Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 24
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 24: Five Go Mad in Tossa De Mar
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
It was a weird time for music in the early 2000s. The arrival of Napster had stabbed the rule book of the potential economic value of music in the back, then they arrival of streaming, even in its most primitive stages, services like MySpace, had twisted that knife around a bit, beaten it over the head with a club, then buried it in the back garden and had a little bit of a dance about on its grave. Suddenly all music ever was absolutely everywhere, all the time, and completely free to listen to.
In the late nineties I had sat in as an advisor on various encounters between artists and record labels in the gold rush of post Britpop signings. Obscenely ridiculous amounts of money were being thrown at projects which couldn’t possibly hope to get it all back. In one meeting I tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade a band with exactly six songs not to accept a deal which appeared, to their untrained eyes, to contain wealth and riches beyond the imagination of most musicians. Strip away the dazzling headlights of it and look under its bonnet, however, and what you were actually looking at was an opportunity to get into three quarters of a million pounds of debt on the promise of releasing two singles, thinking about an album, and spending the gross domestic product of a small country on a video. That video was, completely coincidentally, to be made by another division of the same company that were offering to release the single, a not uncommon practice at the time. Legend had it that one of the biggest selling acts of the second wave of Britpop had signed a deal for their first album which failed to notice not just this clause, an internalised video production budget which they were committed to pay for from their advance, but also the very salient and pertinent fact that the record company could make as many of these videos as it liked from any of the album tracks if it elected to release them as singles. When the album subsequently took off in an unpredictable way that exceeded expectations, the decision was made, miraculously, to issue seven singles. With seven videos. And seven video budgets.
Hunter S Thompson apparently did not actually say "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." He was allegedly misquoted and was, in truth, referring to the TV industry. I’m going to offer that whether or not he did say it, he definitely should have.
The music industry is, was, and always will be, a field of dreams, so obviously no amount of protestations on my part would prevent the three band members from signing this absurd contract, preferring to ditch their semi-manager, yours truly, rather than turn down the guaranteed opportunity it presented to become stadium filling rock stars. The first single went on to scale the dizzy heights of number 43 in the chart for one week, and the video, the one that together with the marketing campaign meant to ensure its success had eaten up more than half of their supposed riches before the money could ever land in any bank account the band had access to, vanished into one play at 3am on a Tuesday on a minor video channel. There was to be no second single, no album. Just a recoupable advance bill running to hundreds of thousands of pounds which they had individually become personally liable for. Fast forward fifteen years and I found one member of the band teaching industry economics at a well known music college. I like to imagine every lesson he led started with a red flashing sign that simply said ‘Warning: Do Not Enter’
Having spent most of the late nineties frittering away vast sums like this, the recorded industry now found itself flat broke, as every student and school kid in the world simply stopped going to record shops and started filling up various devices with all the music ever made. For almost the first time since music began to be recorded, it had become extremely unusual for the vast majority of artists to be able to make a living out of recording their music and selling it. However, the value of the song, as a piece of copyright owned by musicians from the very first point of creation, wasn’t as damaged by that new reality as you might at first think. Happening contemporaneously with this huge collapse in the ability to sell records, very significant new opportunities opened up for synching - the licensing of music to appear in other entertainment. Much of that was in gaming, but film and TV producers also started getting more imaginative with the way that they used music.
Mr Furia and Profesor Manso had already made a whole album of songs by the time I entered the picture. This collection of sounds, The Pink Connection, was perfectly designed for this new world of opportunities. Every track on it already felt like it was from a late sixties spy movie, a sort of loungey electronica sound they had stumbled into accidentally due to Furia being a music obsessive and Manso being a wizard at sound manipulation. This noise was new, exciting, and it played equally well in clubs and on the radio as it had the potential to do in a film or a TV show. They’d created something fairly unique, and had done it in an eccentric way that was an essential part of their process. Others were obsessed by sampling the back catalogue of music, an initially groundbreaking and exploratory use of sound that had already begun to coalesce around a fairly limited pallet of highly over used drum breaks, bass lines and horn melodies. The Pinkers had experimented with this, then rejected it in favour of the unique idea of making, from scratch, their own music on the basis of half recalling what they thought something might sound like if you’d heard it as a child in an episode of Mission Impossible. Then they took that recording, already fuzzily distant from its loosely remembered source, sampled and manipulated it. The outcome was the aural equivalent of a permanent feeling of Deja Vu, a sound you had definitely not heard before but your brain kept telling you that you must have. Music supervisors, the people who make the decisions about what you hear on adverts, programmes and movies, absolutely loved it.
