Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 12
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 12: When I’m Famous I’m Going to Buy This Place and Sack the Lot of You
(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)
A venue’s reputation can be built on a single decision.
After several years of booking bands from various agencies I had built up a little address book of numbers to call to fill the diary. The phone would regularly ring with offers of acts who wanted to play. There wasn’t really a science to it, it relied more on confidence in whoever you were speaking to and a good nose for bullshit. Bullshit, it should be said, is the absolutely essential fuel on which the grassroots circuit is run, a fact I am always trying to impress on companies and brands trying to sell the people who run venues anything. In an average week, a booker for a small venue should expect to be told roughly 100 times that the act he’s never heard of will definitely sell out the venue and will shortly be slightly bigger than The Beatles. As such, our tolerance for bullshit is incredibly low, but our ability to spot the actual diamond among the steaming pile of boid mammal excrement is also significantly lower than you might expect.
It is in this atmosphere of disbelieving caution, and our ongoing circumstances of incredibly tight finances, that I one day take an exploratory call from a regular normal human being who has accidentally, and unfortunately, become an agent for touring artists.
Recognising that not everyone reading this book will have a deep understanding of all the roles within the music industry, let’s take a small detour down a pathway that leads to understanding what the agent does and why. Until about 1965ish, bands used to do tours and play shows because the manager would phone up the booker (the person who controlled the diary at a performance space) and ask for the opportunity to play. That’s how the vast majority of the Beatles shows got booked - directly by the manager, Mr Brian Epstein, to the booker, Dirty Derek who runs the Diary for the venue in Dingley Dell.
Around the end of 1964, Epstein noticed that he was able to book multiple shows by making one phone call to certain bookers who controlled more than one diary. This got discussed by various managers, and they came up with the brilliant idea that perhaps those bookers should work for them instead of the venues, and a sort of half job somewhere between a promoter and an agent was created. What happened next is that all the venues realised that they weren’t getting the shows they wanted any more, so they employed bookers to make sure they did. So now the chain of command settled on the lines of artists tells manager they want to go on tour, manager tells agent, agent phones booker, show happens.
Sometime in the early 1970s, a bunch of the previous bookers that the managers had turned into agents got talking and realised that they could book multiple events by phoning one of the people who had replaced them, because in turn those bookers now controlled more than one diary, and so they , in turn, thought it would be a wizard wheeze if those bookers came and worked for them. Of course, the halls quickly realised, again, that they weren’t getting the shows they wanted. So of course, like last time, they went out and hired their own bookers. The bookers hired by the agents that used to be bookers then became national promoters, with the chain of command now expanded so it went artist to manager to agent to national promoter to booker. Believe it or not it didn’t stop there, and by the mid-nineties a lot of tours ran down a command chain that went artist to manager to agent to national promoter to regional promoter to local promoter to booker. I bet Epstein would never have started all this if he had known.
Within all this, the role of the agent became redefined not so much as the person who could guarantee that the artist would be able to play at a certain number of venues they controlled, but rather to ensure that the whole chain of command only did what the agent thought was good for the career, or the wallet, of the manager. And sometimes the artist. I hope all my agent friends reading this won’t mind me pointing out that this has resulted in the development of certain characteristics among most agents which are essential to the success of their careers but not necessarily beneficial to their role as human beings. Principal among these qualities is an almost psychopathic devotion to the ability to not care if you have upset someone, a skill to which I return frequently as this book progresses. However, some perfectly regular normal human beings have accidentally stumbled into this profession despite this lack of a lack of empathy, and made perfectly worthwhile careers out of it.
The nature of agenting is that it is far from being an exact science; actually, let’s be honest, the entire music industry is very far from being an exact science. An agent rarely signs a band because he just likes them. They, like all of us, follow a buzz around an artist, get alerted when other agents are sniffing around a signing, and hone into to acquire the rights to represent an act when there is a reasonable prospect that somebody wants to book it. None of those skills requires a specific taste in music, it’s really much more about a highly tuned radar for who, what, where, why, and when that will cause a pack of agents to descend on the Camden Falcon on a Tuesday night and fight each other in the parking lot about who gets to represent that unknown band some bloke called Chris Martin has put together.
