A&Rmchair

Like The Doors meets Snow Patrol! - I sense I'm not selling it to you...

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:49:00 +0000

Really? Yes, it really is me. I couldn't let the opportunity of the festive season pass without a quick update. Who cares? Well, I'm under the impression that you do. This is largely because since stopping writing this every week I am still getting between 20 and 30 people a day looking at it. Who are these people? Are they just slow readers who've been there from the start? Or are they re-readers, people who are making sure they know everything about my past life in case they meet me and want to freak me out. Or maybe it's just Google Analytics giving a bonus number to everyone's site so they don't ever experience the horrible truth of tumbleweed and anonymity. Although some of these stats are definitely real people because a lot of them have been requesting an MP3 for Wubble U's A Bit Like U which I raved about earlier in the year in Now That's What I Call Unrecouped. I've uploaded it here so you can stream it or even do something naughty with it.

I've had a lovely autumn and am enjoying a splendid winter. I've been as far away from the music business as you can imagine and it's been rather refreshing. From this distance the business looks kind of grim to me: Robbie Williams' record sounds like Gary Barlow, Oasis are no more, I can't even bring myself to listen to Dylan's Christmas album and still I don't sense that there are any great new groups out there who we can take to our hearts. Although having said that I had one of those lovely experiences in a record shop (can you guess which one?) the other day when I heard a back-of-neck-tickler I didn't know, followed by another one by the same artist. I asked the reassuringly surly bloke behind the counter who it was and discovered that it was an act I'd never heard of. It's on Chemical Underground but don't let that put you off - I don't mean to be flippant but all those worthy Scottish bands that Chemical Underground used to specialise in like Arab Strap, Mogwai and The Delgados systematically failed to grab me. And don't even get me started on Bis. But this album is fantastic - or at least three quarters of it is - it's like a cross between - oh Christ, here we go - a cross, I say, between the groove-based LA Woman period Doors with the melodic no nonsense of Gary Lightbody. I sense I'm not selling it to you, but do yourself a favour and check out Checkmate Savage by The Phantom Band. I've just noticed that Piccadilly in Manchester have voted it their fave of the year so I'm not completely out in the cold on this one.

Anyway what does Wardle know? - he's... well he's.... What does he do now? Nope, not saying yet. But one thing I will say is the book on album sleeves is out next year but you can preorder it on Amazon for next Christmas.

I'm not going to go on too long now because there are probably many things you would rather be doing than reading some tardy missive from an ex-A&R man. I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and get to do all those things over your break that you've got piling up on the kitchen table. Or is that just me?

And because it's the season of good will, I've finally got it together to upload some of my Radio 4 broadcasts for you so you can relive their splendour and wit. So without further ado here are:

Phil Collins is Good!

Cars Go Pop

Reformed

Remastered

Happy New Year!

X

I'll Be Back...

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:10:00 +0000

It's not the post holiday blues. It's not that as each week passes we seem to get further away from what pop music is supposed to be. It's actually just me. I love writing this and of course I love the fact that so many people seem to enjoy it. But everything comes to an end. Blimey, does anyone reading this subscribe to Bob Lefsetz's pompous music business "letter"? I'm sounding him, aren't I - all self aggrandising and humourless. Sorry, I'll lighten up. Maybe tell a couple of poo gags. Actually you wouldn't want to hear those, we've just got two kittens and the expression "pull up a stool" has taken on fresh meaning.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Saying goodbye. The basic point is that I don't think I'm going to be able to write this blog anymore. The reason? Well, put frankly, I'm going to try and earn some money, get a career, do something else. And to do that it would seem I have to study, work hard and focus. The new thing is nothing to do with the music business, by which I don't mean that people in the music business don't have to work hard (Christ, they have to work twice as hard as they did ten years ago), no, it's just that because I've chosen to do something totally unrelated to the music business and I've got to learn about it. So I don't think I'm going to have time to write this anymore.

You've probably got a couple of questions, haven't you? Well, firstly, I'm not sure I'm ready to tell you what I'm doing, except that it's not porn. A friend of mine - a singer songwriter actually - traveled to LA a couple of years in the hope of earning money from being in porn films. He was well into his 40s, but figured he was still quite popular with ladies, so he would fit into some sort of niche category. He was under no illusion that men earn considerably less than women in the porn business but he was fine with that. I haven't heard from him since but I suspect that he is happily panting away somewhere in front of a camera. Good luck with all that. I'm going to try for a much more respectable career option but I'm just not ready to talk about it here.

The other question is: "but, but, but.... weren't you doing really well as a freelance writer? Weren't you writing books and lecturing to music students and reviewing plays and doing columns on Radio 4? And your Guardian blogs always succeed in annoying people so well!" Well, yes, all of those things have been happening over the course of the last year or so, and many of them continue - here's a Guardian blog from this week about 10 new Kinds of Blue.

But you know what, the reality is that you don't earn much money being a freelance writer. Especially these days. I bumped into a proper freelance writer at my dad's 80th birthday party last weekend - he is still reviewing books for The Daily Mail aged 75+. He could remember having interviewed Marty Wilde and Doc Pomus in the 1960s and he's still at it. "I'm living proof you don't earn much as a freelance," he said, shuffling off to get another drink. OK, you may know people who do earn a juicy living - and so do I for that matter, but they are in a minority. I tell you, for all the joy of being creative, seeing your name in print and getting paid for it, there are long days of watching tumbleweed drift around your inbox waiting for one of the "editors" to get back to you on an idea. Putting the word editors in ironic inverted commas is as close as I'm going to get to naming and shaming.

Also - and this is the big one - I haven't written one sentence of fiction since I became a freelance journalist; haven't even jotted down a single story idea. I went to a local writers' group the week before last to get myself back in the mood. The group is an absolute textbook selection of would-be writers: old man who pens detective fiction set in the present day where everyone behaves as if they're living in the 1950s; strange fella with a squeaky voice who writes poetry, middle aged woman who is a talented poet but lacks confidence; woman who writes equestrian romances, then shows you pictures of her horse; sci-fi guy; Samuel Beckett-wannabe etc etc. They're all good, to be honest; there's no one there whose work you find yourself inwardly cringing over. I took a short story with me to read and realised that it was about two years old. I read it and it still came over well I think, but, I felt like a impostor. I was so distanced from the thing, that it felt like someone else's work.

Anyway, to cross the road and get the bus back to The Point, I'm going to stop writing A&Rmchair for a while. I will be back, possibly in this form, possibly anonymously writing about what I'm going to be doing. In the meantime, I may contact you about my novel Pink Flag, which we hope to have ready before the end of the year in a lovely pocket-sized hardback edition. Also, feel free to keep your comments coming - Facebook, still seems inexplicably to be the most popular - and I promise get back to you.

To everyone who read this regularly and to those of you who dipped in and occasionally sent me comments, thanks ever so much. It's difficult to know where the record business is going now and to be honest I'm glad in a cowardly sense that I don't have to try and figure ways of earning money within it. Whilst it would be easy to interpret recent music business events as being negative (Bob Dylan leading the team of artists who are pulling out of Spotify; hardly any new UK acts hitting Gold in almost two years; Radio 1 being full of vacuous star turn DJs just like it was in the 80s, the live circuit dominated by reformed bands) there are still good things happening - new acts like La Roux and Florence - good acts who weren't championed at the outset being recognised, like Friendly Fires and Tynchy Stryder and the charts resembling less of a graveyard of re-releases and bearing some relation to the singles chart (Calvin Harris, who would've thought it?).

Also, it occurred to me as I sat in the Royal Albert Hall watching the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain playing Anarchy In The UK last week, that maybe the armchair in which I sit and observe things needs a break too. I was getting annoyed that people found the Sex Pistols/cute tiny guitar/Proms juxtaposition in any way amusing - a hall full of middle people (aged/class/management/skin tone) singing along to "Anne R Key" in an ironic way, made me feel like like the angry 13 year old having just rushed back from the shops with Bollocks. Clearly, I am taking it all too seriously. Just because I am still listening to Fast Cars, When You're Young and Hate and War doesn't mean that normal people haven't moved on with their lives.

So for all these reasons, I think it's time to bow out. I shall miss you. I hope you'll miss me a bit too. This blog is about the same age as my daughter Esther who is now 19 months old. At the risk of sounding mawkish, the two of them have developed side by side and I'd like to think that A&Rmchair occasionally managed to be as articulate, amusing and charming as she is.

They're writing a song in front of me!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:32:00 +0000

"Daddy, can we listen to those two men we saw at the festival?"

Where the hell have I been? Thanks for asking. Although I'd love to say I've been lying around on a beach for three weeks (is it three weeks?) I have actually been really busy. OK, I've been lying on a beach too. But only for a week and most of that time was spent being a chauffeur to the family.

Since I was last here - it was about Blur right? - The Mercury Prize nominations have been announced (congrats to Friendly Fires!), Tynchy Stryder has got a number one hit and Michael Jackson is selling records again. Pop is back. Funny, just as I was thinking pop was over, I go on holiday to the South Coast and find that the independent record shop is living and breathing. In Broadstairs, there's even a record shop in the building where Dickens wrote Pickwick Papers. Eat that, iTunes losers!

It's sad really, you go on holiday to get away from daily life and all you do (well, I do) is make a b-line for the charity shops. Just to see if I get that Nick Hornby-esque experience of finding some priceless gems tucked away between the Bygraves and Mantovani. It rarely happens anymore, and I suspect that with the advent of eBay and Amazon Used it doesn't happen to many people. I was looking after my youngest on Thursdays before the summer break and would take her to a Salvation Army mothers' morning every week. Obviously, I'd spend a bit of time wheeling her around the hall in a red plastic car and sitting on a mat reading but without fail, the itch would overtake me and soon I'd palm her off on a mum and go next door to sift through the 20p a pop vinyl. It's the same addiction as gambling, I imagine: chasing that high that you got when you discovered the soundtrack to the Ipcress File on original mint vinyl for $10 in Texas or Sticky Fingers complete with zipper cover for a couple of quid in Cancer Research.

This busman's holiday aspect was accentuated for me last week on in Whitstable. The previous two weeks I had been manfully struggling with a deadline for a book on album covers. That's the reason why I've been so tardy with the blog. True story. The editor and myself had to write 140 word mini essays on 350 albums as well as 10 chapter introductions with themes such as Sex, Death and Ego. I'll be honest, it was a lovely job - the sort of job that - like Woody Allen in What's New Pussycat?, where he works in a striptease - I would have paid to do. Actually, forget that - the editor is probably reading this - it was a tough job. Really hard. Especially trying to find things to say about sleeves where no actual info was available; after one sentence I was dragging my heels through a dessert of waffle and bollocks.

Still, I think I managed to find out most of the interesting things to say about some of the unsung sleeve design heroes - I mean, we've all heard a surfeit about Vaughan Oliver, Storm Thorgerson and Peter Saville but there's simply not enough stuff devoted to Barney Bubbles (although Paul Gorman's new book on him is work of erudition and beauty), or great unsung in-house people like Ed Thrasher (Are You Experienced), Nick Fasciano (that Chicago logo) or Burt Goldblatt (loads of 50s and 60s jazz and also that brilliant Robert Johnson sleeve).

Stories of my own about getting involved in band's sleeves should perhaps wait for a separate blog, suffice to say, I love artwork and tried to get involved as much as possible, frequently treading on all sorts of marketing toes. It was nice when artists knew what they wanted - Stephen Duffy for example always knew exactly what worked, but some others had no idea and why should they? I'm pleased to say that Bagsy Me by the Wannadies made it into the book, not because it was a record that I put out but on the strength of Lars Sundh's fantastic artwork. Oh bollocks that reminds me I still haven't written that one.

And talking of sleeves, I visited the home of one of the other great unsung sleeve designers a few weeks ago. We were on our way to the Latitude Festival and stopped off to say hi to an old friend of mine, Cally. He long ago gave up on conventional Christian and surname and strangely this is one of the few instances where it doesn't smack of vanity or conceit. It is merely accuracy. His artwork ranges from the in-house stuff he did for Phonogram and Island for the best part of the 90s (think of Scott Walker's Boychild or that Cranberries sofa) to the more recent jobs he did for Scissor Sisters (their second album, a homage to Band on The Run with its celeb cameos) or Kaiser Chiefs or the recent Madness triumph. He specialises in using vintage fonts, handwritten liner notes,often incorporating archaic language and always seems to have an eye for what the finished thing will feel like in the hand. His house, a word which does it no justice is his finest work of art. I won't go on about it other than to say it was like visiting Caractacus Potts' workshop and Willy Wonky's factory - a dream home for anyone interested in art, music, cycling, motoring, architecture or beautiful English gardens. There are only a handful of genuine music business original and he is near the top of the heap. My enduring memory of our brief stop off is Cally picking us fruit from his ancient cherry tree on the front lawn - appropriate as he looks after the estate of Fruit Tree singer Nick Drake.

Down the road at the Latitude Festival (we're in Suffolk, by the way if you're wondering where all this is going on) I manage to get our Hymer camper van parked up next to the loudest van in the guest enclosure. "I've got a five year old and a one year old on board can we park somewhere a bit more family orientated?" I ask the friendly man in the hi-visibility tabard. It's a no-no but it soon transpires that Loud Van is actually owned by a family with a baby who just happen to have some boisterous mates. They soon disappear and I sit staring at the van interior in front of me - about a foot away - shell shocked by having just driven a massive, left hand drive van from London without any damage to it or my family. I sit and guzzle red wine whilst listening Chrissie Hynde being back on the chain gang.

Later we go and watch a band that Maddy falls head over heels for. It must be genetic. Those two men she later asked about are Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook. As they sing It's So Dirty and Slap & Tickle, I realise that much of my youth was spent listening to Squeeze. I liked them but partly out of loyalty - I never realised just how good they were because my best mates' sister was friends with them. One time, I remember coming back from school with Robert and there they were on the sofa, those two men, Chris and Glen. I was pretty excited. I mean I'd seen them around before but usually Robert and I were being aloof 13 year olds in his room listening to cassettes and talking about girls. Now here they were in front of me. I sat at the kitchen table while Robert made tea and they nodded over at me. I nodded back as cooly as I could. They went back to what they were doing. "A9" said Glen to Chris. There was a pause while Chris looked at his notes "OK, C7..." FUCK! I thought, not only are the men behind Cool For Cats and Take Me I'm Yours in front of me but THEY ARE WRITING A SONG! Maybe I'll be in it! Or maybe they'll ask me for my opinion when they finish - it sounds like they're going quite fast after all. A bit later, I'm in Robert's room when he returns from the loo. He's just bumped into his sister on the landing. "Have they finished the song yet?" I ask. He laughs as if he knew all along (he didn't! He was as excited as me - well almost) "No, they were playing battleships."

I bumped into them much later in the 90s at a studio called The Strongroom in East London. I was helping Aimee Mann make her follow up to Whatever and she had invited them to do backing vocals and play on a song called That's Just What You Are. I tried to make conversation with Glen, who had always struck me a friendly sort but, despite the South East London connection (I mentioned Robert and his sister, possibly even told him the battleships story) he blanked me. I think to him I was just the A&R man for the day and as such of no interest other than paying for the studio time. Perhaps this is harsh, maybe he was like the rest of us, having a bad day. The fact is that the rest of us haven't written a song as good as Pulling Muscles From The Shell. I sing along to every word at Latitude and now, despite the fact that she's not yet six and has never heard of Harold Robbins and was only 1 when we went to Camber Sands, so is Maddy.

You'll be happy to hear that both Squeeze's debut and Aimee Mann's album with that Difford Tilbrook song on are both in the sleeve book. Neither is their best work but both remain great sleeves.

Promise to be back sooner next time.

Blur: "They fit better the more you wash them"

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:18:00 +0000

Man who knows all the words to every Blur song: "They haven't played Charmless Man yet."

Second man who knows all the words to every Blur song: "They're not going to play Charmless Man"

Third man who knows all the words to every Blur song: "Of course they're going to play Charmless Man! I bet you a fiver they play it!"

Second man who knows all the words to every Blur song: "I bet you a tenner they don't..."

I assume by the end of the show that the slightly more laid back man behind us is £10 up on the deal because Blur don't play Charmless Man. This is not surprising considering it's the song which singularly represents their Britpop hubris from which they beat a rapid retreat. But that doesn't discourage the charmless men behind us singing along with every word of the rest of the set. The sense of warm satisfaction that comes over me when Blur play Oily Water - an underrated My Bloody Valentinish megaphone-sung thrash from Modern Life Is Rubbish is huge - here finally is something this barber's shop trio from hell are incapable of singing along to. At last we get to hear what is coming off the stage rather than out of the mouths of the Britpop students.

Hello, I am your resident Britpop Grumpy Old Man and this week I'll be taking you by the hand and telling you about how great it was back in the old days. Relax, of course I won't. Thursday's Hyde Park Blur show was great as I'm sure by now you will have read or more likely seen on Youtube. Did you see the shagging video by the way? I don't know whether the couple's frantic grass jiggery did happen along to The End but this choice of song definitely adds to the power of the clip.

Back in Britpop's heyday when I was just about young enough to still get away with such alfresco antics (although of course, will neither confirm or deny that I ever did) this is the sort of thing that was expected of audiences and bands alike - anything went. Or so it seemed. To those of us who had been going to gigs up and down the country professionally since 1989, observing terrible sub-U2 chest beaters, post-acid house baggy bands, miserable shoegazers and tuneless, right-on crusties play to near-empty venues, Britpop was a welcome hurricane. To finally go to gigs and for the venue to be packed with audiences younger and better dressed than us and, crucially, made of equal numbers of girls and boys - it was life affirming. Several times I had the hopelessly romantic notion that this was what the 60s must have been like. Quite what the 60s were like, I have of course like the rest of us, gleaned from watching Blow Up, Help! and The Italian Job because I was playing with my Lego at the time.

But for sheer exuberance and excitement, it did for one brief summer in 1995, at least, feel like the 60s again. The crux of this as far as being an A&R man was concerned was that it felt possible to a see an unknown band in a small club and within a couple of months they could quite reasonably be expected to be on Top Of The Pops. Admittedly, this probably only happened a couple of times - Menswear being the key occasion. But the fact that it could perceivably happen at all was a remarkable thing considering we were still living under the spectre of album projects spiralling into years, singles requiring many different formats, artwork and b-sides and a pre Evening Session Radio 1. Amongst many good things that Britpop did was reintroduce an element of fun and flippancy to the music business - 7"s came back, coloured vinyl, good melodies, witty lyrics, bands looking sexy, being bitchy to one another in the press, hanging out with each other in private, and very occasionally shagging. We all know what happened in Blur's case.

Damon never did say much on stage. Last Thursday his mid-song banter was truncated to the point of mid-sentence break-up. It didn't matter, no one was there to hear Bono or Chris Martin-like monologues. I suppose Damon, like Mick Jagger, is an articulate man who prefers to just be a performer on stage. Having said that, he did ramble on a bit about the 2003 Anti War march ending in Hyde Park and how we should never forget its importance. Interesting, considering it's very unlikely that he has any recollection of it as on the actual day he was by all accounts so drunk he could barely stand.