The first tricky thing I had to manage was to extricate them from an agreement they had signed in a rush because they really wanted to get a record out. The other contracted party was a perfectly nice chap who ran a vinyl record store in Barcelona, and it gave him the rights to use this music in all formats everywhere. My first thought was to simply take over the licensing of it for Mr Vinyl and work out a deal where he got some reward for the rather one sided contract he’d persuaded them to sign. After I presented him with the first fruits of this work, however, it quickly became clear that he had literally no idea what licensing was, how the music industry worked, and certainly not any experience of helping artists to make money from their works. I secured a deal for a European label to issue one EP of their work for an advance of 8,000 euros, with a royalty split of 30% for the artist. He wrote back suggesting it should be 70% for the artist and what about 100,000 euros. I’m guessing a lot of people reading this won’t know what sort of percentages and advances you might expect to get for such a deal, so for comparison let me offer that at this time the Beatles were getting a 25% split. I had a lot of confidence in the band, but I wasn’t imagining they were about to write Hey Jude.
There’s a little known, but hugely important, element of contract law that comes in useful in this sort of situation, and any musicians reading this who may have found themselves in a similar contractual conundrum might want to keep it in mind. A contract exists as a legal agreement when both sides to the contract can deliver the thing that it says they are going to do in the terms and conditions of the paper they are signing. For example, if I sign a contract with you that I will help you build a palace in your back garden, that contract only has any legal standing if I can demonstrate that I know how to build a palace, and have access to the materials and tools that might help me do it. I can do a terrible job of it, maybe installing a rickety shed and writing the words ‘this is a palace’ on it in crayon, but if I don’t actually have any idea how to even attempt that relatively lowly, but agreement compliant, version of it then my side of the contract isn’t legally robust. Because when I signed the agreement with you I didn’t actually have any ability to make my side of the bargain happen. Conversely, if you agree with me I can build a palace in your back garden and you don’t actually have a back garden, we don’t really have a contract. Someone should probably have told Menswear that because when they signed their two album deal in 1996 they had written exactly two songs, neither of which indicated any likelihood of them being able to write a whole album.
In our particular case, Mr Vinyl had read a whole bunch of stuff about what record contracts look like, cut and pasted one together out the back of the Peter Grant book of terrible things that people do in the music industry, then got the two of them to willingly sign it because, like every other musician, they just really wanted to release a record. I phone up the Legal Beagle and ask him what he thinks. He considers it for a couple of days, then sends a letter to Mr Vinyl asking him where his spaceship is and when our clients can expect to have their recordings placed in its cargo hold so that he can honour his side of the deal to ‘distribute the music to all known or unknown parts of the universe’.
We swiftly reach the mutual conclusion that he won’t be buying a controlling interest in NASA to reach out to any life-forms in Alpha Centauri that might be a potential unexplored market for their music. We send him a nice cheque for his work so far, then the Legal Beagle and I establish a new record label. It’s main purpose is to put out the records so that in the background we can create the atmosphere to sell the music into other things. Music Supervisors love physical product, so the purpose of the new label is to create some for them. The Pink Connection becomes the BCN Connection, and we very quickly sign a deal to put that out in Japan which, in turn, immediately results in us selling 45 seconds of one track to a games company so that every time a character appears in their latest game you hear Pinker Tones music. This one deal pays the money required for Furia and Manso to start work on the follow up album, and we negotiate a way of working which, believe it or not, is an almost entirely new and surprisingly unexplored method of helping musicians to eat and live somewhere: We start paying them a monthly fee. We will continue this arrangement for the next ten years.
