it a car? some jeans? a hair product? Nope. It's Oxy. You know, the spot cream. When I had spots (about a million years ago) it was called Oxy 10, I think - now they've streamlined it for the noughties. Initially, we wobbled but then we thought - hey, what's the worst that can happen? We'll have a song that people associate with an ad. Then we thought... well, I thought - money! I could do with some of that, bet those spot people are loaded. Er, no. If anyone tells you that the future for artists is not about record sales but getting your songs placed in adverts, they are probably a music journalist and not in the business. There is not much money for a new band but there is, as we decided, that magical thing: Exposure. And that for us, is what hit the, er spot.
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