But later he mentioned Hyde Park again, this time in the context of "a song I wrote". There was a ripple of anticipation from fifty thousand people. Before launching into a Phil Daniels-led Parklife, he reminisced about how he'd lived in a flat off Kensington High St and would regularly come into the park to people watch. He didn't elaborate about this flat but it set me reminiscing - this flat - in leafy Hornton St - was owned by his girlfriend at the time and very lovely it was too. I knew it was Justine Frishchman's place because I used to leave my car in the underground car park opposite, when I worked at East West Records which was - as Atlantic are now - in the Electric Lighting Station just off Ken High St.

I mentioned in a blog last year that Justine once arrived unannounced at East West with the first Suede demo - presumably because we were local. "Got Justine in reception for you." "Who?" Unannounced strangers pitching up happened surprisingly rarely and it was usually just irritating chancers. Still, I went upstairs to relieve her of the demo and promise to listen to it. It was a good plan she'd had, she knew she looked very cool and that I would immediately check the tape out. It all would have worked splendidly if the music (which I still have somewhere) had been any good. Ironically it was only after she left the band that they got better.

Later, when I was no longer local, I visited her flat for the first time. It was to woo her RCA-wards, as she was by then in Elastica. For our meeting, she had bought some very impressive looking canapes for us. Canapes! We sat, poured tea and discussed her future in rock and pop as if we were in an Evelyn Waugh novel. It was certainly the only time I've ever had a meeting about doing a record deal accompanied by canapes - how very Britpop you could say, although this was, to be fair, 1993.

Either during that visit or another, later, slightly more desperate visit (Steve Lamacq's Deceptive imprint were clearly going to win Elastica's hand), I remember bumping into Damon. At that point he wasn't at a career high. After their initial pop success Blur had somehow got lost. A year earlier, many people, possibly including Damon himself, had given up on them. They were perceived to have jumped onto the baggy bandwagon with There's No Other Way and times had moved on. At some point during Elastica's first run of dates that myself and my mate Michael drove the band to, Damon came along. I think it was probably Guildford. Anyway, on the way back we were chatting about music and success and we got on to the subject of Top Of The Pops. Damon said of the show: "Yeah, I've pretty much done that. Don't feel the need to go back to it." At the time I thought: fair play, you've moved on, you're in a different game now, you've been Blur the pop act, now you're going to be the wayward screeching Blur of Popscene - the band who plays with My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jnr. and ignores the singles chart. How little I understood the Albarn ambition. Buried beneath this faux indifference he was obviously loathing every minute of not being in the public eye; of Brett Anderson's Suede having taken the Britain's Best Band crown; of the ignominy of being ranked alongside other underachievers like Swervedriver and Slowdive. Funny to think that despite Blur starting the Hyde Park shows with She's So High (which finally sounded like the enormous international stadium filler it always was) the band's early hits became mere footnotes after they achieved their big crossover.

Back in Hornton Street I remember standing by the window of Justine's living room chatting to Damon about how things were going. This was some time after our Top Of The Pops chat and, as I recall things were going a little better, Modern Life Is Rubbish was deservedly doing OK but it hadn't quite set their career back on track. Blur could have still gone either way. We made small talk and I asked him what he was up to. I can't remember exactly what he said but it was along the lines of:"Writing and recording B sides, the record label are always wanting more and more". I can't remember much beyond this but it struck me at the time as it strikes me now that here was a grafter; someone who has a respect for the system if it is going to get him to where he needs to be. He was also clever enough to know that as an A&R man I would appreciate the mild dig. Incidentally, I'm surprised with all those B sides that EMI haven't put a Blur box set together. I'd make an exception for that.

But back to Damon's work ethic. All those stories you hear about bands not cracking America because they can't be bothered to put the hours in, the constant smiling, handshaking with local DJs and promoters, the playing in tiny venues after playing European stadia - it makes you wonder why Blur failed to export their hugely commercial sound to the States if Damon was such a hard worker. And how frustrated he must have been to see his girlfriend rocket to the top there. After all, many of Elastica's songs sounded uncannily similar to his own, have you ever listened to Line Up and Boys And Girls back to back?

Talking of which, the blokes behind us are off again, singing along to "Girls who like boys..." lost in a sea of nostalgia for when they were 12 and Blur had just opened up the world of pop and rock for them. Over to our right stands Mark Ronson. Like so many others, he's wearing the Blur shibboleth: a Fred Perry. On stage, Damon wears one too, as does Dave. Damon once said to me, almost as if he was in the company's employ, "They just fit better the more you wash them." And he's right, I'm wearing one now as I write this although last Thursday I deliberately avoided doing so because I didn't want to look like some sad old fella re-living his Britpop years. Which of course I am and was. An old friend I bumped into who now works in fashion said to me, "Damon's wearing one of the Comme Des Garcons ones" She was right, you could tell from the single line of piping on the collar - that's the difference now, the grown ups are recreating the old look via their new access to cash. Another exec next to me is wearing a Marc Jacobs version.

The guys behind us must be mid to late twenties. It occurs to me that the crowd I had expected - the crowd I wrote about in a Radio 4 column a few months ago, who I anticipated being now more familiar with Parklife in the sense of pushing a buggy around one - is not here. Or certainly not near us. We are the oldest people here - everyone else is their 20s. This means that they probably never saw Blur first time around and which by definition means that Blur have done it; they have achieved what every artist desires - a constantly renewing audience. Like the Stones or Bob Dylan they could now carry on forever - fitting better and better like those Fred Perrys. This crowd aren't just here for the nostalgia; sure they want the hits but they're mainly here for a new experience.

As the sun goes down over West London and the moon comes up over the stage I am having a new experience too. It involves hearing The Universal being sung tunelessly from behind my left ear. But I tell myself to chill out, this is what live entertainment is all about - the audience makes the show.

The record company thumbs a lift with hippies

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:03:00 +0000

There are two slices of Goo fudge cake left on the picnic plate. No one is claiming them and it doesn't look like that's going to change now that the rain is converting the icing to a brown soup. Soon bits of it start falling off like a sandcastle as the tide comes in. On stage the band are oblivious. The singer is having a ball underneath the hot lights and the dry ice. OK, so maybe I made up the dry ice up - but crucially everyone on stage is dry. For us, the audience, the concept of being dry is a sweet and distant memory. If my 'waterproof' jacket ever did make it to the North Face it would break down and beg forgiveness; I am clearly not dressed for this sort of weather.

Around me, my friends' children contemplate buying a T-shirt from the handy souvenir stall - do they sell souvenir umbrellas? Ah, it turns out they do. My own daughter is barefoot in her mud-spattered favourite dress, indifferently twirling an umbrella over her head. My friend, Mandy complements me on her stoicism but I know what is going through her head: when can we go home so I can watch High School Musical 3? And as another ear-splitting crackle of thunder breaks and the rain gets even more intense, the prospect of watching Troy, Gabriella and Sharpay going through their routines for the 38th time is beginning to seem attractive to me too. But two things keep me going. Well, three actually if you include the half bottle of red wine I've just downed in 3 minutes.

Firstly, we are not at Glastonbury. We are in London and can leave any time we want to. Hooray! OK, so it would be lovely to be at Worthy Farm with Springsteen, Albarn and Spinal Tap, bumping into friends I haven't seen in ages. But the big mistake to make about Glastonbury is that if you want to watch lots of your favourite bands it's probably better to stay at home with the telly. Glastonbury, as I discovered when I took Robyn and Maddy in 2005, is about serendipity; about chancing upon The Bootleg Beatles on a stage you never knew existed, about getting your face painted in the kids field, about walking around with no particular destination and no deadlines. The moment you start referring to your little Guardian timetable your weekend takes on a completely different shape, you'll find yourself saying sentences like "Christ, the White Stripes are on the Pyramid Stage in 10 minutes - we're never going to make it!!!" Far better to be wandering past a stage and catch a song by a stranger with a beard.

I used to go to Glastonbury for work but it was only when I went as a punter in 2005 that I felt like I'd sampled what the festival is all about. As an A&R man you're not actually working at a festival, just bathing in the reflected glory of your bands. And schmoozing with other industry folk in the Guest area between the Pyramid and the Other stages. And I did have a good time most years but let's be honest, small talk with the drummer from Echobelly or the scout from Rondor Music is not the cutting edge of festival pleasure. Particularly if you have to find your way back to a B&B in Shepton Mallet at midnight.

At Glastonbury in 2005, I smoked a joint for the first time in a hundred years. After the obligatory 15 minutes of complete paranoia where I thought I was going to get abandoned by everyone and end up sitting alone in a mud pool all night, I surfaced as officially the happiest person on site. I missed every performance, regularly arriving to see bands at the precise moment when there was a mass exodus from the John Peel tent. So we missed the Magic Numbers - big deal! we giggled, and made our way back for more drinks. I walked barefoot round the whole site at 5 in the morning just enjoying the morning. That's the sort of sentence you get punched for isn't it?

Contrast this with waking up in a posh B&B with the staff of BMG as I did in the 90s and finding there were no cabs to the site so we all had to hitch hike in. We eventually all got a lift in - I kid you not - a van filled with veteran hippies. There were about eight of us - from marketing to business affairs, all wearing our best festival gear. Hidden about each of our persons were mobile phones - a object which in those days was symbolic of being The Man. We all got into the back of the van and contemplated the unbelievable tableau before us - a mixture of teenager's bedroom and Moroccan bazaar, hand woven scatter cushions, empty bottles of Lambrusco and king size Rizzla.
"Welcome aboard. You guys come to Pilton every year?" says a long haired handsome guy whilst strumming a guitar (I am not making this up)
"Er, yeah, man" mumbles our head of legal, not wanting to say anything that might be used against him.
"We go over the fence" says another, slightly less benign-looking hippy.
"Can you still do that? I thought they'd clamped down on all that...stuff..." says a product manager instantly regretting he'd opened his mouth, "I mean, I used to of course... " Handsome hippy lifts his fingers from the strings and taps his nose,"You gotta know the right places, man."
Each one of us is silently hoping that our phones don't ring. Not before before we get to the festival site anyway - how much longer? Come on! If that happens then our cover of being young hitch-hiking gunslingers will be blown and our new hippy friends will probably wreak some horrible Manson-esque vengeance.

Or so I was thinking anyway. But we were lucky, we got to the perimeter of the site without ringtone incident. We waved goodbyes like the best of friends - see you in the Head shop, man! Turned down the offer of a bunk up over the fence too. Who knows, maybe everyone in the van breathed a sigh of relief as they sped away. Maybe they started back on the Pimms and lemonade and got out their own mobile phones: "Hello darling! You'll never guess what! We just picked some hitchhikers up! Ya! Totally wicked - Sebastian and Everard even pretended to be hippies! Priceless!"

Of course, we were the exceptions in the 90s - not many normal punters had mobiles at festivals . And this lack of contact was a good thing. I didn't bring my phone in 2005 as I recall and I tell you not being in constant contact with everyone and everything all the time really adds to the pleasure. Reception is never good there anyway, so why bother? But clearly many do - this year there was a mobile phone recharging area and of course a place where you could get your Wifi access. Yes, I read those Tweets, you sad people.

Before all this connectivity there would be a rumour every year that another pop Peter Pan had died - Cliff Richard. For several hours you could believe it was true - unless you had been there the year before when exactly the same rumour had gone around. And apparently this year when news started hitting the wires about Michael Jackson's death there was just as much confusion as when Cliff 'died' - lots of people running about asking "Is it true? Can it really be true?" I'm sure there were many who remembered the Cliff rumours and consequently assumed it must be a wind up. Apparently the massive BBC presence at the festival this year was utilised by punters simply to confirm the truth about the King of Pop's demise. So it was worth the licence fee funding all those presenters being there after all.

I'm not going to go on about Jackson here as you are no doubt fed up with hearing reminiscences and confessionals in the press. It is sad but at the same time, I suspect the O2 shows would not have been a pretty affair and so his death at least spares him - and his legacy - the ignominy of a 50 year old man thinking he can perform like he did in his thirties . As Paul Gambaccini said on Radio 4, the ugliness of the last few years will be forgotten just as Judy Garland's final years were and all that we will remember will be the fantastic body of work. And Bo Selecta obviously.

So if I wasn't at Glastonbury, why the hell was I standing in the rain in London? I'll tell you, I'd gone to see Ray Davies at Kenwood. How middle class and middle aged is that? But regardless of the weather - and I would submit, because of it - it is fantastic. The music is the second thing that was keeping me going (if you can remember that far back in this blog- the first thing was the fact that we were in London, remember!?)

There is nothing more English than unpredictable weather and arguably none more English pop than the Kinks. The fact that Davies had the Crouch End Festival Chorus with him too, added to the plaintive quality of the tunes and fell in with the blackening skies and ominous rumblings. So by the time he'd reached the bit where he played most of Village Green Preservation Society weather and music were locked in a groove - somehow Ray's lyrics about vaudeville, variety, china cups and draught beer seemed absolutely appropriate whilst every member of the very English audience grooved on the spot whilst clad in in makeshift rainwear, letting their wine get a heavenly top up. If there was any queuing to be done we would have been there like a shot too. And I'm sure if the sun had shone Ray would have been first to complain.

It was only then that I remembered we'd brought a cake and it was calling my name from the bag. I got it out and our group descended on it wolfing chunks down before the rain got there first. It kept us going for a few more songs. As Waterloo Sunset and Lola finished the show, we realised that no amount of High School Musical would make Maddy forgive us if we stayed any longer so we began to pack up. I left the remains of the cake out in the rain just like the Jimmy Webb song and watched the sweet brown icing flowing down...

Now That's What I Call A Compilation

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:59:00 +0000

This Father's Day I asked for nothing more than to be left alone. I just wanted to sit in the sun with a cup of tea and read one of the books from the teetering pile next to the bed. Anyone who has children will understand the excitement I felt at this prospect. Far from making me the most boring man in the world - although perhaps it does qualify me for the heats - this is surely what most dads want on their day. Certainly not a shaving mug, a 'novelty' card or God forbid, a CD compilation with the word Dad in the title.

If there is a God, I thank him or her that I wasn't the recipient of a Dad compilation on Sunday. Did you notice any of these pernicious things? I meant there's nothing necessarily wrong with We Will Rock You, Addicted To Love or Sweet Home Alabama but if anything proves Bill Drummond's notion of all recorded music having run its course, these compilations do. There is just nothing left of these tracks is there? Maybe for kids who've never heard them but surely not for the dads who were bludgeoned with them for 20 years by Simon Bates and now are insulted by them via the Tannoys of every chainstore and hold music of every helpdesk.

I speak specifically of EMI's 3 CD set Dad Rocks! and Universal's Dad's Jukebox - with tracklistings so predictable that it's almost as if a computer put them together. So who compiles these things? I'd suggest that in both cases it's a question of using what you have on the shelf (hence EMI including Coldplay's Clocks) but also it looks like these brands have been going for years and are subscribing to the Ain't Broke philosophy - rather like the annual appearance of the Best Xmas Album Ever and why you no longer find Jona Lewie in the kitchen at Christmas parties but gleefully rubbing his hands together at the bank. Perhaps you'll always find him in the kitchen at Barclays. On Father's Day you don't get Stop The Cavalry but you do invariably get Alright Now.

Every year these brands get rolled out and back in 2006 - Sony had a go with World's Best Dad - opening track? Van Halen's Jump - but relax, later on you do get a dose of Alright Now. There will be a few changes to the brand to keep the thing up to date, for example on this year's Dad Rocks! Pink Floyd's Money has been replaced by Razorlight's America - surely giving father a kick in the bollocks would have been cheaper? But do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Despite the fact that I think I make a pretty mean compilation - or mixtape, as the kids now call burned CDs - I've never really been in the compilation game professionally. The closest I came was when the Head of Marketing at RCA asked me to put together a tracklist for a compilation of Irish and Scottish pop he wanted to do - you know the sort of thing - Van Morrison, The Proclaimers, The Saw Doctors, Clannad, etc. I leaped into action and immediately produced what I thought would be a good tracklisting. Then the research came back on what the title was going to be - Celtic Heart. My own heart sank. It's a title that reeks of marketing meeting, focus group and flip chart. But, it must be said, it would appear that this title has stood the test of time as it still appears to be available on Amazon and has at least two imitators which have stolen its title.

It might of course be my cunning and timeless tracklisting which has resulted in the continued availability of Celtic Heart- I mean, who can argue with the genius of kicking it off with Deacon Blue? Christ, what was I thinking? Still, at least I sneaked in Brian Kennedy who at that point had been dropped by the very label I was working for. Turned out that the exec who was masterminding Celtic Heart was unaware of Kennedy and liked the track so much he ended up resigning him to the label. Kennedy still didn't end up selling many records but he was a worthwhile artist who was given a deserved break. Those of you who've been paying attention will remember that the exact same thing happened to a band I signed, Club St Louis who got dropped by Warners label East West (a label they re-christened Least Best) and then re-signed as Honky to the Warners label over the road WEA.

But I'm digressing from compilations. I really don't mean to be down on them. Some of the best records are the ones that mash together a load of stuff you wouldn't think of putting together yourself. There are two reasons why compilation can work, one is where in amongst a quagmire of unlistenable bollocks you find a gem you've never heard of which immediately rises to the top of all your playlists. Examples of this for me are hearing Quincy Jones' sexed up version of Loving Spoonful's Summer In the City on the first of the three quite superb Blaxploitation CDs that BMG put out in the 90s, Stan Getz's bonkers I'm Late, I'm Late on frequently hard-to-like The Verve Album and Roger Eno outdoing his brother with Winter Music on an All Saints Records compilation I bought at SXSW. More recently, I was reviewing a compilation for Word Magazine called Destroy That Boy - More Girls With Guitars and in amongst the enjoyable if predictable collection of 60s girl bands was a track called Hold On by Sharon Tandy, which makes Janis Joplin sound like Sandi Thom and is a guaranteed air-punching winner. You never know where

The other, perhaps more valid, reason for compilations is when they work as bona fide albums; where the tracklisting works in a way that artist albums are supposed to. I'm not going to list my favourites because they are probably the same as yours but I'd argue that by far and away the compilations that work best are reggae and ska ones.

Reasons for this are twofold, firstly, many of the artists contained on these compilations were singles artists who made one or two definitive tracks which are great and secondly reggae and ska are so stripped down and muscular that disparate artists can sit alongside one another without jarring. Oh, and of course, the quality level is invariably high. I've lost count of the number of great reggae, ska and dub compilations I own or my good friend and reggae 7" collector Russell has bootlegged me, but it's certainly more than any other genre. Sometimes I yearn for more artist-based ska and reggae albums but then you have to remember than a lot of the time it's the same band I'm listening to - the Skatalites, the Soul Brothers, the Soul Vendors - they're playing on most of the great ska records of the 60s, either under their own name(s) or backing everyone from the Wailers to Desmond Dekker as well as ending up being manipulated by Lee Perry et al later in the 70s when dub came in. Those guys, Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso on tenor sax, Don Drummond on trombone, Lester Sterling on alto sax, Lloyd Brevett on bass, Lloyd Knibbs on drums, Jackie Mittoo on piano, Jerry Hines on guitar and John 'Dizzy' Moore on trumpet, deserve the same respect afforded to the usual Mojo and Uncut suspects. Indeed, if anyone is looking for a good story like Nick Moran has just produced about Joe Meek, they need look no further than Don Drummond, the trombonist who was the creative force behind many of the Skatalites tunes, a schizophrenic who was locked up for murder and was then found dead in his cell amidst rumours of gangland revenge.

I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know already but if for some reason you aren't a huge fan of this sort of music or you haven't got to it yet then I have two compilation tips for you. Firstly Jazz in Jamaica, a compilation of great good time ska instrumentals including Roland Alphonso's mind blowingly wonderful Yard Broom. For some reason it seems to be deleted but you can still get it secondhand - or from me if you ask nicely. And secondly Studio One's Dub Specialist which is packed with lots of the same ska recordings but put through the dub blender and rendered otherworldly yet still warm and melodic. Again it's deleted - clearly Celtic Heart fans aren't particularly moved by it.

Judging from this week's compilation charts, it would appear that Celtic Heart fans have been persuaded to get into ska but only on the terms laid down in 1980 by Jerry Dammers. Ska Mania is currently at number 3 in the charts, sandwiched between Dad Rocks and Dad's Jukebox - it's not a bad compilation, a nice mixture of Two Tone and original Trojan artists, and it's a much better paternal experience than anything with the D word in its title.

I was going to leave it there for this week but I want to leave you with one final piece of compilation advice - if you are tempted to buy Common People - The Brit Pop Story, make sure you go in with a firmly held remote control - or rip the tracks you want - because I can only assume that whoever compiled it was deaf. Or mad. A three CD set that starts with the criminally overrated Auteurs then, after the brief respite of Elastica, sucker punches you with Gene. Relax, it gets worse. CD1 particularly is insane - Dubstar are are loggerheads with Black Grape who precede Stephen Duffy - you couldn't make it up. By CD2 you are lulled into a false sense of security by Pulp's title track (but relegated to volume 2?), Supergrass' Alright and Sleeper's Inbetweener then before can say Parklife, you're hit with Echobelly, Northern Uproar and Powder. There is of course good stuff here and you know that the Britpop years in my opinion were healthy for British music but this compilation seems to have been put together with the meticulous hatred of a serial killer - someone who wants to bury the genre for good. Come out and show yourself, whoever you are!

What kind of music are you into?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:47:00 +0000

Radiohead.

There you go.

What are you going to say now?

Not a very interesting answer is it? Possibly the most boring and predictable I could give you.

But let me tell you how I got there.

It's the hardest question in the world isn't it? I mean, we've all got great taste haven't we? Yet, to boil down our taste to a balsam that encapsulates our very being is, well, unfair, right? I can never answer that question. Partly because it opens up a whole six pack of worms that cover my career, my life choices etc etc. It's like asking me: Hey, Ben, would you mind baring your soul and brains so we can take the piss? Which of course is why I write this every week. So I can get the satisfaction of revealing the bits I want to without giving the entire game away.

But, if pushed, my answer to that question is thus: I like White Man (In Hammersmith Palais) by the Clash and This Year's Model by Elvis Costello. Despite the fact that I decided that these were my favourites 30 years ago, when I'd probably heard about 20 albums at most - and most of those were by Geoff Love or ELO - I still stand by that single and that album as being my favourites. I mean, they never let me down. I can be in any sort of mood, any situation and a snatch of White Man or the title track from Model will set me right. So at the risk of completely giving the game away, I confess to liking skinny tie new wave or more specifically, records made in 1978. I'm writing something for Loops about 1978 at the moment so the subject is banging around my brain but also I've been thinking a lot about how tastes change but somehow always remain the same.

You may have noticed over the last year or so's blogs, that I have been making references to listening to English Whimsy. English Whimsy was my original name for the sort of music that covers eccentric pop oddities that have something peculiarly English about them - examples from my new wave fave category are The Soft Boys or Ian Dury's first album or the pastoral side of XTC, but the genre slips backwards into Eno, Barrett, Drake, Ayers, Wyatt, Martyn, and Harper and forward into Goldfrapp and Tuung, although it ceases to have as much fascination for me once it takes on that 21st century self awareness.

But despite branding it English Whimsy, I soon realised that what I was actually beginning to like was Prog. So added to this list soon came Genesis, King Crimson and Yes and before I knew it I was turning into the sort of person I hated at school - the guys in the Sixth Form common room who had the Breakfast In America poster on the wall, or Tyler in my class who laughed at my Buzzcocks fixation and carefully wrote out the lyrics to Stairway To Heaven on his rough book to show me how much better they were than "your punk shit".

But I couldn't help myself and soon I found myself doing a column on BBC Radio 4 about how great Phil Collins is, contemplating buying Thick As A Brick and Aqualung and exploring the solo works of Robert Fripp.

But as I listened to You Burn Me Up Like A Cigarette from Fripp's all-over-the-shop solo album Exposure, it dawned on me that I was going full circle - here was the loop I'd been looking for, the link between the Whimsy or Prog and the Skinny Tie rock that I love: it's the genre that never spoke its name or was possibly too bookish and shy to do so: Prog Punk!

This is of course what Magazine really were. So it struck me that I must listen immediately to early Ultravox! (when they still had the ! in the name) ... This week I wrote a piece for the Guardian music blog about Ultravox!'s label, Island Records, attempting to inject a tiny bit of sanity into the otherwise mouth-foamingly reverential coverage of Island's alleged 50th anniversary. Of course, I love classic Island more than anyone at the moment - much of what I have been listening to during my Whimsy obsession is from Island's undisputed golden period (although I still can't quite get behind Dr Strangely Strange). But what I don't mention in the piece is Island's singular flailing uselessness in the face of punk. I mean, Eddie And The Hot Rods is just not enough is it? Perhaps it was just not musical enough for them and, I suppose, they were proven right: not much from the punk years has endured in the same way as the reggae, ska, rock and folk that Island pioneered.

But at least they had a go at Ultravox!, whose Island debut contains songs with promising punk titles like Satday Night In The City Of The Dead, Wide Boys and My Sex. You can imagine the record company looking forward to hearing these tracks and finally having something that X-Ray Spex fans might want to buy. I can taste the fear of the A&R man at the time, who knew that promisingly titled punk wave rocker I Want To Be A Machine was actually an acoustic ballad which opens on the line "I found the bones of all your ghosts, locked in the wishing well..." And rather than being a chest-beating S&M thrash, My Sex, turned out to an ambient piano-led synth piece. Boy, did he have some prog on his face.

But listening to this album and the slightly punkier follow-up Ha!-Ha!-Ha! they sound way less dated that the Midge Ure's Oh Vienna new romantics - I cannot recommend Ultravox!'s Prog Punk classics highly enough,- give them a go on Spotify then snap them up for under £4 on Amazon.

So once I'd recognised the hidden genre of PP I realised that if my taste has evolved from the 13 year old who bought those Clash singles, it has gone in this direction. So a snapshot of PP classics from my favourite 70s period like Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets and Magazine's Correct Use Of Soap, Buzzcocks' Different Kind of Tension, the Cure's Seventeen Seconds and the first three albums from my perennial favourites Wire. But it also incorporates my favourite album of the last 20 years... Yes you guessed it, it's by Radiohead. But it's not OK Computer, it's The Bends.

It's hard to describe the indifference surrounding Radiohead when The Bends first came out. Sure, they had a fanbase, but even their PR company Hall Or Nothing used to show off about them being a 'best kept secret' - sort of like a hairdresser listing the number of bald customers he styles. I remember sitting on a train going to see some gig with a very well known indie tastemaker - he had a promo cassette (cassette!) of The Bends - "You like this lot, don't you?" he asked casually, "I can take it or leave to be honest" he added. I told him I loved My Iron Lung and had been played some mixes by John Leckie's management when they came in for a meeting. In fact they had wanted to play me John's work on Elastica but I had heard a handful of the new Radiohead tunes at a gig at the Highbury Islington Garage, the week before, and I still had a song called The Bends in my head. They obliged and played me an unmixed version of the track. It was electrifying - I'm not just saying that, even in the context of a workaday A&R meeting with some producer managers I found myself bristling with excitement.

So when the tastemaker offered me the unwanted promo cassette I grabbed it. For the next couple of months it the only thing on in the car. At first I found it heavy going - so much detail, layers of complex guitar, lyrics that seemed like a JG Ballad novel. But after two listens the song Black Star leapt out, then soon afterwards the rest of the album opened up like a flower. I became evangelical perhaps too much as no one took me seriously. In a world that was obsessed with Blur and snappy, cynical, handsome indie kids it just didn't fit. This was Sleeper's time and I of course was enjoying riding that wave. But I remember bumping into Radiohead's manager's at an EMI Music Publishing street party in Denmark St. They had a new band called Supergrass who looked like they were going to be the year's big thing. I congratulated them. Then told them that the band of theirs I thought were the best was Radiohead and how much I was loving The Bends - they looked slightly bemused ; who was this weirdo? Hadn't he heard the I Should CoCo advance cassette?

Of course Supergrass shared a label with Radiohead - they were signed by the same guy and I'm a big fan of theirs too. But I can't somehow see EMI releasing box set versions of their first three albums as they have just done with Radiohead. It was odd opening the Bends box, given that my old CD is as close to being worn out as CDs ever get. I thought I had most of the singles from the period but the accompanying CD of B sides is revelatory in that it threw up a load of tracks I never heard at the time but which, if not as good as anything from the actual album, are pretty splendid. And it's great finally to have everything together in one box. I'm sad enough to have wondered when EMI were finally going to package up the b sides, partly because I lost my favourite ones. I brought round my Fake Plastic Trees CD to Stephen Duffy's flat in Albert Street to play him the fantastic India Rubber and How Can You Be Sure? in 1995. I never got it back. I don't blame Stephen, you understand, it probably slipped fell under a sofa, and we were having such intense Britpop fun at the time that I only noticed it was missing several years later.

But as usual am I digressing into a sea of bollocks. Prog Punk then, is not the scratchy post punk that the newly-founded indie labels of the late 70s specialised in and which Simon Reynold's about writes so well about in Rip It Up. PP is actually rather well played. Radiohead's Just, for example, has several completely different sounding and incredibly well delivered guitar solos one after the other. But, like original proggers King Crimson, it doesn't resist the urge to rock. Something I find the later period Radiohead doing quite a lot. Of course, I know I'm in minority in thinking that The Bends is better than OK Computer, but as ever, as with my choice of favourite Bond film (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, of course - it's got the best music!) I am prepared to defend the underdog.

And what an underdog. Like White Man (In Hammersmith Palais) and This Year's Model, it always gets me no matter where I hear it and in what mood. It used to be my 'favourite album of the 90s' but looking back over the last 15 years since it came out, I should probably add another decade to that accolade. I certainly can't think of another album I've played more by a band who are still a going concern. And discovering this week that Thom Yorke is playing Latitude is exciting news - particularly in the knowledge that I might spy him in the audience for Magazine. Taking copious Prog Punk notes, I hope.

South East London Song Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:06:00 +0000

The band are now playing at full pelt, brass section giving it oomph, Telecasters are chopping and bass syncopating with snare. But the enthusiastic dancers have given the floor over to someone who is clearly having it larger than they are. The shape thrower in question, who looks like a combination of the foreman from Auf Widersehen Pet and Little Krankie, has now stripped off his polo shirt and is doing bare-chested press-ups on the pub floor. Ah, it's good to be back in South East London on a Saturday night.

The patrons of the Ladywell Tavern must be the only people in the entire country who aren't watching the final of Britain's Got Talent. Why am I missing this televisual feast? Don't I want to see how SuBo is going to fare? Am I, as my good friend Andy suggests, "a bit weird"? Why would I want to miss the ultimate bit of communal A&R? After all, I couldn't resist sitting down with my five year-old daughter and watching a generous slice of Eurovision this year. No one can accuse me of being some elitist twat who only accepts music that has been blessed by hipsters as you will know if you've been reading this for any length of time. I am, in fact, the polar opposite of this; far more likely to embrace a Girls Aloud album than one by Bon Iver - how many tunes does Bon have per song? Answer: two at best; how many do Xenomania give Girls Aloud? Five per song. Fah. Eye. Vah! Count 'em.

Eurovision had the usual pitiful selection of tunes but some unforgettable performances - Dita Van Tease's appearance with Germany's appalling entry was so popular with Maddy that she forced me to sit through it a second time the moment it finished. How I cursed the Sky+. At least she showed a modicum of taste when half way through Norway's inexplicably winning entry, referring to an earlier Graham Norton quip, she said, "Daddy, I agree with what that man said before, I want to give him a slap too."

But why watch talent on the telly when you can go out and see some of it in real life? We were off to see the band - The Grey Cats - that a friend of mine plays in. The clue of course is in the name - these men are not young. Some of them are even older than me. By day they are all mortgaged, parenting, reliable pillars of society but every now and then they put on some black clothes, pick up horns, guitars and sticks and practice some Clash songs. They've all got their own hair and most of them are slim enough to have tucked-in shirts without looking like cabbies. In short: for a bunch of old fellas singing London Calling they don't look too ridiculous.

The pub is packed for their performance, mostly friends and family of course - but how brilliant does this feel? It's like I suppose it was before entertainment was provided so easily on recordings - when, as the cliche goes, you had to make your own entertainment. To a certain extent I go along with Bill Drummond who believes that 'all recorded music has run its course' and that we should ditch it all and 'start again'. Clearly The Grey Cats are not out to produce anything quite so radical as Drummond's choir - you can't imagine The 17 doing a version of Stray Cat Strut with as much gusto as The Grey Cats - but the fact that we have all come to watch some blokes playing for fun, who have no worries about playing a few bum notes or wonky time signatures, says something.

Perhaps it's what all of us who never really liked sport are destined to do - instead of golf or fishing or watching the cricket we dust down our guitars, buy some new plectrums and get on the phone to some cheap rehearsal rooms. I'm playing music again for the first time in 20 years, as are many of my friends. I've yet to do any gigs (and boy, if I do, am I going to keep that one quiet) but I'm in a minority - one bunch of 40-something friends are in a band called Mass Data Storage (I love this band name) - who, despite having a jazz-obsessed bass player with the brain the size of a planet, only play three chord new wave covers.

The beauty of pop music being so old is that we are now all mature enough to recognise it as something which we shouldn't feel bad about maintaining a passion for until we die. Why should we put childish things away as we puff up, lose brain cells and develop ear hair? Most of us had some sort of aspiration to play rock when we were young but it's only recently become acceptable for normal middle aged guys, who aren't Stephen King or Simon Armitage to get up and play just as badly as they did when they were teenagers.

And talking of teenagers, last week I also got some first hand experience of another phenomenon at the other end of the age spectrum: the pop music school. I was asked to talk to a bunch of students at a North London music school about their Myspace pages .

The idea of going to school to learn about pop music still seems slightly bizarre to me. After all, School of Rock was only a handful of years ago. But these schools are a massive growth area in the UK and seemingly there is no end to the amount of kids who want to formalise their pop music knowledge so they can earn a living from it. Come to think of it, my mate from The Grey Cats has a daughter who goes to the BRITs school in Croydon.

This was the first time I'd ever spoken to students about the music business and frankly I was a little alarmed. Not just at the prospect of standing up in front of a class who might take anything I said as undisputed truth but also at what you say to kids who want to get into the music business when no one really knows what this business is any more.

Of course, the usual thing happened before any of the kids arrived - no one could work out how to make the overhead projector connect to the laptop. It's always the same, whether you are organising a surprise birthday party for your wife or an international A&R conference: whenever more than 6 people gather together in a conference room, all AV gear will stop working for as long as it takes for everyone from Post Room staff to Prada-sporting CEOs to be on their hands and knees under furniture shouting "Is it working now? Can you press AUX? No? Well, press PHONO, see if that works!"

Eventually we got it working (one of the students saved the day, of course) and in the blink of an eye the two hours I was booked to talk to them disappeared. In that time I found myself spouting all sorts of music industry lore I never even knew existed. I've heard this is what happens to lecturers and teachers - you are seduced by the sound of your voice - hey, I'm making these guys laugh... I AM A GOLDEN GOD.

This was a very smart bunch of kids and most of what I was saying was simple common sense - about logos, images and blogs - but they still seemed to something from it. We didn't speak much about songwriting and the music each Myspace was promoting but in preparing for the lecture I'd come across some notes I'd made back in the 90s when I was at Indolent and listening to far too many demos. I decided to close on this just to give them a little hint at the depths of my cynicism - it's a list of the most common lyrical cliches I found on demo tapes. Believe me, these blunders are so common if you have ever written a song you will have used one. So here as a little bonus are the Top Ten Lyrics To Be Avoided

10 Deep inside (combined either with "I've got a feeling..." or "Make you feel good...")
9 How much you mean to me
8 I hope and I pray
7 Don't matter what I do (plus optional) just can't get over you
6 Change... rearrange
5 You can't run, you can't hide
4 Just can't go on (and yet somehow, they manage to...)
3 Should have seen those lies in your eyes (plus optional) made me realise
2 Never thought it could be this way
1 Till the break of dawn.

The Grey Cats have a couple of their own songs which avoid any of the above - something I think we must thank the punk rock idiom for is the absence of navel gazing love lyrics. And talking of navel gazing, I find myself staring at the naked torso of Mr Krankie who is now being escorted from the pub by the landlord. He is clearly no stranger to White Ace and has a face which tells a thousand stories - most of them ending in being escorted from the building. "He comes to all our shows" announces Grey Cats singer Jac, and there is a ripple of mirth before the floor fills again to the strains of a Message to You Rudie and I start worrying about the babysitter.

Could you furnish me with some of your dubstep wares?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:58:00 +0000

Me: Oh hello, it's Ben from V2, can I speak to Oliver please?
Bloke: Who?
Me: Er, Oliver Jones... Skream?
Bloke: No, who are you?
Me: Ben Wardle - from V2. I think I spoke to you a couple of days ago...
Bloke: Oh yeah. What was it about again?
Me: It's about a remix...

To paraphrase Norm from Cheers: Remixers - can't live with them... Would you pass the beer nuts? Why I didn't want to like the La Roux album is precisely because of the fella above - Skream. But first let me give you some background.

I was writing a piece on 'The Red Lady' for a Portuguese magazine and I thought that rather than just write a load of old biased conjecture based on hearing two songs and knowing she had a funny haircut, I really should do the decent thing and listen to her record and interview her. Well, the latter never happened because she was 'on holiday' but Universal did hook me up with their amazing digital pass system and before I knew it I had the album in my inbox - surely this is the best way of getting music to fans, it was just as fast as iTunes and frankly a better service.

Anyway, the album is genuinely great. OK, In For The Kill has been in the charts for 10 weeks, has only just left the top five but is far from the best track on the record. But, I'll be honest here, I didn't really get the single - the voice sounded too strained, out of its comfort zone and after a while the tune just seemed to go round and round without getting anywhere. Hey, Mr W, that's pop music, buddy, get used to it, I hear you say. And, as ever, you are right. I am listening to it now and it's one of those records - and songs - that feels like it's always been with us. But once you've heard the album - and judging from my travels last week you probably have, as it seems to be the most widely disseminated pre-release in recent history- yes, once you've heard the album (out on June 29, listeners) you'll get a much fuller idea of Elly Jackson's voice. Bulletproof, the next single, is a stonker. Yes, I did actually write that word down.

But I was cynical about La Roux for the reason many people initially were - because when In For The Kill was getting its early plays three, four months ago, the buzz was all around the Skream remix. It had nothing to do with the original track. This remix is great, markedly different from the actual track and wholly in keeping with the dubstep hipster's previous releases. But this only made me extra reluctant to like La Roux - and here's the rub: a couple of years ago I had tried repeatedly and failed to get Skream to do a remix for one of my acts. Actually, worse, I couldn't even get the dubstepper to return my calls.

I was A&Ring Lethal Bizzle at the time for V2. This is a whole other story in itself and I'll save it for another time, suffice to say here that the Walthamstow grime hero is a genuinely lovely chap whose only fault is perhaps the length of time he takes to get around to recording things. Bizarre, because once in the studio he would zip through stuff with lightning speed.

Anyway, at his insistence I'd been trying to open his ears up to things he wouldn't normally listen to and getting him to work outside his grime comfort zone. He loved Gallows at SXSW so I got them to remix a single, after that I got The Enemy to do the same and both remixes turned out great. Lethal (for that is what we call him) also worked with the massively underrated Akira The Don on tracks which featured samples from The Clash and The Ruts (there is even a superb track Akira did which samples The Breeders' Cannonball, which will never see the light of day for Kim Deal reasons, sadly.)

But we needed something hip for the second single and what better - and indeed cooler than that summer's underground dance craze dubstep and its coolest representative Skream If you haven't heard his debut Skream! it's worth going and purchasing a copy - it's full of Hitchcockian menace and cheap beats - like a council estate Portishead.

Skream turned out not to have a proper manger at the time - he appeared to be based out of a record shop in Croydon. At least I think it was a record shop. Maybe it was a proper office with fax machines and lavish itineraries pinned to the wall. Or maybe not. I phoned it several times and the conversation would start as per the exchange above and continue thus:

Me: It's about a remix. For Lethal Bizzle...
Bloke. Oh yeah, that's right, yeah.
Me: Is he about? You said he would be around today...
Bloke: Nah. He's not about today.
Me: Right. Did you pass the message on though?
Bloke. The message? (Sound of other conversation and laughter in the background)
Me: About Lethal?
Bloke. No, he's not bin in.
Me: But did you pass the message on?
Bloke: (laughing uproariously at something going on in Skream HQ, then returning to phone) Yo...
Me: Hi, I just wondered if did you pass the message on?
Bloke: Nah, like I say, he's not bin in
Me: And you can't pass his mobile number on?
Bloke: Nah sorry.... (to some colleagues in the Skream HQ in the background) Oh wicked, man! That's mega!
Me: Hello?
Bloke: Yeah - I'll tell him you called. (Line goes dead)

So Skream wasn't exactly biting our hands off on this one. To be fair, he wasn't getting a whole lot of remix work at that time which either means he was avoiding calls like mine or he was sitting at home wondering whether he should sack his assistant. I'd like to think it was the latter as he's since done a fair few remixes.

Dealing with producers, remixers and their representatives is - or certainly was - one of the main parts of the A&R job. There's a scene in John Niven's book where an A&R man is asked for his producer suggestions in a meeting and he lists a very impressive line-up of people he says he's considering. It later becomes apparent that all he's done is quickly look at that week's album chart (which always lists the producer alongside the artist presumably for this very purpose). And in theory it's that easy. Ever wondered why suddenly a producer or remixer seems to be everywhere? It's because, as William Goldman says in Adventures in The Screen Trade, "nobody knows anything" so if someone has had a sniff of a hit it's likely that they'll be enlisted to produce whatever the big signings are which the record company needs to be successful- and because these acts are the safe bets it's likely they will be successful and so the producer's Midas-like reputation will grow even more. Then eventually, a couple of surprise stiffs later, the producer's mortality is revealed and the A&R men move on to fresh pastures. But there are a handful of perennials who are safe pairs of hands - certainly I'd cite Stephen Street as one. Graham Coxon, who Street produced in Blur and who Coxon continues to use for his solo stuff, recently described 'Streety' as someone who is 'consistent', not perhaps at first glance the biggest accolade but if you're an artist it's a huge plus. Artists reserve the right to be erratic, blow hot and cold and you definitely don't want someone behind the console who is like that. Even when Street makes a dull record it's always redeemed by lovely little bits of detail - and you can hear everything, nothing is buried.

I always tried to use interesting producers and remixers - not go for the obvious list of that week's chart winners. I'd try and find people who were new or had perhaps not had the breaks but I thought - or their manager suggested - might be good. Sometimes this worked (Akira The Don had never produced a record before Bizzle for example) and sometimes it didn't. I once was given the task of looking after Aimee Mann for one summer in nascent Britpop years. She was making the follow up to Whatever (a nascent Britpop album if ever there was one) and had recorded a song, a duet with Glen Tilbrook, called That's Just What You Are which needed mixing. I got a producer called Marcus Dravs involved who was a personable young German guy who had done some engineering with Brian Eno and had some good ideas. He mixed the track really well, I thought, bringing out a modernity that it needed . But guess what? Aimee loathed it and bless her, told me in no uncertain terms. Ah well. Still a decade later Marcus is having some sort of last laugh as he's now producing Arcade Fire and Coldplay.

It was the artistic process which always interested me - the listening to the tracks, the tweaking of certain things which subsequently threw a new perspective on everything else. Sometimes too much bloody perspective. What I was less good at was the haggling - the fee, the percentages, the deal. I was out earlier this week meeting someone at The Strongroom, a studio in Hoxton and in the bar opposite was a meeting of the Music Producers' Guild. Outside was the manager of two sizeable acts and we speculated on what these producers might be talking about. "How they are going to get paid" he said bluntly. He then went on to point out how unfair it has always been that producers have always commanded a percentage (points) of an artist's royalties in perpetuity: "Sure, share some of the action for the first couple of years but after that goodbye and thank you very much!"

As record companies lose their power and artists with a fanbase gain more leverage, this could become a reality but back when I used to negotiate with producer managers you were really made to feel who was boss when you wanted one of their top producers. I remember trying to get a very well known dance remixer for a Pop Will Eat Itself single who was managed by an portly industry legend who shall remain nameless. After the inevitable industry small talk he cut to the chase and said what the deal was. I told him what I was thinking (IE MUCH LESS), and explained why given what sort of group PWEI were etc etc. He listened, then quietly told me I could fuck off if I thought his producer would take any less and put the phone down. Most producer managers, I must stress are charming and open to negotiate but I was always surprised by the disregard for manners that would occasionally come out of the blue - one big name manager with whom I was trying to negotiate, cut me off mid sentence and said "Just fax me the bloody deal and make sure it's not Mickey Mouse!" I ask you, is that what a Cambridge University education achieves?

So maybe the boy with the goldfish attention span in Skream's office was giving me the dubstep equivalent of a fob off; he may not have been to charm school or even Cambridge but in his own syncopated way, he was saying: "We're not interested in your Grime, Mr Record Company - never call us again".Or perhaps the day that La Roux called, Skream like Godot had finally shown up and taken the call.

20 Years with Lamacq

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:00:00 +0000

For approximately the 1000th time, I'm standing at the back of the Camden Barfly. I'm leaning on the bar watching I Heart Hiroshima doing their odd mix of angsty feelgood thrash. Perhaps they manage this dichotomy because whilst being out and out indie rock, they nonetheless come from Brisbane and can't help giving off a relaxed surfer aura. Or it might be that in between songs, the female drummer is relentlessly chummy.

I look around me at the young crowd and once again have to acknowledge that apart from Steve Lamacq who is standing just in front of me and Simon Williams who is to my right, I am undeniably the oldest person in the room. No, wait, hang on - I'm not! Who is that whispering in Steve's ear - it's Fruitbat from Carter From The Unstoppable Sex Machine! Blimey, maybe going to see the time-travel friendly new Star Trek film on Wednesday has warped me back to 1989.

Earlier the same evening, Steve and I had been drinking in his favourite pub The Ship on New Cavendish Street. He was chatting to NME Radar editor Jamie Hodgson and without either of us saying it both of us were thinking - this guy does the same job Steve was doing 20 years ago. That would be the equivalent of the two of us in 1989 meeting the guy who had given Led Zeppelin, Free or James Taylor their first NME column inches.

Also outside The Ship was up-and-coming singer Florence aka Florence And The Machine. I saw her perform in some Soho basement about two years ago with a lone guitarist (The Machine, I presumed). Even back then it was full of hipster A&Rs like Geoff Travis but I have to admit I didn't get it at all: her voice, which everyone was extolling the virtues of, seemed to work off a small portion of Amy Winehouse's range and the songs were circuitous bluesy dirges. But from what I hear of her forthcoming album, she's gone into a rich La Roux/Bat For Lashes direction and the voice now has really depth. And I'm not just saying that because she was very personable outside the pub. Although she was. I mean, she didn't need to be friendly to me, did she? - I am neither a legendary music DJ or an influential new band correspondent. I am merely the bloke who once spent a windy October evening at the Harlow Square on Steve Lamacq's birthday in 1990.

Looking back on the last 20 years that I've known the bloke they used to call 'the boy Lamacq' I now realise that without ever becoming what you'd call 'bezzie mates' we did share an awful lot of pop experiences. OK, so I missed that night at The Norwich Arts Centre when Richie Manic claimed to be 4 Real but we were together for much of Britpop, especially Elastica (although he bagged them for his label Deceptive over my label Scared Hitless) he followed and supported my first signing Five Thirty, and it was Ride that brought us together. It was for Ride that were waiting in the Harlow Square that night in 1990.

Steve was grumpy; possibly about being a year older, although there may have been some kind of romantic issue going on too. But once the band came on nothing mattered. Ride were a great live act obviously, but my point is that Steve's heart and soul have always been so wrapped up in music that it takes priority over everything else. Yes, he loves Colchester United and I've frequently found him reading Jeffrey Bernard books when he's waiting to meet me in the pub but most of his waking hours are filled with noise. A few years ago he wrote a piece in The Guardian about only ever having seen 14 films in his entire life. Now whilst he was probably exaggerating (for instance, the two of us definitely went to see Robocop 2 together when we were in New York for a music seminar, so that makes 15 already) I don't find it hard to believe that he couldn't find time to catch, say, a Bond movie on TV on Christmas Day - he would be too busy going through the demo bag to see if there was anything worth including on his Boxing Day show.

This obsessive behaviour makes him an easy target for ridicule of course and sometimes when I feel myself slipping into cynicism about the music business I ask myself why he bothers. But bother he does and regardless of him being a friend I think in the shallow modern world of celebrity presenters, he is a lone and necessary figure. Zane Lowe, Hugh Stevens, Colin Murray and their like are good on the radio - some of them better than Steve perhaps, but you know that much of what they play has been suggested by the producer or is dragged from the pages of the NME or Internet blog trawls. With Steve, you know he's hunted the stuff down and quite probably has had a pint of cider with the singer.

Of course Steve is a celebrity of sorts, but only by default of being good at what he does. I'm sure he enjoys being recognised in venues - and he always is and invariably comes out laden with CDs - but that's not what motivates him. Anyone who is out with him gets caught in the crossfire too. I came home with a Tapetheradio CD last night (very good by the way - a much more manageable and melodic Bloc Party). Out with him couple of years ago, whilst I stood patiently listening to an awestruck bass player tell him how he should really listen to Track Two of the demo, the guitarist from the same band took pity on me, "You done been doing this long?" he asked. "Sorry," I looked up, "Doing what?" The guitarist gestured at Lamacq , "Being his bouncer."

I won't go on because it will look like he's paying me for this. Actually that's an idea, perhaps I should ask him... No, I will simply finish on this: A few years ago an old A&R friend of Steve's was staying on his couch after his marriage had broken up. One afternoon after Steve had gone through his demo bag, he gave the guy a CD to listen to saying he thought it was pretty good and might cheer him up. Fast forward several years and Steve's mate is now managing the band, who have become rather successful and are supporting AC/DC on their current world tour. Normal friends would have tried to help him meet a new woman or get a job; Steve did what he does best, he found him a band.

What happened in the cubicle

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:06:00 +0000

One day a few years ago a friend of mine who used to work at Warners went into the Gents. He walks up to the urinal and starts weeing. From the stalls behind him he hears a slight moan. Fair enough, he thinks, it's a toilet stall, people make sounds in them . As he finishes and zips up his fly, he hears a louder sound from the same stall. This throws a new and disturbing light on the previous sound. Christ, he thinks, that's the clatter and bang of some serious diarrhoea - and just as he's finishing this thought, he's greeted with a third and almost deafening retort which seemingly ricochets off the tiled walls. Inside that stall, there is someone in serious trouble...

Why am I telling you this? OK, I admit it. For the last week and a bit I have been less than attentive of the music scene. All I've done is written one thing about the comical Coldplay plagiarism story and lorded it up a couple of times at the theatre (Opera? Got it: l'elisier d'amore; 19th century Danish business? Sorted: Peer Gynt) And what have I been doing the rest of the time? Looking after my 1 year old daughter. And I'm doing it for the rest of May, my pop-picking friends.

Relax I'm not going to start regaling you with 'amusing' accounts of what a wake-up call house-husbandry is compared to normal life and how comically inept I am at it. Ho ho ho - wouldn't that be ironic and hilarious? But listen, that's the point of mentioning it here - because just as there always seem to be a bunch of new books about how crazy fun-loving guys have managed to learn to knuckle under and become great dads, there now also seem to be a swelling mass of books written by former music industry employees - the most high profile of recent months is of course Luke Haines' Bad Vibes.

Now clearly I am always going to be biased in matters of books about the music business. It would be lovely to tell you that my book on the music business is about to come out but I think perhaps that that is a way off. Besides, I'd like to get some of my stories published - it does look as though the Pink Flag collection is going to emerge at some point which is exciting. I'll keep you posted.

But anyway, back to Haines. Firstly, unlike my Kill Your Friends blog last year (which I anticipated not liking, but then found myself surprised and impressed with) I imagine I am really going to enjoy Haines' book. I know a few folks whose opinion I trust and they've all had fun with it and it covers a time in the business that I know well and having read one or two extracts it is clear that he writes engagingly. But one thing bothers me about the Haines book - how am I going to enjoy it when I never liked his band?

Let's be honest, The Auteurs weren't all that great were they? Their demo emerged around the same time as Suede's and they were vaguely in the same musical glam camp (at least at first) but it was a thin voiced, jangly textbook indie. They got a deal with Virgin imprint Hut, after everyone who failed to get Suede checked them out. And after that, well, nothing really happened. Over a long period of time. And the book appears to be about how annoyed LH was with the way things went and how terrible all the other artists were and undeserving of their success. I know I'm doing it again and writing about a book I haven't read but as far as I can tell, Haines sticks to his schtick despite the evidence being plain to anyone who has heard The Auteurs. I'm listening to the first album New Wave now and it's OK but... oh, you know, it's just not that great.

This argument didn't stop me loving The Dirt about Motley Crue without really being able to name a single Crue song but somehow because the Haines book is one man's very personal vision it seems to me that you have to buy into his music to immerse yourself in the prose. Or not? You've probably read it haven't you and you're stroking your chin and shaking your head at my idiocy. Anyway, David Peace liked it so it must be good, right kids?

Another book on the music business (which you'll be happy to hear I have read) is Dan Kennedy's Rock On: How I Tried to Stop Caring About Music and Learn to Love Corporate Rock and, should you wondering what your next read is, this is the business. It's by a fella who contributes to Dave Eggers' McSweeney magazine and who in a former life was a senior marketing exec at Warners. The book tells the tale of how he got the job and managed to keep it until he was, along with many others, made redundant.

There are many reasons why Rock On is good (the title isn't one of them by the way) the main one being it's hilarious. Kennedy writes from the perspective of someone who can't believe he has managed to bag a job inside a record company - surely how everyone feels - or felt. And because he wasn't long in the job, he retains a crtical distance - or at least his writing has the authentic ring of someone who never got absorbed into the system. Plus he's writing about relatively recent history so all the horrors of the industry meltdown which the US felt before the UK are covered.

But mostly I love it because it's about office life. I'm obsessed with books about office life, the nonsense of corporate structures and the idiotic way people behave within it. So music and this combined - it's a winner, frankly. Not wanting to spoil it for you, there is one bit which I sincerely hope is true:

Kennedy has just learned from HR along with a senior executive who doesn't even know his name or what he did ("thanks for all the, uh, marketing...") that he's been made redundant. He emerges from the office outside of which two male assistants sit typing and avoiding eye contact with him. They know that everyone going in and out of the office that day is being laid off. Instead of sheepishly walking off, Kennedy proclaims (I'm paraphrasing here so forgive me if I'm not doing it justice) "Well that was a surprise!" The guys look up. "Yes," he goes on, "Apparently, you two now work for me!" The blokes look at each other dumbstruck and horrified. "Just kidding!" he beams and strolls off.

Oh yes, I never finished my Warners story. So my friend is washing his hands and waiting for the next painful rear end explosion to come from the stall. But instead, there is an eery silence, broken only by the reassuring noise of a squeaking toilet roll dispenser. As he drys his hands the stall door opens slowly and a completely relaxed and fresh faced person emerges - as if end-of-the-world cacophony was standard lavatorial procedure. And who was this person? Well, let's just say I hope his aim was true.

A&R Man Claims £1000s In Slap-Up Meal Expenses Frenzy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:12:00 +0000

I'm glad I reproduced that Ricky Gervais story last week, largely because I got an email from a reader called Kate, who also remembers Ricky in pre-Office days. I asked her for permission to quote a bit of it here and she said yes, bless her. So here is her brilliant story:

"We all went to the same gym - me, him and Jane, his lovely missus. I used to listen to his shitty bands, year after painful year. I let him have an enormous time of day because he was brilliant at impersonating David Bowie, it broke up the demo tape boredom and also because, like you, I was diligent. Also he let me use the ULU swimming pool! I made Chris Parry take us to dinner (this is probably after listening to his cruddy bands for ten years) because I thought he was so funny and should be on the radio. Quite randomly, Chris said 'yes, you can have a job at XFM we will call it Head of Speech'. No word of a lie, Ricky wept, I did nudge him and say 'pull yourself together' - we were all a bit the worse for wear. Behind every great man is an underpaid somebody or other... "

Well, like I said a couple of weeks ago in the Susan Boyle blog, all some people need is just a little break and then they blossom. And Ricky G must surely be an inspiration to all late developers - just like Boyle is now. Although, now the main story on Susan Boyle seems to be that no one as yet, has made any money out of her - least of all ITV whose clip has now been watched over 100 million times on Youtube.

One business which has probably done well 0ut of Boyle is the restaurant trade - and they probably need it in the economic climate change. Did you notice the pivotal part of Kate's story above? Food. It was the head of Fiction and XFM taking them all out to dinner. I bet there have been a number of substantial 'working' lunches and dinners held between various employees of ITV, Sony and Syco in the name of Susan Boyle. With all manner of starters, desserts and liquid refreshment. And what happens afterwards? Yes, you got it: the expenses claim. Anyone who has ever had a job with expenses - and possibly there are some of you out there who are still blessed with such jobs - will know the combined pleasure and pain. The pleasure of the 'cashback' moment; the pain of the mounting receipts burning a hole in an old envelope in your desk drawer that you know will take half a day to sort out. Fortunately none of you will have experienced the public scrutiny being enjoyed by the government today but then again, the sort of things that A&R men claim rarely involve furniture or decoration costs.

But to sympathise with our beleaguered public servants for a few brief moments, the key thing I remember about expenses is that no matter how hard you try to claim back everything you have spent in the name of your job, you still end up out of pocket. No matter how many receipts you would save, there would never be enough to cover what you had spent. No wonder Gordon Brown had a go at claiming twice for the same thing, eh?

With A&R the primary form of expense is always Entertainment - that's mainly buying people drinks and occasionally food. Now, unless you want to look like a complete tightarse and defeat the purpose of buying booze in the first place, you never ask the bar staff for a receipt. In fact the expression, "Can I have a receipt please?" is so laden with the pain and suffering of boring office life that you may as well say to whoever it is you are getting a drink, "Please don't sign to me/produce this record/ever return my calls again - I am a boring company drone and really not worthy to be in the company of a creative free spirit like yourself."

That's the thing about A&R - half the time you are a dude with a cool record collection and an ear for a hit, and the other half you are a flunky. Unfortunately you are - in my experience at least - usually the latter when you hang out with bands, who tap you for free drinks and only the former when you are in the office surrounded by others who don't get out as much as you. And boy do the folks in Accounts know you go out - they know where, when and exactly what you had.

Expenses, as the man who signed Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine once said, are the most creative part of the A&R job. Incidentally, he went on to make a fortune doing cover-mount music CDs for newspapers, then sold the company, made a pile and is now a happy and successful school teacher. But I digress, the creative part of expenses is the fact that rather like drama in books, film and TV, the truth is often stranger than fiction and of course when you submit your sheets of A4 to Accounts you sure as hell don't want anyone thinking your claim is strange. So if you've been buying large amounts of booze, food and plastic novelty items in order to convince a band that you are without doubt the coolest and most exciting record company you might find yourself fabricating little stories around the receipts you have collected in order to creative believable scenarios.

So many times I would find that for legitimate nights out with bands I would spend £100 or £150 on booze/pinball/entrance to gigs but only come away with a couple of cab receipts. So in order to make up what I'd spent I started using receipts from the occasional time I would go out for a meal with a mate. And then before I knew it EVERY time I went out with friend to eat I would ask for a receipt just in case. But imagine that on the front page of the Daily Telegraph - it wouldn't wash would it? "A&R Man Claims £1000s In Slap-Up Meal Frenzy!" And no, before you ask, apart from that one time when I went to buy 'stimulants to help us work through the night' with a band's money - I never bought a band drugs. Take their drugs, sure! Who didn't?

I've noticed that recently when I see friends from record companies that I end up having tea and biscuits more often than a slap-up meal. This is frankly a welcome development. The thing about expense accounts - and this may just be a bloke thing - is that often they are flaunted like expensive jewellery or cars. Quite often I remember going to meet music publishers and lovely thought they invariably were, we would end up in ludicrously expensive restaurants in West London talking about what we had seen at the Barfly and if we would be able to get on the guest list at The Bull & Gate - it just seemed wrong. And then of course next time we met, I felt duty bound to entertain them in a similar fashion. One record company pal told me recently that they now have to clear all their FUTURE expenses before going out and spending the cash. Surely he was exaggerating, this is madness! - kind of like being asked to predict how many CDs a freshly signed act is going to sell. Oh hang on, we actually did have to do that when I was at BMG and V2.

But really, telling an expenses Tsar how much you think you are going to blow on lunch with a business associate takes all the glamour out of having an expense account doesn't it. Looking back on my expenses days I now realise the real joy of the expense account was the reward every month. After spending an afternoon of going through your pockets for receipts and trying to remember what the hell you had done it was pure pleasure to get that extra bit of cash back in your account. It was my money, I'd spent it, but I could never get used to the fact that I got money back after I had spent it - however legitimately. It was free money. And astute managers recognised this psychology - one manager (who is now extremely powerful) was pretty skint when he managed a band for me in the 90s and made no bones about tapping me for free food every time he saw me, "Where are we going for lunch today, dear boy?" he would enquire on the phone, often before I knew I even had a meeting with him. Fortunately, like Ricky Gervais, he was marvellous company and I never turned him down. Last time I saw him he offered to buy me lunch - it was a lovely moment and even though I'd already eaten I hope he somehow managed to claim for it.

The Lassitude Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:10:00 +0000

Last week's Susan Boyle blog proved the simple Internet logic that if you write about a topic that is hot you get more readers. I'm not sure how many of you reading this only discovered A&Rmchair last week but I can promise you I won't be covering her this week. In fact it will be a very short this week. Why? Because I am devoting my time into staring into space like a person in an Edward Hopper painting. My doctor assures me that this lassitude has been brought on not by the swine flu but by a simple virus. Let's hope that's true. My friend Russell, who's a bigger hypochondriac then I am told me that he wants to contract the swine flu now so he can get maximum medical care and attention. He reckons there won't be the beds and drugs in two or three weeks. Apocalypse dot com.

Anyway there you go, I got another topical reference in this week - my stats are going to go THROUGH THE ROOF.

Frankly, I think I'd be better if I'd spent more time at home with the family last week. Instead I went out to see a play through glass, interview a fashion model and check out Bob Dylan's arse. The latter - which let's face it, is probably not in as pulchritudinous a condition as his re-blossoming career - was most of what we saw of him at the Roundhouse last Sunday. We actually had great seats, really near the stage, but Mr D, now no longer playing the guitar, had positioned his Vox Continental organ sideways on and was facing his two Costello-alikey guitarists. With his back to us. There were moments of greatness: Tangled Up In Blue three songs in, was lovely - a different arrangement which made the song darker and suited Bob's new 'old' voice.

But I was just not very well; coughing and sweating and wondering if I could reasonably lie down on the venue floor. It's not really not fair of me to pass judgement on a 67 year-old who is on a Never Ending Tour while I am struggling to just watch him for one evening but it would have been nice to get a bit of a clue as to who was on stage! The clue is in the name of course, it's the Roundhouse - he was circled by people. But turn around, he did not. In his Guardian review of 2001's Love And Theft album, Alexis Petrides refers to Dylan's grizzled voice as sounding like Papa Lazarou from The League Of Gentlemen. I made the mistake of mentioning this to my friends sitting next to me, which they found amusing, so subsequently the entire show was punctuated by crowings in my ear, "It ain't me, Dave!"

Anyway, I'm still in the land of the unwell so I'm going to stop here but in order that you have something to read - and sticking to last week's A&R decision theme, I will reproduce part of a blog which removed last year for reasons I won't repeat. Older readers may remember it and for that I apologise, others may find it as fresh and amusing as if I had written it yesterday.

See you next week.

I'm aware that you have to sell sell sell in order to get any 21st century attention but I still stand by the psychology of any talent search - a scout wants to hunt and gather; if something lands on his desk in a nice Jiffy with a glossy photograph, a DVD, a 10 track demo and a three page biography complete with accolades from the bass player of a well-known Danish metal act, he will pour the lot into the bin. Believe me, I'm not making it up. If you go into the Atlantic Records offices in The Electric Lighting Station and head for the basement, go to the office in the far corner and look above your head. If you push the central ceiling tiles up, underneath you will find a handful of particularly annoying biographies, unlistened-to demo tapes and other detritus from the early 90s - there is one, as far as I remember, from a would-be Motely Crue from the home counties called Tygertailz. Ah, happy days.

Actually, to be honest, I was a fairly responsible talent scout. I tried to give everyone and everything a fair hearing. Not for me the casual flinging of demo tapes out of the car window at 80mph on the M1. One example of my diligence is that I once received a letter from a certain Richey Edwards asking how he could become an A&R man. The Manics' manager once told me this several years later, I had completely forgotten about it. Apparently, I had written him a very encouraging letter which he'd never forgotten, outlining the best way of becoming a talent scout. He clearly didn't listen to a bloody word I said.

Talking of legends, I also remember getting regular calls from a promoter at the University of London Students' Union, who continually took on the management of terrible no-hoper bands. The reason I took his calls was that he was hilarious - a pleasure to talk to, genuinely nice, with a distinctive, infectious laugh. I still have a covering letter that came with one of his demos; written on headed ULU notepaper, it reads:

Dear Cunts in charge of the record industry,

Your label, or whatever the fuck it is you call it, doesn't half give me the horn.

Yours faithfully,

Ricky Gervais

You didn't expect that, did you. Did you? No!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Earlier today on Twitter - and who'd have thought you'd ever read a sentence like that here? - music writer Rob Fitzpatrick tweeted this: 'Why do the sort of bands who get "Record Deals" have to sound so depressingly like the sort of bands who get "Record Deals"?'

He's got a point. But - and you'll be happy to hear I tweeted (twat?) this back - more pertinent is how the sort of bands who get record deals always look like the sort of bands who get record deals. In fact, I'd go so far to say that it's more likely that they'll look the part rather than sound it. After all it's easy to make a bunch of cool looking guys sound great than sell a bunch of ugly-stick-prodded losers who write a good tune. Right, kids?

Well, that's the received wisdom, isn't it? And I have to say I'm as guilty as anyone for subscribing to the looks fascism that has always existed in the music business. Or entire entertainment business for that matter. Half of the reason I was excited about Ride was that Mark Gardner was just so good looking. And the reason I, like a lot of people, passed on On A Friday wasn't that the demo didn't have enough strong songs on it - it was that the singer had a paralysed eye and we just couldn't imagine audiences getting past that.

You can see where this is going can't you? Two words: Susan Boyle. The three of you out there in the world who have not yet heard about this singer or seen the clip from Britain's Got Talent - well, here's your final chance. It's astonishing that her clip (almost 13 million views on Youtube as I write) has become such a global phenomenon so fast. People are clearly angry about the way looks are prioritised in pop - just take a look at some of the comments: "IN YOUR FACE. Cowell!" or this one: "look at that ugly girl in the audience who pulls the horrible face when she says she wants to be a professional singer, take the look of ure face you ugly little bitch"

Whilst it's nice to think that someone who doesn't conform to the stereotypical talent show winner levels of attractiveness can create such an impression it's also worth thinking about why people buy music - what gets them excited about music? I could be wrong but my experience is pop music that works, invariably has a dynamic between the music and the way the performer looks. It's a dynamic that doesn't necessarily depend on the performer being good looking but there has to be a relationship between the two things: the looks and the voice. I always asked myself: does the act look like it sounds? So many demos would come in with a very groomed and styled Walkerprint (look it up, people under 30) and a demo which sounded like a different act - like someone dressing up for a job interview to work in a coal mine.

The acts that made it past this first hurdle were invariably ones who had identified something about themselves and were milking that rather than doing what they thought was the best way to get the attention of an A&R man. The majority of acts were getting it wrong on a basic level - like a writer who hasn't found his voice and slips from funny to angsty with no warning or an artist who draws a painfully accurate sketch of a face except there is something slightly wrong about the chin rendering the whole picture comical. Bad artists make art look hard.

Once past the first hurdle the acts who had something unique about them would then be judged on all the arbitrary and unfair things which people who create new art are judged on: lyrics, trousers, colour of cassette inlay... And very often they would get a rejection letter because despite having a spark they weren't ticking as many tickboxes as the A&R person wanted ticking. Sometimes the A&R person would venture forth and see the artist perform live or in as showcase and maybe the Walkerprint would have made them look better than they looked in real life and despite really liking the song, the A&R man couldn't get over the fact that the singer had a receding hairline, or oversized hands or maybe a mannerism involving his tongue poking out of the side of his mouth while he sang. I'm talking generally here - don't for a moment think I was ever this shallow...

But sometimes there was a a magic from the demo that was undeniable. It normally came from the voice. The Verve came through unsolicited - I phoned them up because I really liked the voice. In the end I just didn't like the songs enough but crucially I didn't see a picture of the band - if I had I think I would have taken the unconventionally attractive Richard a bit more seriously. Sometimes it took a visit from a band to convince - I met Crispin from the Longpigs before he'd even formed the group and not only were the three songs on his tape amazing (On And On, Far and one other) he was also cripplingly cool - even when he was flicking the ash from his cigarette into his top pocket during the meeting "Why are you doing that?" I asked "What?" he drawled. "Flicking the ash into your pocket?" "Oh that - it's just an affectation..." I was sold. It didn't harm him that he was ludicrously good looking too but crucially he knew exactly what he was about.

Susan Boyle clearly knows this too. The Rev. Angela Tilby on Thought For Today this morning isolated the fact that Boyle sang with authority - she knew she had a great voice and no amount of criticism was going to take that conviction away. As she said in front of the judges, she'd just never been given the opportunity. And isn't that the way so many of us feel? Did I write that last sentence? Blimey, stop me before I start openly weeping.

Anyway, you can tell that this woman knows she's good from her eyes - the usual talent show crazy desperation is absent, she's just happy to be on stage singing. And the dynamic, how does my theory fit with her - does she look like she sounds? Well, actually yes. If she was trying to be Beth Ditto or Michael Jackson then her age announement would have warranted the cruel titters she got. In fact after she says she's 47 she does a mock sexy gyration "And that's just one side of me!" and we are briefly back in familiar talent show freak territory. But she's not a freak, she knows who she is, she doesn't want to be La Roux, she wants to be Elaine Page and even though the world of musical theatre that Paige emerged from is just as body fascistic as the record business, you can imagine Lloyd Webber getting her into one of his shows like that. She'd be perfect.

But the people who love the whole IN YOUR FACE, Cowell aspect of the Boyle saga have been fooled. Of course Cowell knew about her before the show was filmed - he was raving to Max Clifford about her a week before it was aired and I'd imagine that most of those involved with the show knew what they wanted out of the performance. I mean listen to Dec crowing to the camera "You didn't expect that did you?" when Boyle starts singing - it's clearly scripted. And Cowell's raised eyebrows of surprise as Boyle's goes into full throttle are about as believable as Roger Moore. He is probably already working on song choices for her album - he's publicly said she could have a number one in the US. The clip is a massively manipulative bit of telly - it lulls you into expecting to see another freak, showing cutaway shots of all those audience members who are not in on the secret rollling their eyes to their neighbours "Who does this old fatty think she is?" then turns on a sixpence using gently lifting ooohs and ahhhs and spontaneous clapping as Boyle starts. Yes, the voice is good but the reaction is too fast. And who started that standing ovation? Some prudently distributed runners? Cynical? Moi?

The IN YOUR FACE, COWELL brigade who want the 'ugly little bitch' in the audience to "take the look off her face" would have done the same had they been in the audience that night. It's human nature, or at least modern human nature; we are a deeply shallow and cynical generation prone to judging people on their appearance. The violent emotions of the Boyle reaction was manipulated by the direction of the show but also by the guilt felt by everyone who would have dismissed Boyle from the moment she bounded onto the stage.

There was a euphemism used in A&R departments about artists who had slipped past the ugly police and made it onto the roster - unconventionally attractive. And actually some of the biggest stars are genuinely unconventionally attractive - Shane McGowan, Jarvis Cocker, Michael Stipe... But more often that not, singers lean towards good looks. Have a look at your record collection - how many unconventionals or just plain old boots can you find? For a brief moment in the Bob Harris part of the 70s there was a value placed on musicianship over looks but mostly pop music is about style, fashion and looks, it's about being young and sticking it to the man and all the other cliches. So even literate, 'serious' pop stars like Dylan, Cohen and Mitchell (J) were supremely attractive - all the icons from Marley to Strummer to Morrison (J) to Gaye were gorgeous but, just for the record, here is a Top 10 of Pop Boyles - but before you read it, remember that whilst none of the below are or were heartbreakers, they all have it - they look like they sound, no one else is like them and all the better for it.

10 Joe Cocker
9 Mama Cass
8 Van Morrison
7 Elton John
6 Shaun Ryder
5 Lemmy
4 Meatloaf
3 Ian Dury
2 Beth Ditto
1 Thom Yorke

PS: Next week, I annexe the Sudetenland.
PPS Check out Mike Skinner's Susan Boyle remix with a Donk on it

Rock 'n' Roll Replacement Bus Service

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:25:00 +0000

The one-armed scouser in the AC/DC T-shirt is waving a crumpled can of Stella at us all: "Hoosh going to get me a ticket for asheedeeshee? Come on you cunts!"

Everyone on the tube - many of whom are doing their best to hide their own AC/DC clothing -busy themselves with copies of London Lite. The man starts singing along to whatever is playing on the headphones under his enormous furry hat: "We'll bring the house down!" He leans conspiratorially into the man sitting next to him, "Will you get me a ticket for asheedeeshee? Come on, you've got some influenshe.. I can tell.... (singing) We'll bring the house down. What stop is acdc? Where am I am getting off?"

The man, rictus grin forming, tells him

"You'll get me a ticket, right? OK?"
"Sorry, no, I'm not getting off there.."
"No! You rotter... (to the rest of the carriage) Whose gonna get me a ticket? Come on you cunts! You rotters! Goodbye to jane!"
He turns to the man with the guitar case standing next to him, "You're a musician... you'll get me in. Come on, I need to rock!"
He leans into the man next to him again
"Goodbye to jane! Slade... Noddy Holder... he nailed them. Proper singer... Donington 1981... nailed them. Not like Asheedc. Acdc are shite! Veins on his neck wherever he shings.... Noddy nailed them. (To the rest of the carriage) Whose going to give me 50p? I've got five pounds, If someone gives me 50p I can get in ... They know me at Wembley! They know me at Hammersmith! (to his now visibly sweating neighbour again) Where are asheedeeshee playing again?"

I get off at North Greenwich and start making my way along with thousands of others to the O2. I'm meeting some friends here - we've been invited to see AC/DC by a mate at Sony and there appears to be some sort of luxury meat dinner thrown in too. I eventually find the restaurant, Gaucho, inside the vast dome and am guided - and glided - by super efficient, super polite staff to a private room where Sony guests are being given champagne and scallops. I'm still thinking of the one armed AC/DC fan who needed to rock. He wouldn't have fitted in amongst the surf and turfers here but he definitely deserved to see the band more than a lot of the porcine businessmen who seem to using tonight as an excuse for entertaining their clients.

It makes sense, I suppose. Back in 1981 when our drunk friend saw the band at Castle Donington Monsters Of Rock he was probably surrounded by a lot of beery 16 year olds who went on to do very well in business. Now those same boys - if they still have jobs - are being reminded of their youth in corporate boxes by cunning companies treating them to a jolly in order to solicit more orders.

Meanwhile in the private room everyone is talking about the record business. I'm talking to my old friend Emma about the lifetime we've known each other. Like me, she used to work at Warners, now, like me, she's got kids and worries about the financial crisis and the environment. Unlike me she still works in the music industry. She thinks the record business will survive but after having seen The Age Of Stupid, she's not so sure about the environment. Apparently at a screening of the movie hosted by Ken Livingston, the ex mayor told the audience in his introduction that the US government have just completed work on a bunker for 2 million people in New York as they are preparing for the Gulf Stream to do its worst to Manhattan in a Katrina style.

Whilst this is uniquely ominous and as Emma said, more disturbing to learn than anything in the film itself, it is somehow hard to balance a desire to do less to upset the environment with an interest or career in rock. Emma's family decided not to have a holiday in California the very next day which is admirable but she is behind the scenes in the music business - what about Angus Young and co and all their pyrotechnics? Would AC/DC mean as much if they went green? I say this because I was invited to do another Radio 4 column last week about Neil Young's Fork In The Road - a concept album about his Lincvolt project where he is converting his old Lincoln Continental to make it environmentally friendly. This is a worthy concept and coming from a fella who is famous for having burned rubber from Canada to California in a hearse called Mort, almost poetic. But is it rock? The album is kind of dull - the tunes aren't up to much and lyrically, well it's just too didactic. My piece is actually about the cars in pop music and how ultimately, how every car themed song is about shagging. Although the BBC wouldn't let me use that word, it's too rude apparently - the piece is going out this week so tune in weeknights at 7.15 BBC Radio 4, pop pickers!

And talking of cars, shagging, and burning through the environment like it's a king size Rizla, here we are watching the explosions and screeches of Angus and co hitting the stage. Alongside various lucky invitees in our corporate box - including the head of Domino Records which is both confusing and refreshing - we watch the band who look no different from how they must have looked to our one-armed friend in 1981: Brian Johnson in cloth cap stalking the stage, punching the air, Angus Young in the schoolboy outfit, natch. But the massive screens either side of the stage act like enormous Dorian Grey style paintings freed from the loft: Johnson looks every bit in his sixties, the veins are popping on his neck with every vocal effort, Angus Young is small and sprightly but underneath that cap - which after four songs is discarded along with all of his clothes bar the shorts and shoes - he is a wispy haired secondary school teacher; I imagine him covered in chalk dust, talking about Brazilian coffee production - oh no! Double geography with Mr Young!

But he knows how old he is. There is no Mick Jagger 'laughter lines' self delusion with Angus. And that is ultimately why despite seemingly only having one idea (a riff and some lyrics about naughty women) AC/DC manage to be such fun - they don't talk themselves too seriously. As an giant inflatable Rosie looms over the reproduction of a crashed train and Brian Johnson sings Whole Lotta Rosie, I lean over and say to my mate from Sony, "Is this where pop music all ends?" "No!" he replies completely in earnest, "This is where it begins!" And he's right, this is no different from people going to see old bluesmen in the sixties and seventies - these guys have seen it all and are still playing 12 bar blues - admittedly while dressed a schoolboy. And that's why they can get away with calling their 175th single (who's counting?) Rock 'n' Roll Train. Anyone else would get laughed out of the playlist meeting, AC/DC get played by Zane Lowe alongside Ladyhawke and The Killers.

Apparently before Sony started the campaign for the album Black Ice last year, they organised a special show for all the territories. Key execs were flown to New York then given a ticket to travel on the 'Rock 'n' Roll Train' to a venue in Philadelphia. Except when the train arrived at Philly, it transpired that the venue was still 25 minutes away from the station. So minibuses had to be organised to cover the last leg - a rock 'n' roll replacement bus service if you will. One senses that despite it being off message, Angus would have found this absolutely in keeping with the band's bubble bursting humour. After all this is a man 7 years shy of being 60 who does a mock striptease and shows the audience his boxer shorts at the end of it - AC on one cheek, DC on the other. I hope our drunk friend was there to see that.

Now That's What I Call Unrecouped

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:14:00 +0000

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.

My face is finished, my body's gone...

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:44:00 +0000

INT: Small kitchen. Tasteful but not extravagant. Morning.

William Shatner, Lee Majors and David Soul are sitting round a table having breakfast. Shatner's eating Marmite on toast, Majors is sulkily staring into his coffee and Soul is looking at the small ads in Variety.

Soul: Hey guys, here's one: Producer seeks experienced talent. No timewasters. Sounds perfect for us!
Majors (scowling): Yeah right! We all know what that means...
Soul (hands in air): Tell us...
Majors: He's looking for chicks!
Shatner: It could be guys... and if it's experience this producer wants, then hey ...
Majors: Yeah, whatever. Even if he is looking for dudes, we're 'overqualified'.

That's an excerpt from the forthcoming series Six Million Dollar Men. No, of course it isn't, I made it up, but hey, if someone could get those fellas together to do comedy I'd watch it. Majors would have to agree to try and shag anything to reflect his model-marrying in real life. Incidentally, I didn't know Majors markets his own hearing aid, called inevitably The Lee Majors Bionic Hearing Aid - tagline: it won't cost you $6 million but you'll think it's worth it. Something us tinnitus sufferers could use, I'm sure.

Anyway, the reason I mention Steve Austin, Hutch and Kirk is because I've been musing on the concept of over qualification. Last year, whilst I was managing the band, I would occasionally put myself up for job interviews and a couple of times when I never heard back from a submitted CV I would enquire why and be told: you are overqualified. Ouch.

I went to the musical of Priscilla Queen of the Dessert last week (I thoroughly recommend it, by the way - and I hate camp, as you know.). Anyway, in the pivotal role was Jason Donovan. His body is still lean and taut, as he's keen to stress by stripping down to pants in the first five minutes. But he's aged in the face like anyone in their forties has a habit of doing. And so what? He's not the greatest actor, neither is he much competition in the singing department for his co-stars but he does a good job; he's convincing and you're rooting for him. Although not in the Australian sense of the word, I stress. The point is, in the age area he is 'overqualified'. If he was still flogging the cute blonde boy next door it would not work. He would not work. But he's bent his image to fit the market and he's flourishing. Blimey, never thought I'd hear myself defending the Donovan.

And isn't that what everyone is doing? Particularly in the current economic climate. You can tell the people that aren't doing it - the people who have one thing they do and stick to that - people like Oasis, for example, but I suppose you could argue that they don't need to thank you very much - but what happens when Liam does start to lose his insufferable good looks? Well, perhaps he'll retire and do something else. Or carry on Jagger-style with all his self-pronounced 'laughter lines' ("Nothing's that funny" said George Melly)

Or what about Kylie? There is nothing else that people want Kylie to be other than a diminutive, multisexual cypher, once she begins to look her age (which, I admit, may never happen) whither the wispy songs with vaguely suggestive lyrics? Nick Cave - now there's a man who has made a career by sticking to his schtick. In fact, even dueting with Kylie he never went off-message.

That thing I wrote for the Guardian last week about rock stars going off-message has got me thinking. It seems to me that maybe that's what many stars are going to have to do in order to survive. In a world where anything digitizable can be free, you can no longer rely on residual back catalogue sales from CDs or DVDs to keep you going. So you are going to have to carry on working like the rest of us and to do that you're going to have to keep relevant to the market. Sure, if you're Leonard Cohen or Van Morrison you can charge your affluent audiences £200 a ticket for the privilege of seeing you, but you can only do that if you have their stature and crucially, you can't continue to do that every year. So what you surely must do is start thinking laterally and do other stuff. If you're Cohen you can sell your art which sticks to the message and keeps your image safe. But what if you're Michael Jackson, you're 50 years old and you've just sold out 50 O2s? Now there's someone who's overqualified. Surely it's time to leave the Moonwalk behind and just perform some fantastic tracks - use the great voice and occasionally do that thing with the foot, sure. But don't try to pretend you're 25 and book an elephant and 100 Masai warriors...

So many friends of mine are doing their bit for reinvention and going off-message - like my pal I described last week who picked up the Twitter baton (the Twaton?) and ran with it. Or another friend who is lecturing to music students after having been MD of a large music publisher. Re-invention may be deemed undignified by some, but often it's far less dignified to try to remain the same in the face of change - you can end up looking a bit of a Cnut.

"Mother doesn't go out anymore ..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:46:00 +0000

I feel my eyes gently closing. It's fine, it's fine... nobody can see me, it's dark after all. Maybe that's why theatres turn the house lights off during the performance... how many plays have I seen. in my life? Over 500? No, probably about 250... How does that compare with albums I've heard... My thoughts start running together into a scrambled mush and I momentarily lose consciousness. Suddenly I jolt back upright... Shit! It's OK, it's OK, nobody saw. Oh look there's Tony Parsons and Miranda Sawyer sitting in front of us. Wonder what they think of it... Concentrate, concentrate, you're reviewing it too, remember.

Christ this is boring. I mean, really - imagine having paid proper West End prices for this. It's awful. How much longer? This has to be the longest hour and 40 minutes I've endured since, well certainly since that terrible thing on Monday at the Soho Theatre. No, actually this is much worse, because the cast is so good - what the hell were they thinking?!

It's tragic isn't it, that people put so much effort and money into artistic endeavours which fail to produce any joy in the audience. I remember at my first A&R job watching my boss who has spent a year putting together Ian McCulloch's debut solo record ranting at its press reception: "Who the fuck do they think they are? What the fuck would they know about making records? You spend a year making a record only for some c**t to spend 20 minutes pulling it apart..."

The balance is wrong isn't it? All that time producing something should at least be rewarded with some respect by those whose job it is to pass judgement. Yet every music critic has stories of events they have reviewed without necessarily being present. It's easily done, though: at around the same time my boss was ranting about the minimum effort the journalists were making on his McCulluch album, I pretended to attend a ULU show by the Flatmates. I couldn't go for some reason and frankly, I didn't think they were any good anyway. At the time they were at being checked out by the majors in the wake of bands like The Wedding Present doing well. I knew I would be asked what they were like during the weekly A&R meeting, so I spoke to another A&R mate about the show. A good move. It turned out that the band had had a fight and split up on stage.

But reading reviews - particularly the snide singles reviews that are trying to emulate the wittier writers - can be a wholeheartedly tawdry affair: poorly paid, disinterested hacks, trying to quickly wade through a pile of stuff that no one will be buying anyway. Indeed, I am reliably informed that some critics don't even bother phoning the PRs for good quality copies of the tracks to review - they do it all off the videos on Youtube.

But I can always forgive negativity about a band or show or restaurant or book as long as there is some wit - humorous or otherwise. Certainly from having been on the other side of the critics for so long, I never minded if say...oooh let's pick a band out of the blue shall we... Sleeper, got unfavourable reviews as long as they were humorous. Actually I tell a lie, I did use to get quite annoyed at times. Once I wrote to Laura Lee Davies at Time Out when she accused Louise Wener of being sexist when she told feminists to "Shut up and shave". Lee Davies was unfamiliar with the quotation from Alan Partridge. My letter got published in Time Out the following week with the inevitable paragraph by Lee Davies underneath, which somehow manged to put her in the right and illustrate how very wrong I was. Whoever was right though, Louise was funniest - so she wins in my book.

Humour does seem to be the underlying currency in Guardian Guide. And I'm not just saying this because I've had a couple of thing in there recently (one on My Bloody Valentine and one on a well known brand of flu drug). Having said that, I wrote something on the Guardian blog last week and boy, does humour sometimes get lost there. The piece I wrote was pegged on the story about Bob Dylan' stinky portaloo and was about when pop stars seemingly go off-message. I got absolutely Tourretted by a Dylanologist: How dare I? Didn't I know that Dylan never had a message? Had I not seen the films? Read the books? And who the hell did I think I was?

Ah well. You can't please all the people ... And I did in fact have my fair share of people-pleasing over the weekend. It was Robyn's 45th birthday and I organised a surprise birthday party for her - something I have never done before. It was a brief glimpse of what life must have been like for Bob Geldof and I'm still a bit shell shocked. Also I'm amazed that it managed to remain a surprise after the catalogue of gaffs in the run up e.g. someone texting their husband about it but texting Robyn by mistake - a text I had to intercept and delete at 7am while Robyn was in the shower, or another friend who said to her: "see you on Saturday, then!" "Oh, are we seeing you then?" she asked "Ooh er, no... no, actually I'm thinking of someone else - silly me!"

Anyway it worked. As did the idea of everyone bringing a 7" single instead of a birthday card. Again this was astonishing, considering the amount of confusion the sentence, "bring a 45 rpm single" caused. "Can we bring CDs?" was one request. "Can't I give her a record token so she can buy what she wants?" another. I don't know, is the link between between the age 45 and 45 rpm that hard? It's probably me, living in the bubble of pop music these things are second nature to me. Everyone else has grown up and got proper lives.

I expected a slew of Paul Young's Wherever I Lay My Hats but instead Robyn was given some classics, all of them personalised by hand-written dedications on the sleeves and all of which we played on the turntable I set up on the stage. Here are the 10 most popular 45s played- some of them even had kids dancing:

1 Low Rider by War
2 I Want You Back by Jackson 5 (bit scratched this one)
3 King of The Road by Roger Miller (very kid-friendly apart from the line about cigarettes)
4 Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Statton
5 What Difference Does It Make by the Smiths (not in the Terrence Stamp sleeve sadly, but good effort for bringing this one)
6 Nowhere to Run by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
7 Leader of the Park by the Shangri-Las
8 Georgy Girl by The Seekers
9 White Horses by Jackie
10 Cars by Gary Numan

I'm glad the party went so well because it was on Robyn's actual birthday that we went to the boring play I describe above. It was Madame De Sade, the latest of the Donmar's West End productions, starring Judi Dench, Francis Barber and Rosamund Pike. With a cast like that and the Marquis De Sade as a topic what could possibly go wrong? We we both really excited - not least to get out of the house together sans enfants and span some time as a couple. But what a stinker. All that effort, all those hours' rehearsal... And then some badly paid bloke - on his wife's birthday no less! - puts the boot in. Bloody critics.

There's no stoppin' the cretins from hoppin'

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:52:00 +0000

Three superheroes run past me on Walthamstow tube station platform. Spiderman, Superman and someone whose identity I can't be certain of... YFrontman, possibly. They run into my carriage, make off down the isle, then get off again and board the next one. One of them has a video camera and is in fits of giggles. I'm sitting there chuckling to myself like a madman. Is this what Comic Relief is all about? Not to the only other occupant of my carriage, a middle aged black woman who is staring after them as it they've just sworn at her. No red nose for her today, then.

Earlier in the week, I'm coming back from the Royal Court, buzzing from seeing the new Mark Ravenhill play, Over There. I review it very favourably, feeling unequivocally that seeing twins acting opposite each other is remarkable and that the story of East and West Berlin they perform is shocking, clever, funny and all the things that make going to the theatre such a joy. Later in the week, I can't resist seeing what other people have written about and it looks like I am in a minority - The Telegraph predictably savages it as politically naive, and the otherwise evenhanded Michael Billington in the Guardian is less than enthused. Does this make me wrong?

Everybody has different taste. The world would be a most tedious place otherwise. The guy whose office I share, spent a large chunk of January ripping the piss out of me for being on Twitter. He does this sporadically, when I do something he considers unbecoming, e.g: "Why are you reading the NME? Are you 17? Eh? Eh? No, is the answer, my friend so PUT IT DOWN and start behaving like a grown up!"

He was particularly vehement about Twitter - "It's for c*nts!" he ranted,"It's for students with nothing better to do than talk about what sort of coffee they've ordered in Starbucks." I try to defend it: "Actually, there are quite a few really interesting feeds, Financial Times, BBC Entertainment, Brian Eno..."
He is unrepentant:"Hey, ever heard of newsfeeds? So what do you need Twatter for?"
"I can tell people when the blog is up... tell people about the plays I'm reviewing..."
"Exactly! Back to my original point: Twitter is for c*nts!!!"

But fast forward to earlier this week. He leans over to me and asks, "Hey, have you tried Tweetdeck?" How things change. Not content with having embraced Twitter, he is now getting excited about laying out his respective Tweets on his desktop. Added to this he is banging on about Spotify the whole time.

My point? Well, back to the woman on the tube and those clashing reviews - we all have different opinions and tastes but - and this is the point, sometimes these opinions change. Adults are expected to be consistent, to stick to their guns. But kids don't have to adhere to the guns law. Maddy changes her mind daily, "I don't like tuna," she said, the day after she wolfed down a mountain of the stuff - that's what you do when you're five. She doesn't like the Charlie & The Chocolate Factory music any more either and her favourite colour is no longer pink. Praise be for that last one.

As you get older, people pigeonhole you - it saves time. So whilst I'm not likely to suddenly change course, Maddy tuna style, and decide I no longer like White Man In Hammersmith Palais, After Eights or Huckleberry Finn, I like the idea that I could for example say: you know what, that Bon Iver album is OK.

Incidentally this is just an example and not a statement of fact, I'm sure you'll be reassured to hear that I still think Bon Iver smells of wee. No, what I've been thinking about is some of the artists I tried to sign at V2 and whether I would still pursue them now.

100 record business years ago, when I was at V2 back in 2006, the first thing I wanted to sign was the subject of much blog-related excitement - a solo act from Albuquerque called Beirut, which was, as it turned out a solo artist called Zach Condon. I'm sure you know his stuff already as he has gone on to do quite well. His music on debut album Gulag Orkstar is a strange shuffle of folk and mariachi blended with European lyrical references most of which, other than the song titles, are indecipherable. There was undeniably a mystery the record, it shouldn't have worked but it did. Plus, I freely admit, there was the comforting seal of approval from lots of other people who were raving about it in blogs.

In the end he never signed to V2. We paid for him to come to London and meet the company but of course he met others while he was here and he liked 4AD more. His manager later told me that the reason for this was because they had signed Scott Walker for the love of his music rather than thinking that they would ever make any money out of him. Ha ha ha. Good luck with all that, I remember thinking. Did Condon aspire to making albums using meat being slapped for percussive purposes?

By the time the second album came out it had qualified as an album to be played on the marketing department's stereo. Beirut was a now cool name to drop (although, you had to wonder what he was thinking about the connotations of the name - actually, I asked him once, "There's a mystery to it... it's very evocative" he said.)

But despite our marketing team really liking it, I found myself unmoved by this follow up. It wasn't a million miles away from the first but it just wasn't doing the trick for me anymore. I have not heard the new Beirut album yet, but I read that it is a game of two halves, one of which is electro. Hmm, we shall see. I haven't totally done a Maddy on Beirut but I must admit that even the first album smells a bit of tuna now.

The next artist I tried to sign at V2 was Kate Nash - I'll save the full story for another time, suffice to say that you already know the outcome - she didn't sign to us. And you know what? Good move! I mean, we offered her a pretty good deal financially, but crucially the company was confused and afraid about what sort of artist she was - was she any good? being the underlying sentiment, I got from everyone. Yes, she was good but she did have the ability to miss the mark quite badly - The Shit Song being an example and Caroline Is A Victim being another. But other than this, she was talented and occasionally produced a song (Birds, for example) which seemed so effortlessly beautiful that it made the question of where she fitted in with Jamie T or the Klaxons or Lilly Allen seem entirely redundant. When the NME slated her first independent single, I had a queue of V2 people coming into my office saying "Oh no, the NME hate her! This is bad - do you think we should pull the deal?" I'm not joking, this really happened.

At the time, our plugger somewhat gleefully reported that George Ergatoudis, Head of Music at Radio 1 had said "Some people are going to lose a lot of money on Kate Nash" Well, you know what happened, somewhere along the line (around the time Foundations' Top 5 midweek came in), George, like my daughter, decided he liked tuna after all.

But I don't think I could listen to her album now. I still enjoy Foundations and Birds but on the whole, I feel the same way about Kate Nash as I do about Beirut - the novelty has worn off.

The one band I tried to sign at V2, who I still absolutely believe in, are Friendly Fires - and I'm pleased that they seem to very gradually be gaining a foothold despite not being feted in the same way as Late Of The Pier or other slightly more fashionable bands. A sold out night at the Forum - (that's the HMV Forum, pop pickers!) is impressive. Of course, I didn't get them either, partly due to the indifference of the marketing and promotions departments, who by this time had been given unofficial A&R duties by the increasingly panicking MD. But the main reason we never got Friendly Fires was due the fact that half way through courting them, I returned from their local pub in St Albans to discover that V2 had been sold to Universal. Boo hoo.

No one really wanted to sign Friendly Fires at the time and this was why I couldn't get the company excited, I think. It does help to know that others feel the same - makes you feel more comfortable. That's largely why Maddy went off tuna, I think - a friend of hers at school - possibly that pesky Carmen - told her that she didn't like it and after that all tuna betting was off. And that feeling of being in a minority never goes away, that's why I still feel odd about my review of Over There, despite still believing it to be a great night out. Another show I saw recently was so poor I could only muster one star for it and I felt pathetically pleased that other reviewers felt the same.

I just played To Earth With Love by Gay Dad as I walked back from dropping Maddy off at school this morning and it actually gave me that glorious bristly feeling on the back of my neck. That's the thing about music - like laughter on your own on a tube train, no matter how silly it might make you look, if it moves you, you can't help yourself.

"I never felt magic crazy as this..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:43:00 +0000

Spotify really is good, isn't it? It seems funny that only a couple of weeks ago that I wrote complaining about losing my blagging mojo and having missed all these new releases. And now, well, who needs their mojo when they've got that green icon on their desktop? I've heard everything I wanted to hear apart from David Byrne and Brian Eno's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today which I am now listening to here. Indeed the title of that album would appear to be perfect for what is going in with music online.

I spent a large chunk of Tuesday in a car with a friend driving up to Manchester. He and I were at the University there in the 80s and we were driving up to spec out a project for later this year. He's a record exec (of course! which of your so-called friends aren't? I hear you crow). His job requires him to be constantly in contact with people who work with and for him and so I sat in the passenger listening to his speakerphone conversations: lawyers telling him how he was "their guy" and how and they honestly wanted to sign to him, American executives telling him how genuinely excited about their projects they were , new employees telling him how sincerely they were looking forward to their job... It was a veritable sea of love and sincerity. It reminded of my A&R days and how so much of what got people out of bed depended on passion. It may sound like they're being insincere but you do really need to tap into some emotion to get through all the pain, rejection and terrible midweeks. It must be so hard to be like that now, knowing that so many less people are passionate about paying for your product.

I asked my pal - let's call him Michael - what would happen if the majors stopped financing new artists - what if they simply acknowledged that the one-success-in-ten-signings formula was not working for them and they invested their money in doing something else. He looked at me as if I was insane - "it will never happen," he said. He's probably right, but I wanted to talk hypothetically. What if it did?

In the article I wrote for the Times about the UK music industry doing OK, I suggested that without majors we would all return to folk music. Without their money, bands wouldn't get to the level of a Duffy or an Adelle, they would reach a local level of popularity by themselves and then stay there. The music business would become a cottage industry. Music would be people sitting in front rooms playing each other their work on Garageband - like a 21st century Victorian parlour. Or not. Perhaps the future is the majors limiting themselves to picking up acts who are already happening. To an extent this is already going on, but logically this is exclusively what majors should do to survive -remove the element of doubt.

But what about the sublimity of talent spotting? Signing something you really believe in - where the unknown artist gets a deal on musical merit alone? You know, good old fashioned A&R? I really don't think that happens so much any more - there just isn't the money.

"A more sensible question," said my learned record exec mate, "would be: what happens if EMI and Warners go bust? How will the industry deal with that one?"

Blimey, there is a thought. It's no secret that the two smaller majors are in trouble, in a pre-Hands world they were trying to buy each other for years, like schoolkids playing Slapsies in the playground. If they went down, then the two remaining big boys, Universal and Sony, would battle it out over back catalogue like Queen and Fleetwood Mac as well as the paltry selection of current stars like Coldplay or Michael Buble. And then what? Would booking agencies be the new big boys to compete with them? Would merchandisers take over?

We stopped for a sandwich on the motorway, still talking. I brought up the subject of the BRITs - most people in the industry know that the show is produced by Helen Terry - she's been doing it for years. But from my distanced position it now seems to me that having the former Karma Chameleon backing singer producing the BRITs is odd. "What else does she produce?" I asked "Don't know - I think that's it" he said. "They should give some other backing singers a go," I say, "What about Clare Torry? She'd do a great BRITs" "Good point," he said, making a note to raise it at the next BPI meeting. At least I think that's what he was writing.

Back in the car we neared Manchester. It was of course, raining. Funny, we're such old men we both spent about 10 minutes oooing and ahing at how the city had changed. Fallowfield was all fields in our day. Culture Club were still releasing records when we were there, keeping Helen Terry in business, informing us that war was stupid. Our First Year was the year of Band Aid and I remember how at the Owens Park Revue, some rugby lads from my friend's floor in Owens Park formed a group who used the Feed The World tune but sang about that year's big issue: "Kill the queers," they sang, in front of a concert hall, packed with 1st year students, "Let them know they've all got AIDS." Of course, being students we used our right to protest vociferously. But no one discussed getting a mandate to kick the shit out of them. I wonder what those guys are doing now. Probably did quite well in sales.

On the way back the rain had turned to sleet. We took a look at the old house off the Burton Rd where we used to live - apparently according to Michael, the man who went on to become the Doves' manager was living opposite us at the time. If only we'd known.

We listened to Huw Stephens sit in for Zane Lowe on Radio 1. He played the new Rakes single, 1989, which sounds great. Blimey, it's taken them a while hasn't it? They were doing demos for me when I was at V2 a year and a half ago. They were never the quickest of bands when it came to producing anything. This is maybe their weakness because the music they produce sounds instant and exciting as if they've just plugged in and gone for it. A lovely and very funny bunch - they used to call me Boddicker because of my alleged resemblance to the villain in Robocop. Bastards.

It was always a source of real anguish to me that they were constant losing out to labelmates Bloc Party in sales and press coverage. The Rakes, by far the more interesting and melodic of the two, made a fantastic album both musically and lyrically about living in London (OK, so I A&R'd it, so I'm slightly biased) and yet Bloc Party who delivered another helping of yelping - also about living in London - got all the gushing reviews and sales. I still can't listen their The Prayer single from that second album without thinking of the "Is it so wrong....?" line and all the reworkings of it I got the A&R department to sing: "Is it so wrong... to fellate an otter" etc etc.

After we got bored of Radio 1, we listened to some of the music we'd brought with us. "How often do you get listen to your favourite stuff, Michael? I mean, when I was in A&R I felt guilty listening to music that wasn't new releases or mixes or demos - anything connected with the job..." "I have to listen to my favourites," he said, "have to remind myself constantly why I do the job." So that's how he's managed to do so well.

After this we played iPod tennis. Michael kicked off with something he knew I wouldn't know - a sixties beat singer whose name I have, of course, forgotten. I grabbed the jackplug and just about matched him with the Stylistics tearjerker Stone In Love With You. He responded with the quite superb Biology by Girls Aloud - I came back with This Perfect Day by the Saints. "Here's a Michael & Ben classic!" he shouted and launched into the Smithereens' Behind The Wall Of Sleep.

It was like we were back at Owens Park for a moment. Until Michael had to take a call from an American manager and pretend to be an adult again. As we got back to London I played my ace - a mash up of Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On and Nick Drake' s Northern Sky which transcends crassness and manages to sound as if the two are in the studio together - if you haven't heard it then I urge you to.

I can't tell you what we went up to Manchester for yet. Suffice to say it has nothing to do with his day job. But it's not about the destination is it? It's about the journey. And during the journey, it became apparent that whatever happens to the record business, whether Michael continues to do what he does, whether Spotify replaces purchasing, whether EMI or Warners goes, whatever happens people like us, like you, will still find ways of enjoying the tunes.

"Standing on a beach with a gun in my hand..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:38:00 +0000

It was the last song they played.

They'd gone on past the curfew at the O2 and my pal who was officially filming the event feared the band would have to pay a fine and end up out of pocket. Boo and hoo. Still, it was an encore that made the event worth it for the thousands of middle aged air-punchers whose pockets would only be taxed an extra hour of babysitting fee (I'd managed to once again persuade my mum to babysit, which she does for a small fee of Guilt). But driving home, tailgating through the Blackwall Tunnel, I couldn't stop thinking about that last song...

The gig we were at was the NME Awards Big Gig - a show sponsored by Shockwaves, which for many of the fellas keeping babysitters in business that night, seemed an inappropriate product given our follicular state. It wasn't all about the headline act though - The Cure may have managed to pretty much fill the 23,000 capacity venue but it was Franz Ferdinand who gave it some NME flavour - I doubt whether many of the folk there had ever heard of Crystal Castles and you know my thoughts on White Lies already - we missed them both last night by the way, as we were more usefully spending that time patrolling the cavernous Dome looking for its Box Office, queuing up, being sent to another Gate because of a 'ticket misprint' etc etc. White Lies were about to release their follow up album by the time we got in.

What a strange audience. Perhaps its a sign of the times that a youth-branded event has to use the carrot of a vintage band to get punters through the gate but it certainly resulted in a mixed crowd. There were loads of boys who looked like the daughter's boyfriend in Jack Dee's sitcom Lead Balloon - hiding behind curtains of hair and jutting their chins out they sloped around the venue looking confused. And along with their Peaches-a-likey girl mates, they were obviously all really excited in their own special way about Franz Ferdinand. Along with Les Kids there were also many drunk people who looked like they'd accidentally walked into the show from the Salsa Night going on the Mexican restaurant outside, add to this suited businessmen making jazz hands to Just Like Heaven and all those Cure Mums and Cure Dads and you've got a Dome full of weird. It's a shame that Franz Ferdinand were so ordinary.

I wrote about Franz here a few weeks ago, how I was longing to hear their new album. I must say that I've heard the album a few times now (on Spotify, natch) and it's made absolutely no impression on me. It's done what we've identified here as 'A Killers' - pleasant while it lasts before sailing directly from memory. A shame, I was looking forward to it. They were still enjoyable but it was old songs like Michael that had the snap and verve you expect from them. They should split now and quit while they're relatively ahead. Then they could reform in five years and do a Blur. I was chatting to a friend about this this morning - as with Magazine, isn't it better to quite while you're ahead or just beginning to fall from grace then reappear fresh-faced and lean when everyone's palettes are ready again? This is rapidly turning into the most reliable music business model for bands, I think. For years Terry Hall had trouble getting arrested - now he can't move for Brixton Academys, they're coming out of his ears and all because he's got the name Specials attached to his name again. You might think I'm being cynical (and of course I am) but surely reforming without the guy who wrote all the songs, came up with the whole Two Tone idea and look, and effectively was the spirit of the band ranks is a trifle opportunistic. I don't know, I like the Specials, but I can't get that excited about the Sans Dammers reunion gigs as so many people seem to doing.

Travis should have split up just after the Invisible Band album started their downward turn. Instead they've been playing on regardless to fewer and fewer fans and you can't move for copies for their last album in Fopp where it retails at £1. I can't bring myself to buy one, it seems wrong.

The Cure have never split of course. How could they? That would be like Mick Hucknell splitting up - a tantalising thought indeed. It's all about Robert Smith, isn't it? Or Fat Bob, as I seem to remember him being called in the press in the late 80s. Twenty years later and he's no fatter or thinner, his hair is the same and so, incredibly, is that squeaky, boyish singing voice. The bulk of the show last night was from their new album. I wonder if he had split the band or just retired after, say, Disintegration, whether they would be any bigger than they are now. It's true, they're having something of a renaissance now, Goth is very much back in the air, but I suspect that if they had split up 20 years ago their show would have been leaner and more enjoyable. The crowd last night swayed politely through songs from 4:13 Dream but really got hot under the collar for 10:15 Saturday Night. Myself included.

I could wax lyrical about the Cure in a similar way to how I did over Magazine the week before last. Much of my formative pop experience is connected to them (saw them by accident supporting Siouxise & The Banshees in 1979, learned guitar by playing their songs, kissed my first girlfriend in a bedroom featuring a mural of the artwork from Boys Don't Cry, used Robert Smiths name in my English O Level...) But I'm resisting the temptation because I want to talk about that last song they played.

The second part of the set was a track per album and we were blessed with a stonking Three Imaginary Boys, A Forest , Primary, In Between Days and so on. To our right, a large florid woman flailed her hands and buttocks, in front of us a fortyish couple, who smelled of air freshener, gave each other loving looks through Boys Don't Cry, even Les Kids seemed to know the words . The encore just after the 11pm curfew featured more early stuff including the quite superb Jumping On Someone Else's Train and Grinding Halt. And then they played it, they played the song. I think you will have guessed which one by now: Killing An Arab. Or not, in fact. No, the song they actually played appeared to be called Killing Another - I wasn't going mad, my film producer friend confirmed it:"Yes, they've changed its named - too sensitive."

I don't know where to start on this - I'm still in the Blackwall Tunnel, baffled and jammed. I mean, the song is a take on Albert Camus' L'Etranger where the central image is the man on the beach who shoots an Arab. It's a song dramatising a story he's read. It may as well be him singing "I have woken up and discovered I am a giant insect!" or "My name is Holden Caulfield and I'm really pissed off".

Is this the climate of fear we live in? Must we shy away from saying anything that might risk offending other races and cultures? Is this the legacy of the Satanic Verses? Rushdie's fatwa happened exactly 20 years ago this year - have we not moved on? I can't believe that in a music world where I don't seem to be able to download a version of American Boy for my daughter without getting Kanye saying Fuck half way through, where I can't get Lily Allen's single without the same word, not to speak of her favourite Sugababes track Hole In The Head featuring 4 Shits - I cannot believe that we're still in a climate where the BBC would probably still ban Relax (25 years ago this year, pop pickers).

Apparently Smith changed it initially to Kissing An Arab in 2004 then switched that to Killing Another in 2006 for a Royal Albert Hall show. I could understand if they'd been playing Dubai Media City or the Abu Dhabi HMV Forum (made that one up) then they wouldn't want to cause offence. But really. In front of a load of middle aged fans and some NME readers? Am I missing something? Please tell me if I am.

"Oh look at those clothes, now look at that face - it's so old..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:27:00 +0000

It was the rictus, dead eyed grin of the violently disappointed. And the fact that the bearers of it were wearing their now ubiquitous riot of colour and hand-made braiding and epaulets only heightened the insincerity.

For those of you who may erroneously think I was on a table adjacent to Coldplay and Elbow when the latter won Best Band at the BRITs, you are wrong. I haven't been since... 2006, I think. The year Prince blew everyone offstage. This year, I decided I'd like to watch it and indeed got to see about half of it before our toaster decided to fuse all the sockets in the house. I was making a snack while Kings of Leon were on.

The camera is cruel at awards ceremonies, lingering like a rubbernecker at a traffic accident as the losers do their best 'really happy for you' face. When I was interviewing people for that Times piece last week, I spoke to a friend of mine at EMI who attended the awards with one of his artists a few years back. Sadly, the artist didn't win the award they were nominated for and later, no doubt at one of the free-booze-laden aftershows where the real entertainment occurs, they confessed that they had had to work hard on achieving their 'not at all UPSET I HAVEN'T WON' face. Kirsten Scott Thomas who was quoted in the press in the run up to the BAFTAs complaining that it was unfair for Kate Winslet to win both Actress and Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, didn't bother with The Happy Face - she kept her ice cool, insouciance - some would say, snooty look intact when the inevitable happened and Winslet won again and mounted the stage to gush. I applaud her and anyone honest enough to concur with the title of this week's first line - We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.

I've been thinking a bit about professional jealously recently. Not just because of the BRITs or because Morrissey has another bilious album out this week, but also because it seems to me that as this recession deepens, and with it expectations on what is realistic and achievable get 'adjusted' in everyone's lives - including my own - I wonder if the spectre of a colleague doing very much better than you gets easier or harder to bear.

I found myself in meetings in various offices in West London last week, each one with a friend I have known for many years and during each one I stepped out of myself and watched the two of us talking and our body language. Is Ben showing signs of jealously that this person has a nice office and a secure job? Is he being over-deferential? Does the person he is in the meeting with behave in a different way to Ben, knowing that he is now a freelance writer in a recession rather than either a) a mate with a job and no agenda or b) a mate still working within the industry?

I'll be honest, the green-eyed monster did leap out and happy slap me a couple of times during these meetings. Incidentally, a massive aside: I saw Othello for the first time last week (I was reviewing it for thelondonpaper) and the green-eyed monster cliche originates there. Ditto the beast with two backs.

So yes, when I was sitting in Universal Records' subsidised Dean & Deluca style coffee bar, the sunlight dappling onto the lavishly presented promotional posters, I can't deny feeling a frisson of envy that several of my pals are safely ensconced here. And waiting to see a very dear friend in the London offices of CAA, the perfect air-conditioned silence in the meeting room, complete with its cinema-sized widescreen television and designer chairs, made me hanker after the sort of AirMile-rich lifestyle that these office furnishings clearly denoted.

But I didn't hate my friends in a Morrissey way - even if some of them are actually Northern. That same morning I had breakfast with my two Scared Hitless colleagues. Regular readers will know that we've been meeting every Christmas for 14 years since we first had a dabble at running our own indie label. We always have such a good time at these meetings that we've decided to have monthly breakfasts - my other two friends are now so successful, particularly the Northern one, that they don't really have time for lunches. We also decided, credit crunch style, to avoid having power breakfasts in poncy hotels but to meet in proper cafes. This time, because we all had things going on in West London, we decided to meet in Georges cafe behind Olympia. I used to come here a lot when I worked at AOL and I hadn't been there since I visited old AOL-ers when was working in the V2 office in Holland Park.

So to get there in time for breakfast I took the familiar tube route that I'd done for getting on for six years - all the way to Barons' Court then across the appalling Talgarth Road past the University of Hip Hop (I assume that's what they all study there, given the students' strict dress code) and down the fig tree-lined Gliddon Road. This journey, particularly the walk at the end brought back memories of having regular, reasonably normal employment and I had expected to feel a nostalgic yearning for more secure times. Guess what? I felt absolutely overjoyed not to be heading for that terrible black glass building. All the horror of AOL's petty bureaucracy, the passive aggressive bullying and general bad times of that part of my 'career' came flooding back and, like a patient undergoing Jungian therapy I almost broke down on Hammersmith Road and pounded the pavement with my bare fists.

And at breakfast with my two former music business colleagues I felt no jealousy - I am fortunate that they are doing well because they are friends and quite frankly in these times you need all the successful friends you can get.

In Toby Young's column in the Guardian,(always a good read) he uses the Anvil film (directed by a friend of his) to talk about just this sort of professional jealously and comes to the conclusion that as you get older you accept your friends' success much more gracefully. But he also points out that happiness in life is U shaped - you're happy when you're young and again happy when you're older but the most miserable years are your 30s and 40s when you realise the dreams you have are unrealistic and you start to face the reality that you won't perhaps be a pop star, or, I dunno, an international banker.

I'm not sure men ever give up on dreams like these - a mate of mine came up with the theory that this is why old women are generally a lot more sane than old men - because they frequently achieved fulfilment through childbirth and motherhood. Men carry on collecting coins, toy cars or - bit close to home this one - records, and harbouring dreams of becoming international playboys or Internet poker tycoons. That's why grandma is so adorable and wise, while grandpa sits growling in his chair holding a magnifying glass over the Telegraph crossword.

Which takes us back to Coldplay - do you think they really cared about losing out to Elbow? Maybe I was projecting my own suppressed jealousies onto their sweet angelic, internationally successful faces. No, I think they are young and ambitious enough to care. And there is nothing wrong with it; jealously and competitiveness is what drives ambition: no one is successful without it. From lifetime achievement BRIT winner Neil Tenant, who famously admitted putting Pet Shop Boys CDs to the front of record shop racks whenever he had the opportunity, to Paul McCartney who, despite all he has achieved, is still trying to be cool. Even someone you would think was above such pettiness, Franz Kafka, wrote in his diary about his close friend Oscar Baum, another writer in Prague at the time:

Envy of the apparent success of Baum whom I like so much. With this, the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself.

Yes, that ball of wool was present at the BRITs and if I'm honest, is present whenever I see other writers getting features, or indeed getting their calls returned by editors. I'm getting out that Morrissey CD right now in fact ...

"I am angry, I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:08:00 +0000

I am still quivering with excitement. How can this be? I mean, it's only music, right? And I left the venue over 12 hours ago.

I've not written much about live music here and I know the prospect of me 'reviewing' gigs on my blog frankly fills you as well me with dread and ennui - or "On wee wee" as Robyn and I call it. But here's the thing, I went to see Magazine last night and it was the best show I've in seen in, well, years.

Now before you point out that I am, like so many 40 somethings, lowing myself into the Radox bath of nostalgia let me assure that it really wasn't about that. Sure, I loved Magazine when I was younger (although unlike the Buzzcocks, I never saw them live) and the reason I bought tickets for myself, my brother and my wife was largely fueled by nostalgic curiosity.

But by the time we got to the HMV Forum - Christ, when did HMV get into bed with the Forum? I have clearly not been paying enough attention. They are paying Mama Group, who own a whole load of venues (including Hammersmith Apollo where I saw the Buzzcocks - 31 years ago!) over £18million for a 50% stake - surely there is no greater indication of where the CD trade is going than a record shop getting into the live business...

Anyway, so we walked through snow to the HMV Forum and outside, as I expected, were many many men of a certain age. My brother met us there, he hadn't been to the venue for so long I'd had to describe it to him as the Town & Country Club and I suspect that many ticket holders last night were in the same boat. Odd then, that our means of entry were E tickets made on my printer at home - and it was fitting that the Dyson-sized scanner by the box office refused to work and they had to manually punch our ticket numbers in. Yes! Back to nature etc.

When I did a Front Row column about reunion gigs recently, I imagined what the Magazine crowd would look like and pictured the cover of the Curb Your Enthusiasm box set - a sea of shiny domed Larry Davids. That was exactly what it was like. Going to events like this should make me feel old but I felt young. Or younger than the rest of the crowd anyway. Maybe everyone feels like this and that's the reason why they go - they can look at everyone else and think - "ha! unlucky - look how badly they've aged and me, well, I've still got it. I am adorable compared to these chumps."

If it had been just myself and my brother we would have been dairnner front, I promise. Well, maybe. But I confess, we sat down upstairs, how very old of us. But we did this largely so Robyn could see; old punks in their late 40s and 50s seem to much bigger and rangier than younger music fans. I noticed this at a Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros gig years ago and my theory at the time was that they had been given free school milk when they were kids in the 60s. Even I would have struggled to see over their shoulders, so Robyn wouldn't have had a hope.

Placed on each seat upstairs was the first indication that this reunion show was decidedly not a run of the mill affair: a beautifully presented Malcolm Garrett-designed flyer illustrating the merchandise available in the venue and online. OK, so you could argue that the £50 man is being exploited - and indeed the posters cost exactly that amount of money. But the fact is, this merchandise was incredibly well thought-out and had no whiff of tack or tat about it. Being more of a 50p man these days, I bought a mug for a fiver with "I know the meaning of life" on one side and "it doesn't help me a bit" on the other in a Malcolm Garrett font. Genius. I'm drinking coffee out of it as I write this.

I won't give you a blow by blow account of the show - you'll be able to get those from the proper grown-up reviews. I'll put a link to Pete Paphides' review in The Times when it comes through, as he made use of my Devoto anal retention plus I suggested a little tweak for his final line which he was gracious enough to accept. Incidentally, earlier this week he asked me to write a piece in tomorrow's Saturday Review about the BRITs and the British music industry - I foolishly wrote it in the voice and style I use here so it needed some serious tweakage, which he did for me and still let me take the lion's share of the credit. What a chap.

What I will say about the Magazine show is this: Howard Devoto where have you been? For someone who has apparently been working in a picture library for the last 20 years or so, there is absolutely no rust on his performance and he moves like a dancer.

Before they come onstage, the lights go down and we hear his disembodied voice - serious and yet with an ironic lilt to it as if to say "I know this is a bit of fun but let's pretend it's really sombre and see what happens" - he explains Dave Formula's phone call which snowballed the reunion.

Then out of darkness we see a youthful skinny-tied John Doyle who picks up his sticks and begins the military tattoo of The Light Pours Out Of Me. Then more light on... fuck me Barry Adamson looks amazing! Rake thin, top hat, shades! Then another spotlight on Noko who manages to be dressed entirely in red and not look like a twat. "If I was his partner and he told me he planned to dress all in red" says Robyn, "I would have said, 'honey, don't do it to yourself' but he's rocking that look!" He also manages to completely nail every John McGeoch nuance. Then Formula - the man who put it all together - mounts his podium-full of analogue keyboards, wearing a trilby at a rakish angle, by which time we've noticed the amazing Linder-designed backdrop which recreates the Real Life artwork but adds many more faces. And then finally in three quarter-length black peddle pushers, sailing shoes and an enormous Bond villain white dinner jacket comes Devoto to deafening applause: "Time flies..." Indeed it does, Howard, 28 years.

The rest of the set is a proper selection of all the songs any fan would want bar an inexplicably missing Give Me Everything. They do a smattering of B sides (Twenty Years Ago, I Love You You Big Dummy) and Devoto is balletic and graceful visually and throws in several of his trademark asides ("Here's a song about anger, duplicity and frozen desserts").They get a standing ovation and bow with arms around one another like they've just played Madison Square Garden.

I never realised I knew every word of Model Worker, Song From Under The Floorboards or even the spoken word Kafka-lite b-side The Book off by heart. But I did and I sang along and whooped and realised a million things about Magazine and myself and the world. I never realised quite how funky they were, what good musical taste (the choices of cover - Sly Stone, Captain Beefheart...) how timeless, how timely, how many female backing vocals they used (and how perfect the Ipso Facto singer was for them), how great it is to see a bald man be so cool, and just how huge Morrissey's debt to them is.

Not Joy Division, not the Smiths, not the Stone Roses - beyond Manchester: it all starts and ends here.

"I want to be rich and I want lots of money ..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:10:00 +0000

Tell you what. An admission - for which I don't stand to gain anything other than ridicule - I haven't heard the current albums by:

The Killers
Razorlight
Kaiser Chiefs
Franz Ferdinand
Lilly Allen
Lady Gaga
White Lies
Anthony & The Johnsons
And this week's number one - the new Bruce Springsteen album

Now, maybe you haven't either, and perhaps you'd consider the quest to hear all new releases in the rock or indie genre a bit on the sad or obsessive side. But I take pride in having my own opinion about current releases, so I don't go around repeating accepted truths about the new Snow Patrol album being a bit dull. For now I'm going to estimate my opinion of these albums (rather like the Tax Office asks you, if you're self-employed, how much you expect to earn), I'll let you know at the end.

Normally I do try to buy new albums - as I documented a couple of weeks ago, I think I bought more music last year than ever before. But also, where I can, I take advantage of knowing some nice people in record companies who will occasionally slip me a promo copy. This year, however, I seem to have lost my mojo. Some of you reading this will be familiar with the Blagger's Shuffle - that distinctive linger by the record company's stock cupboard in the hope of someone from the press office finding the key- or these days the digital version thereof, involving an email starting with the line - "Hi ____, how are things?" before brutally cutting to the chase: "I hear the new album from ______ is really good - do you have a spare copy you could send me?"

I'm generally quite good at this, largely because I slip the odd request into what I hope is a much deeper and more profound relationship with my friends with record company jobs. But I have to admit that in the distant past when I worked at Warners and RCA, I was guilty of having relationships with people at other record companies based solely on their ability to furnish me with new releases. This was fine as I represented exactly the same thing to them. Now I have nothing to offer in return other than my scintillating company.

Now I write about music in other places apart from here, I have started getting the occasional thing in the post, which is lovely - I made a point of phoning Genesis' PR when I did that Phil Collins piece on Radio 4 and they sent me the fantastic box set. Hooray for them.

But as that above list testifies to, I've just not had the pluck to ask people for these releases. And why haven't I bought them? OK, OK, OK - I admit, I don't like buying albums I suspect I won't like on the off chance. I know I'll probably like the Lady Gaga, Lilly Allen and Franz albums so they are on my list, but I can't bring myself to buy Razorlight's latest despite wanting to hear it. Stupid? Or prudent?

And before you start accusing me of Limewire ignorance or that I could have checked out a number of these albums on Myspace streamed exclusives - can I point out that I am a father of two? I can't find the web hours to devote to trawling for online exclusives. OK, so I have just started using Spotify which, along with the Onion's updates on Twitter, is my new favourite thing.

And that's probably why I have single-handedly failed to hear these all-important new albums - like the rest of us, I'm spending all of my waking hours trying to make a living.

But here's a thought about time and money: on Monday - the day it snowed in Britain more than it's snowed for 18 years - an interesting report was published. The report concluded that our 'aggressive pursuit of personal success' is apparently now the greatest threat to British children. Now, I haven't read the report and by all accounts a lot of it is idealistic and/or stating the bleedin' obvious, but isn't it ironic that on the same day as it came out, all the schools closed due to the weather. And all those otherwise selfish parents were forced to spend time with their and children making snowmen, tobogganing and having fun. Did you notice how everyone just dropped their important things - largely courtesy of the UK transport network throwing a wobbly and refusing to take them to work - and for a day, and in some cases two days, the rat race was forgotten and snowball fighting was aggressively pursued. Incidentally did you know that it was Groundhog Day on Monday too?

Actually, if I'm totally honest, on Monday, my daughter went and made snowmen with her friends over the road and I stayed at home and aggressively pursued some people to give me writing jobs. Frankly, my time would have been better spent making snowmen with Maddy. Or having another bash at getting my hands on the Lady Gaga album.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh yes, here's my Musebin- style one line reviews of what I expect to think of those albums:

The Killers - a pleasure while its on only to quickly slip into the background, never to be played again. Incidentally, remember glam rock bands in the 70s like The Sweet who had one very androgynous member who looked good in tinfoil whilst the three other fellas posed like reluctant builders in drag? Hmm ...

Razorlight - I honestly really liked the debut album by this lot but the memory of the cheap-suited businessman sitting opposite me on a train to Leeds listening to the last Razorlight album on his laptop, haunts me to this day.

Kaiser Chiefs - I liked approximately 5 seconds of last year's single Never Miss A Beat- the bit about wanting crisps for tea.

Franz Ferdinand - this will be another FF album and I can't wait. Actually, I can wait can't I? And I still am.

Lilly Allen - the single is magnetic. Almost as good as Foundations by Kate Nash. One of those records that you love regardless of who it is but because it's her, it's even better. A pop star to be cherished. If only her dad her suggested signing her when I ran his label.

Lady Gaga - I suspect I will enjoy this like the aforementioned Killers album.

White Lies - the bits I have enjoyed are ones reminiscent of other bands. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Or just a sign that I am old?

Anthony & The Johnsons - Like music fans everywhere I will be concentrating hard on liking this whilst secretly hankering after a few more tunes.

The new Bruce Springsteen album - the expression 'a safe pair of hands' springs to mind.

"Back in the garage with my bullshit detector."

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Wardle) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:32:00 +0000

I'm standing in the Purple Turtle in Camden. Outside it's raining and the wind is blowing copies of London Lite across the streets. Inside there is a small audience, most of whom seem to be industry types - I see a ageing manager I recognise from the early 90s, an A&R man whose name escapes me, a dusty old radio promotions guy who I see at every gig I go to... There is an atmosphere of treadmillery in the room. Or maybe it's just me. I'm here, as ever, as a spectator. I'm sitting in the A&Rmchair, commenting from the sidelines, not having to invest money or time in whoever it is on stage. Phew.

Tonight's support band plug in and almost the moment the singer opens his mouth I know it's time to leave. It's not that he's got a bad voice, or that the band are exceptionally awful either. In fact, if they were exceptionally awful I'd be more inclined to stay. They are young and clean and play with energy and determination but it's a heart-sinking spectacle - imagine all the rehearsals, all the intense discussions about the name, the lyrics and the 'look'. As it is I can't tell you what they sounded like or even what they looked like - apart from the fact that they are a three piece and the bassist has nice hair. At one point the guitarist/singer plays a clanging Wellerish riff and my 40-something synapses liven up. But then he starts singing in his dreary voice and the band lose me again.

Me and my gig mate leave after 3 songs and return to the pub over the road. We've both done this many many times. He still does A&R for his own label. Over drinks we have a conversation that maybe everyone in the music business is having this January:

-- Where are the exciting new bands?
-- Is trying to get a major record deal as an indie band now a pointless exercise?
-- Are we too old to be going to gigs?
-- What else could we do instead?
-- Just a half? Why not a pint? I'm having a pint!
-- Will the White Lies album keep its midweek of 1? (It did)
-- Are they any good?
-- Preferred Fear of Flying (WL's previous incarnation)
-- Me too
-- Is that why we're in this pub and not drinking fine wine at The Ivy?

OK, so maybe some of the topics covered aren't entirely universal, but I'm not going to relay the whole thing because it would be an episode of Last Of The Britpop Wine. Compo and whatever the others were called.

Talking of age - and let's face it, that's what I talk about here - one interesting development in music seems to be happening in the life of the older music fan: Playing it.

You may recall that a few weeks before Christmas I went into a studio with my brother to record a demo. Well, since then me and Russell - the Guardian-reading Sly 'n' Robbie, the riddim section with the mostest ear hair etc - we've been lending our 'talents' to another singer.

So far we've had two rehearsals with our new singer, Jess. She's got a proper bluesy voice, writes a robust song and miraculously hasn't fallen down in hysterics the moment we get our groove 'on'. Frankly, I've not had as much fun in a small room with two other people since well, the days of hanging out in the loos at Smashing. The weird thing is, I can't understand why I've not played music for fun for such a long time. It's not as if I'm a particularly adept bass player, but pulling a tune together in 20 minutes, experimenting a bit with arrangments (obviously Russell and I go for a reggae beat every single time then usually end up admitting that it doesn't quite gel with songs that sound like early Van Morrison and slip into a shufflely skiffle thing) well, that's all you need to have a good time.

I suppose it must be like going for a kickabout on a Sunday, or fishing, or playing golf. I don't know, I've never been interested in sport so I may be wrong. The one big difference is that there is normally a competitive edge with sport - it's all maths and size and who's better than who. With us at the moment, the only competition is who out of me or Russell can get away with saying the filthiest thing in front of Jess. How mature. Of course it turns out that Jess can outfilth us both without batting an eyelid. She even suggested we should call our band the Japanese word for getting an erection on public transport. I can't remember it, I'm afraid, perhaps you know. I want us to be called Younger Model.

At the last rehearsal there was a proper band in the room adjacent to ours. When I say proper, I mean young and taking it seriously. It's a great place where we rehearse (I'm not going to tell you where it is otherwise you'll all go and book it) but the one downside is that that you hear others rehearsing when you stop playing. You can see them too. From where I was standing with my wife's bass, slung sexy Simonon-style over me, I could see through the window in our door over to the adjacent room where a bass player half my age and with four times as much hair was giving it the full-on Kasabian. In a flash it became apparent that other bands were at it and could arguably be better. "We'll have their guitarist by spring" I told Jess with mock bravado,
"Are we going to play live?" asked Russell
"Of course, when we've got a name and six songs rehearsed," Jess said confidently.
Russell and I looked at each other - this woman really means it. So we do actually have to take this seriously. Bollocks.

Back at the pub opposite the Purple Turtle, my gig mate and I decide not to bother going back to the venue. We call it a night and walk back to his car. The headliners are on now and we can hear them through the wall as we walk past the venue. I can tell that I don't like them even through the wall. And that's probably what the lustrous-haired bass player in the adjacent rehearsal room said about us.