"Maybe it's because everything else is really loud now. In bars, or a car, or on headphones when you travel by tube - you're just never going to notice Charlie Watts' hi-hat or Joe Strummer's delicate fretwork. Record companies think: if I leave any quiet bits in, I'll lose the public's attention!"
"Can you start again from 'In bars'?"
"OK." I clear my throat and unwittingly make a effeminate squeak.
"In bars" my voice has now taken on a desperate tone, "I'll do that again.."
"Whenever you're ready"
"In bars OR in a car... oh bollocks... excuse me."
"That's OK, take your time..."
Christ, who wrote this shit anyway? For a moment, I feel like Orson Wells in those infamous frozen fish adverts, then I realise, it was me, I wrote this shit. It's all my fault.
I'm in a plush studio in BBC Broadcasting House, recording a 'column' for the arts programme Front Row. A&Rmchair has caught the attention of some people there and they've suggested I do one of their spoken columns on some aspect of the music business. I pitched a load of things and the thing they've gone for is Remasters. If you've ever attempted to get any of your writing accepted by radio or newspapers, you'll know how it's actually the pitch that is most of the work: the persuading, the levering of call returns, the attempts at constant politeness when you want to scream: WHY AREN'T YOU GETTING BACK TO ME? In this case they were astonishing swift and the pitch was the easiest thing.
But of course, as every glass-half-empty person knows: nothing is ever easy. What occasionally happens and happened in the case of this column, is that once the pitch is accepted you discover that the point you wanted to make is not as straightforward as you thought and it's consequently much harder to write than you originally envisaged.
It turned out that my argument - about remasters being effectively the same record only a bit louder - was not quite right. Earlier in the week, the Guardian had asked me to write something about the EU's findings on the health risks of having your personal stereo volume up too loud, so I was getting into volume quite deeply. And the more research I did, the more I discovered about the 'Loudness War' that's going on in the music mastering industry. Mastering has always been about making Everything As Loud As Possible but with the increasingly sophisticated digital compression available, there seems to be a demand to make every album release like a TV ad - IE something which cuts through any background noise.
This means that if it's an old record (and by old, I mean pretty much anything before the mid-nineties) it won't bear any relation to how it sounded when it first came out, because every light brush stroke, every whisper and every cough is brought up to the levels of a kick drum or powerchord so that rather like this sentence there is no light and shade, no nuance or subtlety and eventually after a while it just becomes an unfocused background noise which anyone over the age of 16 finds they need to turn off to preserve their sanity.
So back to my 'column'. Just as I am punching the air with joy that I might be on Radio 4, I start getting the fear that what I've proposed this isn't a brief, pithy column where I can pretend that I'm as funny as David Quantick, no, it's actually a lengthy, detailed article where I should talk about Metallica and Elbow and the the Loudness War and get quotes from mastering engineers from the US and the UK and I bring in loads of my own experience of cutting records... and you know what, suddenly I find my prose becoming a bit laboured and worthy and I realise that I'm writing something for a trade magazine. Bugger.
In the I end, I think I manage what I think is a fairly acceptable balance between facts and a bit of observational humour. Something like this blog, I hope. Except I don't anticipate - blimey, you'd think by now I'd start planning ahead wouldn't you? - that the tweaks and rewrites I make should actually be typed into the script I'm reading from. As it is, I am now sitting facing the microphone surrounded by sheets of A4; some are print-outs of my original piece emailed to the producer, some have her suggestions on in blue, some are my hastily-written-on-the-tube notes which, like all my handwriting (even the the variant of it where I use a quill and vellum), are completely illegible.
As I read off my A4 spread, my head is bobbing about like Bruce Foxton as I look for the relevant sheet. It's no wonder I'm talking bollocks. Fortunately, the producer is a total pro, she makes me feel as if I'm actually quite important to the programme and even sends another producer away who wants to use the studio we're in. The fact that we've been in here for days and the actual presenters now want to come in and record tonight's programme is kept from me.
I quite like it though - being in a studio when it's me doing the recording. All my life has been about going to studios where someone else is doing the recording - I'm the just the person whose organised it, just the person who's putting the cash up for it. There've only been a couple of times I've actually appeared on recordings myself and then they were brief. The first was when Neil Hannon was making his second Divine Comedy album in The Church in Crouch End - incidentally, I'm not counting the first DC album as it is indie rock and not really part of the cannon.
I was friendly with him at that point, having tried to sign him but ultimately leaving it to his very capable label Setanta. The album, Promenade, features a track called The Booklovers and Neil had an idea to overlay the lyricless verse parts with the imagined voices of famous writers saying things they might have said. Everyone who popped by the studio was asked the same thing: pick a couple of writers from Neil's list and say something appropriate to them. I picked Mark Twain because he wrote my favourite book Huckleberry Finn and JG Ballard because I had just read Crash at the time (by the way, if you haven't read it don't be put off, it's much better than the film). So I did a terrible Southern accent for Twain and said "but I can't even spell Mississippi" and for Ballard I uttered the expression for dashboard which Ballard uses time and time again in Crash - normally when someone is having sex on one - "Instrument Binnacle". It is worth tracking down the album for the track Tonight We Fly which is the sort of song which continues to work on your body even after all the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up. Hannon's an underrated genius, who will eventually be recognised as such - I bumped into him several years after my recording experience with him. He was in John Lewis looking at fridges with his wife and I was still so star struck I didn't know what to say - no white goods gag came to me in my moment of need. But despte being proud to share an album with that song, I have to say Booklovers is probably one of its weaker tracks.
The second time I feature on an album is on Stephen Duffy's I Love My Friends, the second record he made for my label Indolent. He asked me to shout 'Oi!' on the track Something Good, so he could mix it in with his own lyric 'shouts'. I really went for it with every ounce of South East London yobbo I could muster, hoping my vocal prowess would possibly lead to more invitations from him. Sadly it wasn't to be, largely because, we never made another record together. You see, I was required to drop him by BMG (Indolent's paymaster) before that album was even released, a tragic story which most A&R people probably have some variation of. On the CD booklet of the few copies we originally manufactured, Stephen had dedicated the album to me but when Cooking Vinyl finally released it six months later, my name was inevitably missing from the label copy. Still, do try and hear this album (it still sounds amazing 12 years later) and you can hear my attempt at being a yob - albeit fairly low in the mix
I haven't heard the finished Front Row column yet. The producer has to edit it together and insert all the music I talk about - let's hope those remasters do actually sound different from the original otherwise we're all buggered. And let's hope I get invited back into a studio soon, I think I've finally got the taste for it.
NB: The piece was broadcast last night (Monday 27 Oct) so if you want to listen to it, go to the Front Row website, click on the Listen Again button for Monday's show and you'll find me about two thirds of the way through.
Showing posts with label people not calling back. Show all posts
Showing posts with label people not calling back. Show all posts
Friday, 24 October 2008
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, 17 March 2008
"You guys need to get a girl singer..."
I've been very busy being a manager recently.
This is my rather showy excuse for not having written the blog for over a week. I appreciate that to many of you 'busy being a manager' must sound rather like 'I've been organising a piss up in a brewery, managing my own way out of a paper bag and negotiating the logistics of my arse and my elbow' but it does appear that there are actually quite a lot of things to do when you look after a band, and the moment you've done them all, there suddenly appear to be more things on the list that all should have been done way before the things you've actually just done.
There are indeed so many things to be done as a band manager that frankly I don't know how I'm finding the time to write this, not to speak of doing another thing for the Guardian. This one is about the Beatles incidentally, just in case you haven't read anything about them for a day or so. By the way, if you haven't seen today's Sun headline yet, you're in for a treat.
So our Scottish band are playing some dates outside Scotland for the first time. It's quite exciting. Well, apart from the boring stuff, like booking hotels - I've taken it upon myself to book their accommodation but some manager-chums are telling me that I should make the band do this, it sets too paternal an example, apparently. (Honestly, I don't know - you tell me - should I leave it to them?)