The other thing agents have is contacts, and those contacts flow in two distinctly different directions. The first set of contacts is fairly obvious, it is the venues and promoters that can make the show happen. The other set is actually much more important, and agents acquire it by nurturing managers, labels, PR people, radio producers, just about anyone who has an ear to the ground. This set of contacts is a fairly robust and protected circle in the early 1990s; the circle around an agent tends to bring all the acts it has heard about or started working with to one specific agent or agency. It’s a pack mentality. The Pack hunts for new acts together then serve them up to their favoured agent.
The Pack is an excitable bunch of enthusiastic people. The nature of the pack means that it frequently finds itself in a state of high fever about an act which is going to trouble the vaguest of passing interest of literally nobody outside of a NW1 postcode. However, every so often, to repeat, this is a million miles away from an exact science, this pack will accidentally stumble upon an act which is actually the thing they claim every act they find is, by which I mean that their description that the act is ‘life-changing’, ‘unmissable’ and ‘the greatest thing since pop tarts’ will occasionally align itself with reality. It is 1994, and The Pack is about to hit a run of luck which will create careers, establish reputations, and, completely unintentionally, save our little club in a disused toilet in Tunbridge Wells.
Thus it is one day that I receive what will prove to be the fate loaded call from the regular normal human being who has accidentally become an agent. He has some hot news for me, the opportunity to present what everyone in January 1994 agrees is the next big thing on the indie scene, the band that is going to get things moving again, the band everyone will want to see. The Pack has seen the future of Rock and Roll and it’s name is…. Whiteout.
Whiteout were a Scottish band who’d been around for a bit but their latest single ‘No Time’ had shifted them on to the Saturday morning Chart Show, where the video is selected one morning for a national TV play as it is high in the Indie Chart. To give you some idea of the impact of such a play, at this time there were four TV channels and students used to stumble out of bed at 11am on a Saturday especially to watch it for the brief moments when the Indie Chart or the Dance Chart would thrust alternative culture into the faces of the something like 4 million viewers.
Whiteout are planning a tour, and the regular normal human being who has accidentally become an agent thinks I should put them on. He sends me a package with a tape, biography and photo in it, and within a few days a Fax spits out an agreement. Whiteout will play Tunbridge Wells Forum on 26 March 1994. At the very bottom of this fax a scrawled hand-written note says ‘no local support on this show, we are looking at a co-headliner’. This is not good news.
Despite their appearance on national TV, Whiteout are still a very unknown band locally, having not achieved a lot of coverage in NME, Melody Maker or even Sounds, the three bibles for local music fans that will create enough interest to warrant a ticket purchase. The venue is going through a very tough time. We know that interest in touring acts is on its knees, but we have a few local bands who through peer pressure, bribery and a sizeable guest list might fill the venue up a bit. I try to get one of these as the support, but the regular normal human being isn’t having any of it. “I think we are getting someone really good to co-headline” he says. “We don’t need the local support, this one will fly out” he assures me. We back and forth for a bit, until finally, exasperated, I ask the question the more historically aware of you have probably already asked - “well, who is this co-headline?”
The Pack has been doing its work on another little unknown act, spurred on by the attentions and machinations of a certain Mr Alan McGee. Alan has seen the act that he thinks is the future of Rock and Roll, although to be clear this is the sort of thing that Alan used to say a lot. And I mean A LOT. The Future of Rock and Roll according to Alan has so far included Primal Scream (I mean, maybe?), Jesus and the Mary Chain (perhaps sort of?), My Bloody Valentine (I suppose it could be?), Felt (nope), Weather Prophets (nope), Biff Bang Pow (nope), House of Love (nope), Membranes (nope), and a long long list of similarly unlikely prospects that Alan just really liked. Staggering about in King Tuts Wah Wah Hut one night he has found another name to add to this long list, and immediately decided that this is it, this is the one, this is the solid gold, for real, next big thing.