Initially this project is an entirely studio based endeavour. However, the music is starting to get picked up in some very cool clubs and bars in some very cool cities. This presents another potential source of income, but we aren’t really sure what this looks like as a live concept. It is at this point that the third hero of this little gang enters the picture in the shape of DJ Nino. He has movie star looks, the energy of a cat on meth amphetamine making its way across a hot tin roof, and is a multi-instrumentalist whirlwind who has taught himself to use two turntables like they are a twin necked guitar. He sticks himself between Furia and Manso, acting simultaneously as percussionist, drummer, beat master and sound technician and we have a live show. While we are working this out, the first single, Mais Pourquoi, has taken an incredibly convoluted route onto the playlist of MTV Europe, a story involving a six hour drive to Cannes, France, a Dutch record label based in Melbourne, Australia, the cancellation of the release of a guaranteed dance floor classic after its Italian protagonist is arrested for drug smuggling, and the simple but effective process I have taken towards everything else in this book; try to be in the right place at the right time. We are announced on the playlist one spot below Black Eyed Peas, so the MD of MTV Europe has the brilliant idea that we should join the current worldwide chart topping stars on a beach in Tossa De Mar for their first ever Spanish show at an event called the Isles of MTV.
Tossa De Mar is a beautiful picturesque seaside town nestled behind the hills of northern Catalunya. It is incredibly difficult to access by road, requiring a long and winding trip through the mountains. We are housed in a hotel some thirty kilometres away, but have been assured that transport will be laid on for us.
The newly expanded Pinkers have created a live show which requires a massive amount of vintage Moogs, drum pads, decks, cassettes, things you wave your hands at and things you stick into other things that make everything go ‘wheeeeeee… bang’. To accommodate this floor filling hardware, a separate stage has been constructed on the beach which sits in the middle of a specially created dance floor laid on top of the sand. The complexity of this new live version of the operation, and its potential to go wrong or just fall apart, requires a safe pair of hands, and there are none safer in my experience than those belonging to Big Paul, a man I have known for quite a few years through a variety of London promotions and events.
Big Paul, who the Pinkers will come to refer to as ‘Daddy Paul’ because of the care and attention he will give them over many years, has the number one quality that all the best tour managers share. He can say ‘no’ incredibly politely, firmly, and with no question at all left in anyone’s mind that the answer is actually, definitively, incontrovertibly, no. And it won’t be changing to a ‘maybe’ and certainly won’t get within two hundred miles of a ‘yes’. This is a very particular skill that few people can achieve without seeming to be difficult or confrontational, but it’s one he is an absolute master of. No one ever leaves cross or angry with him or the band after he deploys it, and you will often find someone backstage that he has, effectively, told to fuck off cheerfully doing what he wants with a smile on their face.
A van arrives at the hotel to collect the vast swathe of equipment this new show we have created requires. We go to get in the back with it all when the driver steps in to stop us, explaining that separate travel has been arranged by the Isles of MTV sponsor. We are stood in the driveway as our stage tools depart, when several loud tooting and honking sounds, accompanied by an angry whine of engines, announces the arrival of our personal transportation. The sponsors of the event, it turns out, are the car firm Mini. They have arranged for each member of the performing band to travel to the event in one car each, a red one, a blue one and, of course, a white one. The drivers are dressed as though we are actors in the Italian Job, and proceed to take us to the site in a driving style last attempted during the getaway scene. After screaming our way through the winding mountain roads, we hurtle directly on to the beach, spin the wheels a few times doing handbrake turns, then fall out of the cars into the backstage area.
The Pinkers perform an hour long set for about 5,000 people, then we hang out with Will.I.Am, Taboo, and Apl.de.Ap for bit, watch Fergie flirt around DJ Nino, stand side of stage while the crowd goes wild for all their biggest hits, raid the after show party for every single thing it’s possible to take into your body in the pursuit of happiness, then get pushed back into the cars and driven back again.
If I’d known it was going to be this easy to become the manager of some fledgingly rock stars I would have done it years ago.
Of course, this sort of treatment wasn’t going to be how it would usually pan out, for the band or for me. The headwinds of a negative economic spiral for the music industry, alongside the sheer relentless grind of trying to break any act at an international level, would make the next ten years of work we did together seem like an almost impossible task at times. There would be flights, fights, missing luggage, rows, deportations, awards, and failures to win awards. There were visas, more visas, even more visas, plus some visas to get visa appointments to get considered for a visa. But that first event set a tone and ambition for what we wanted to achieve and how we were going to try to do it. We had created a little family and we were determined to try to get as much fun out of it as possible.
It’s a very big world. If you are prepared to get out and see every part of it, there is quite a lot of fun to be had.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: