Post-graduation, in the early Nineties, I was certain of two seemingly
contradictory things. 1) I didn't want a proper job of any description just
yet, thank you very much, and 2) I wanted - after four years of university
plus two of playing guitar in a penniless indie band - to earn some money.
Both lazy and avaricious, without even knowing it I was already an ideal
candidate for a career in the music business.
Shortly afterwards I stumbled into a job in the marketing department of the
now-defunct major label London Records. London specialised in bright, shiny
pop music - Bananarama, East 17, All Saints, Fine Young Cannibals. It was
the sort of label that favoured that week's chart position over long-term
artist development.
The marketing meetings were an eye-opener. Records were “this useless,
stinking piece of shit”. Artists were “clowns”, “losers” and “spastics”.
Like many a bright-eyed newbie before me I was quickly, viciously, disabused
of the notion that record companies loved music.
It also soon became apparent that, if you were lazy and avaricious enough,
there was only one area of the music business to be in. The kind of area
where you could reasonably expect to be handed a six-figure salary, a BMW
and a bottomless expense account in return for rolling out of bed at noon. A&R
- Artiste and Repertoire, to give the full handle - is responsible for
finding and developing new talent.
The name is a genteel hangover from another era, reeking of civility and
respect, of Ahmet Ertegun in a spun-silk suit leafing through some sheet
music with Ray Charles. The reality was somewhat different: a generation of
twentysomethings blasted to the gills on cocaine, tearing around the world
trying not to lose their jobs by doing something crazy. Like actually
signing a band.
Inevitably I bluffed and blustered my way in. In the autumn of 1995 I went to
a party in a Mayfair nightclub. The entertainment was provided by an
easy-listening orchestra called the Mike Flowers Pops. I thought no more
about it until a few days later when Chris Evans played Flowers's version of
Wonderwall on his Radio 1 show. I gave Mike a call. A few weeks later we
(note - when an act is succeeding an A&R man will always use the
inclusive pronoun. When they fail they become “they”) nearly scored the
Christmas No1, shipping nearly half a million singles, and like that - bosh!
- I was a major-label A&R man.
There is a Hunter S.Thompson quote that has become the music industry's Magna
Carta: “The music industry is a cruel and shallow money-trench. A long
plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.
There is also a negative side.” It's appropriate enough given that the
dominant emotions within A&R culture are fear and loathing: fear that
you had - or were about to - signed the wrong thing. Loathing because one of
your peers had just signed the right thing.
“No one knows anything,” runs the Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman's
maxim about Hollywood. None of the executives responsible for choosing hit
films has the slightest idea what will work and what won't: the
effects-laden blockbuster stiffs while the quirky little film no one wanted
to make cleans up. So it goes in A&R - the can't-miss band goes belly up
on the first single and that strange little indie record sells by the
truckload.
I quickly learnt a key fundamental for survival in meetings - say everything
with absolute certainty and as though your life depended upon it. I saw a
very senior industry figure (someone who, in all likelihood, has signed and
developed music which you own) throw the first White Stripes record out of a
fourth floor window with the words: “No one will ever - ever - be having
this f***ing nonsense!”
I went one further. As the last chords of a mildy hot demo hung in the air I
punctured the silence in the conference room with: “Is anyone really going
to be having another bunch of sub-Radiohead drivel?” Thus did I terminate
our company's interest in the emerging Coldplay.
As you've probably gathered, there was a problem with my A&R career. I was
absolutely terrible at it. But then again, so was everyone else. You were a
success if you could produce a profitable act every two or three years.
Which meant picking the right act just once biennially out of thousands of
demos and hundreds of gigs. Of course virtually no one manages this. In a
neat twist on “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”, the Wildean
epithet about the foxhunting English upper classes, here was the
unbelievable in pursuit of the unlistenable.
And pursue we did, jetting off every other month to some exotic location for a
“convention”; a scarcely credible four-day holocaust of drugs and
expense-account abuse. Miami for the Winter Music Conference, Cannes for
MIDEM, Cologne for Pop Komm, New York for CMJ, Texas for South by South
West: hundreds of A&R men spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on
flights and entertainment. In a good year these conventions might produce
one signing of note.
Of course, spending your twenties flying around the world on a diet of vodka
and cocaine while being wildly overpaid does not make for reasonable,
well-adjusted people. Arrogant? At a Janet Jackson party in the penthouse of
the Chrysler Building I casually tossed my coat to Benny Medina, thinking he
was a bouncer. Medina probably had better things to do: he was managing
Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey at the time.
How were these levels of squander and buffoonery sustainable? Thanks to our
good friend the compact disc. Today you can walk into Asda or Tesco and pick
up an LP for seven or eight quid. Back in the mid- to late nineties a new
release routinely cost £12 to £15 - nearly £30 in today's money. Factor in
manufacturing costs of a few pence per unit and a royalty rate to the artist
of about a quid and you're have a profit margin to make Third World
sweatshop owners wince.
It seemed that the artificially inflated good times would roll for ever.
Britpop lurched towards its swollen apogee. I remember standing in the
corporate hospitality box at Oasis's Maine Road show in the spring of 1996,
being entertained by jugglers and fire eaters, a glass of cold champagne in
one hand. Far below, tens of thousands of tolers (industry shorthand for the
lumpen proletariat who buy the product) gleefully smashed up Moss Side. I
was thinking, “And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain” ... or,
more likely, “Where's the dealer?”
But, of course, elsewhere, the meter was running. By the time the new
millennium was dawning I had an infant son I barely knew and a karma balance
so overdrawn I would need to help several old ladies across the road every
day for the remainder of many lifetimes to get it anywhere near the black.
A few years later (I was never any good at leaving a party early) I finally
left the music industry for good. I became a novelist and decided to use my
experiences, not to satirise the music industry so much as to blowtorch it.
As the resultant book has begun to do the rounds I've re-established contact
with a few people from my time in the business and I keep hearing the same
things again and again: “It's tough out there ... redundancies all over ...”
The late Nineties are increasingly starting to resemble a glorious last hurrah
for the music industry, a spangled fall-of-Rome era. The sales of CDs have
declined year-on-year since 2000. Profit margins have been decimated. Bands
give their music away free with newspapers to drive up ticket sales for
their profitable live shows - a complete reversal of the time where an act
lost money on the road in order to drive CD sales.
As an industry acquaintance put it recently, A&R men “used to go and see
their band playing at Wembley and think: ‘I'm the king!' Now they are
thinking: ‘I'm the only guy not making any money out of this!'”
Somehow I doubt we'll be holding a telethon any time soon ...
John Niven's novel Kill Your Friends is published by William Heinemann. He
will be reading from the book at the Pineapple, Kentish Town, London NW5
(020-7284 4631), on Feb 20
great, great and funny piece..looking forward to the book
Diego , buenos aires,
"Well adjusted" people never achieve anything, it's the freaks on the tails of the Bell Curve who are the movers and shakers. What's so good about "well adjusted"?
Cary Thomas, Bath, UK
Anyone who did their best to prevent the public's exposure to the abomination that is Coldplay has my undying respect and admiration.
ian, gloucester,