Anyway, at least I haven't had to book the shows myself. I was doing that for our girl band earlier this year and frankly it was the most dispiriting thing I've ever experienced- akin to trying to get served at a fashionable bar where everyone is taller, more attractive and louder than you, plus you don't speak the language. You email local promoters and they either ignore your mails or tell you that they only do 'metal' acts or 'local bands that pull'. Or you phone them up (if you've managed to get the number, which always appears to be a closely guarded secret) and it's like talking to a slightly stoned teenager - "Yeah , I'll check out the Myspace, dude..." At this point the temptation to say, "I've got 20 years music industry experience! I've made records you've danced to like a twat! I know what I'm talking about when I''m telling you they're great!" is quite intense but would possibly have a counterproductive effect. Charlie, my business partner, who actually has way more hit records under his belt than I do, had a go booking dates for the girls and for the first week was greeted with the same wall of indifference that I got. Then, just as he was about to play the Don't You Know Who I Am? card, someone gave him a gig. We took the rest of the afternoon off. I think the promoter may have given it to him by mistake but by then it was too late. Anyway, since he got it, he's been on fire - he's got them about ten shows now. Ra-hey! Me, I managed one Bath Moles and some gig in Bristol in what appeared to be a urine bottling plant. At the end of the night, the drunk promoter refused to pay us. Presumably he'd spent all the takings on lager in order to convert it into more wee.
So when it came to looking after the Scottish band I couldn't face doing the gig-phony-uppy thing. Fortunately, I managed to get them an agent and she's a total pleasure to deal with. I wish everyone I dealt with was more like her. Funny, as a manager you really notice all the things that you heard yourself being accused of when you did A&R: when people don't call you back for a day, or sometimes just never call back, or claim to have lost or eaten whatever it was you sent them by registered post. It's the real world, which, if you're sheltered from it - i.e. if you're someone to whom everyone wants to speak, because you represent warehouses stuffed with record deals, cash and supermodels - is a world you never see. It's good for the soul, I suppose, but not good for the mobile phone bill which - and I'm speaking to you, Mr and Mrs Orange - is an itemised monthly bastard.
Lucy, our booking agent, works for an old friend of mine, Charlie, who used to be The Levellers' agent then put his foot to the floor and now has his own agency, which looks after some of the UK's biggest groups. We are, of course, currently one of the UK's smallest groups, so the first step towards joining the upper echelons of Charlie's roster is to play some shows away from home. But how do you do this when no one has heard of you? Answer: The club show. These are essentially indie discos that have a few bands playing based on the theory that the DJs have the taste to play good records so may as well book the bands as well.
So I went up to Nottingham last week to see them play a club night called Radar. The venue -The Bodega Social - is a good old-fashioned building with high ceilings and a covered rear outdoor area where there appeared to be some sort of smoking competition going on. In the bar the walls are covered with framed photos of bands the Bodega has played host to recently - Kate Nash, Jack Penate, The Wombats... Next week Duffy was playing. We were getting a fee and a rider ("a crate of beers and softs" - mmm, got to love a soft.) Oh yes, it appeared we really had entered The Big Time.
The support band - if such a thing exists in the context of a club night - were female fronted. "And she's French," pointed out Jack, our singer. The French singer in question was, it must be said, really attractive too: kind of damaged blonde with a waspish figure and violent cheekbones. All this and French. We couldn't wait to check out her band Tramp (incidentally, I wanted to put a link to their Myspace here but it doesn't appear to exist).
Expectations for Tramp were perhaps excessive. As the singer stalked the stage, gurning at members of the audience in a Hazel O'Connorish, wide-eyed, I'm-a-bit-mad-me sort of way, the rest of the band plodded away in the background. She had an odd voice that ticked all the boxes like 'in tune' and 'powerful' but managed to remain resolutely unappealing. I felt a warm glow of confidence and relief that those involved with bands get when they know there's no competition - like the band who meet Spinal Tap in the lobby of the hotel who are playing the Enormodome. We watched the rest of the set along with the rest of the small, bloke-heavy crowd.
When my band went onstage it was to an even smaller crowd, made up largely from members of Tramp and a couple of their mates. It started well and drinkers from the adjacent bar sauntered round the corner so they could see who was making this truly fantastic music. Or so I thought. As the show progressed there seemed to be a nice little knot of people who were getting into it, some of them even dancing. But then, inexplicably, one, then two, then three of the girls in the crowd decided it was time for a wee or a fag and b-lined it out of the room. No problem, I thought, as I stood there alongside two spindley indie blokes, the girls will be back soon with a whole new crowd of converts. Then the two indie men meandered back to the bar and it was just me and the sound guy left.
Jack and the band heroically played on. They did a new song, which was fantastic, the sound wasn't great but all the bits were falling into place musically and the band were performing their hearts out - Will's backing vocals keeping the whole thing underpinned beautifully and Robert locking everything down on the drums . Towards the end, a handful of people came up and had a conversation in front of the stage.
Eventually, like an operation, it was all over. We returned to the dressing room (more of a dressing corridor, actually - like the office that Tuttle gets in Brazil). We cracked open the crate of beers, we downed a few of the softs, we did the gig post-mortem thing.
There was no great secret as to why we hadn't connected. As the promotor said later: it was a club night, sometimes audiences can be weird - especially when there's a WKD promotion going on downstairs. Plus, people had come to dance to records they knew - that's how some club nights are - no doubt Duffy would have a field day the following week. This was proven later as the dancefloor was rammed with 2 For 1 Bacadi Breezer drinkers in mini-skirts dancing to the Klaxons. As the band and I joined the smoking competition going on outside, someone from Tramp sidled up and offered us one solution: "Tough one tonight, you guys need to get a girl singer, then your problems will be over..."
Next time: The band play Newcastle and Leeds. Rock and, to be perfectly frank, Roll!
This is my rather showy excuse for not having written the blog for over a week. I appreciate that to many of you 'busy being a manager' must sound rather like 'I've been organising a piss up in a brewery, managing my own way out of a paper bag and negotiating the logistics of my arse and my elbow' but it does appear that there are actually quite a lot of things to do when you look after a band, and the moment you've done them all, there suddenly appear to be more things on the list that all should have been done way before the things you've actually just done.
There are indeed so many things to be done as a band manager that frankly I don't know how I'm finding the time to write this, not to speak of doing another thing for the Guardian. This one is about the Beatles incidentally, just in case you haven't read anything about them for a day or so. By the way, if you haven't seen today's Sun headline yet, you're in for a treat.
So our Scottish band are playing some dates outside Scotland for the first time. It's quite exciting. Well, apart from the boring stuff, like booking hotels - I've taken it upon myself to book their accommodation but some manager-chums are telling me that I should make the band do this, it sets too paternal an example, apparently. (Honestly, I don't know - you tell me - should I leave it to them?)
Anyway, at least I haven't had to book the shows myself. I was doing that for our girl band earlier this year and frankly it was the most dispiriting thing I've ever experienced- akin to trying to get served at a fashionable bar where everyone is taller, more attractive and louder than you, plus you don't speak the language. You email local promoters and they either ignore your mails or tell you that they only do 'metal' acts or 'local bands that pull'. Or you phone them up (if you've managed to get the number, which always appears to be a closely guarded secret) and it's like talking to a slightly stoned teenager - "Yeah , I'll check out the Myspace, dude..." At this point the temptation to say, "I've got 20 years music industry experience! I've made records you've danced to like a twat! I know what I'm talking about when I''m telling you they're great!" is quite intense but would possibly have a counterproductive effect. Charlie, my business partner, who actually has way more hit records under his belt than I do, had a go booking dates for the girls and for the first week was greeted with the same wall of indifference that I got. Then, just as he was about to play the Don't You Know Who I Am? card, someone gave him a gig. We took the rest of the afternoon off. I think the promoter may have given it to him by mistake but by then it was too late. Anyway, since he got it, he's been on fire - he's got them about ten shows now. Ra-hey! Me, I managed one Bath Moles and some gig in Bristol in what appeared to be a urine bottling plant. At the end of the night, the drunk promoter refused to pay us. Presumably he'd spent all the takings on lager in order to convert it into more wee.
So when it came to looking after the Scottish band I couldn't face doing the gig-phony-uppy thing. Fortunately, I managed to get them an agent and she's a total pleasure to deal with. I wish everyone I dealt with was more like her. Funny, as a manager you really notice all the things that you heard yourself being accused of when you did A&R: when people don't call you back for a day, or sometimes just never call back, or claim to have lost or eaten whatever it was you sent them by registered post. It's the real world, which, if you're sheltered from it - i.e. if you're someone to whom everyone wants to speak, because you represent warehouses stuffed with record deals, cash and supermodels - is a world you never see. It's good for the soul, I suppose, but not good for the mobile phone bill which - and I'm speaking to you, Mr and Mrs Orange - is an itemised monthly bastard.
Lucy, our booking agent, works for an old friend of mine, Charlie, who used to be The Levellers' agent then put his foot to the floor and now has his own agency, which looks after some of the UK's biggest groups. We are, of course, currently one of the UK's smallest groups, so the first step towards joining the upper echelons of Charlie's roster is to play some shows away from home. But how do you do this when no one has heard of you? Answer: The club show. These are essentially indie discos that have a few bands playing based on the theory that the DJs have the taste to play good records so may as well book the bands as well.
So I went up to Nottingham last week to see them play a club night called Radar. The venue -The Bodega Social - is a good old-fashioned building with high ceilings and a covered rear outdoor area where there appeared to be some sort of smoking competition going on. In the bar the walls are covered with framed photos of bands the Bodega has played host to recently - Kate Nash, Jack Penate, The Wombats... Next week Duffy was playing. We were getting a fee and a rider ("a crate of beers and softs" - mmm, got to love a soft.) Oh yes, it appeared we really had entered The Big Time.
The support band - if such a thing exists in the context of a club night - were female fronted. "And she's French," pointed out Jack, our singer. The French singer in question was, it must be said, really attractive too: kind of damaged blonde with a waspish figure and violent cheekbones. All this and French. We couldn't wait to check out her band Tramp (incidentally, I wanted to put a link to their Myspace here but it doesn't appear to exist).
Expectations for Tramp were perhaps excessive. As the singer stalked the stage, gurning at members of the audience in a Hazel O'Connorish, wide-eyed, I'm-a-bit-mad-me sort of way, the rest of the band plodded away in the background. She had an odd voice that ticked all the boxes like 'in tune' and 'powerful' but managed to remain resolutely unappealing. I felt a warm glow of confidence and relief that those involved with bands get when they know there's no competition - like the band who meet Spinal Tap in the lobby of the hotel who are playing the Enormodome. We watched the rest of the set along with the rest of the small, bloke-heavy crowd.
When my band went onstage it was to an even smaller crowd, made up largely from members of Tramp and a couple of their mates. It started well and drinkers from the adjacent bar sauntered round the corner so they could see who was making this truly fantastic music. Or so I thought. As the show progressed there seemed to be a nice little knot of people who were getting into it, some of them even dancing. But then, inexplicably, one, then two, then three of the girls in the crowd decided it was time for a wee or a fag and b-lined it out of the room. No problem, I thought, as I stood there alongside two spindley indie blokes, the girls will be back soon with a whole new crowd of converts. Then the two indie men meandered back to the bar and it was just me and the sound guy left.
Jack and the band heroically played on. They did a new song, which was fantastic, the sound wasn't great but all the bits were falling into place musically and the band were performing their hearts out - Will's backing vocals keeping the whole thing underpinned beautifully and Robert locking everything down on the drums . Towards the end, a handful of people came up and had a conversation in front of the stage.
Eventually, like an operation, it was all over. We returned to the dressing room (more of a dressing corridor, actually - like the office that Tuttle gets in Brazil). We cracked open the crate of beers, we downed a few of the softs, we did the gig post-mortem thing.
There was no great secret as to why we hadn't connected. As the promotor said later: it was a club night, sometimes audiences can be weird - especially when there's a WKD promotion going on downstairs. Plus, people had come to dance to records they knew - that's how some club nights are - no doubt Duffy would have a field day the following week. This was proven later as the dancefloor was rammed with 2 For 1 Bacadi Breezer drinkers in mini-skirts dancing to the Klaxons. As the band and I joined the smoking competition going on outside, someone from Tramp sidled up and offered us one solution: "Tough one tonight, you guys need to get a girl singer, then your problems will be over..."
Next time: The band play Newcastle and Leeds. Rock and, to be perfectly frank, Roll!
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