It is this next big thing that the regular normal human being has signed to his agency and now wishes to make a double bill out of with the slightly more saleable Whiteout. Naturally I resist. It’s January 1994 and no one except for Alan McGee and the other 20 or so people in Glasgow that night have seen, heard or read anything at all about this band. A local support, I point out quite firmly, will guarantee at least another sixty people in the room. The regular normal human being is having none of it. “I’m sending you a package, I want this band on the bill, Whiteout want them on the bill, this is how it’s happening” he finally states.
Left with no choice, the show is confirmed and a few days later the postman drops a parcel through the door. Ripping off the clumsily applied layers of tape, I tip it up to discover a black and white photo, a biography and a tape. The biography is so gobsmackingly over the top, essentially claiming that this band will be bigger than The Beatles, Elvis and the Rolling Stones all rolled together, that it actually makes me smile a bit. The photo is a moody shot of what appears to be a terminally pissed off and glowering front man surrounded by a bunch of surly builders. One of them looks a bit like the singer’s also very angry brother.
The tape contains three tracks which threaten to be their debut single which, I note immediately, won’t even be released until after the tour. I play the first one. It sounds a bit like every other Creation band ever, only with the guitars compressed so much that it’s about three times louder. It sounds alright if you turn it up a bit, but it’s not a patch on No Time by Whiteout, and has a distinct sound of having been written in about 30 minutes by someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music - a review about its origins that actually turns out to be surprisingly accurate. Obliged to take this double headline bill, I phone the regular normal human being and insist that at our night this act must be the openers.
Tickets go out. We give both bands an equal typeface on the poster, but it is Whiteout that the local press run a photo of, and Whiteout who are selling the tickets. The show is doing alright, actually slightly better than most of the touring shows we have on sale, but obviously that’s down to the TV appearance by the band we have dictated must be the headliner. Sometime around early March the forthcoming debut single starts to get a bit of airplay. Then a bit more. Then there’s an NME article, I think it was just in the ‘rising band’ section, then Melody Maker chime in. However, and I want to be absolutely clear about this; this was nothing out of the ordinary at all, just the absolutely standard thing that always happened every time we had a new and emerging artist going out on tour.
Sales tick up a bit, and finally at 8pm on 26 March 1994 we throw open the doors to a queue of 116 people who have decided to risk their £5 to find out whether Whiteout have got another song while also checking out whoever this other band is. To this massed throng we’ve added the usual 20 or 30 people who somehow have managed to hang around at the venue long enough that they seem to be part of the furniture, although this does not include the International Famous Photographer whose name appears on the guest list for the opening act but who is currently sat over the road finishing off a pint and an anecdote about Metallica’s private plane.
At 8.50pm I walk through the opening at the back of the stage to find the opening act engaged in a bit of a food fight. Hummus has appeared on the ceiling, and the singer remarks that they will go on as soon as it drops off. I say that it looks pretty sticky, and they are on in ten minutes regardless of whether it falls to the floor.
And so it is that at 9pm on 26 March 1994, the opening act of the co-headline tour walk onto the Tunbridge Wells Forum stage in front of about 140 people to play all eight of the songs they currently have, culminating with the single that will be released in about two weeks. Fact fans, these were the 8 songs:
Shakermaker
Fade Away
Digsy's Dinner
Live Forever
Bring It on Down
Up in the Sky
Cigarettes & Alcohol
Supersonic
As they hit the closing chord of the last song, the Internationally Famous Photographer appears in the hallway, thereby granting him the same bragging rights across the next thirty years as the other 140 attendees, although how much of his claim to have ‘been there’ stands up to close inspection is a matter of debate. He certainly was more than the other 5000 people who weren’t but later claimed to be.
Whiteout go on and are rapturously received. I mean full on stage dives, mosh pit. Everyone agrees they are worthy of the headline slot on the night. The usual gang is gathered at the bar after the event offering their reviews. While most focus on the likelihood of world domination for the plucky upstart Scottish boys, one offers a scathing review of the opening act, describing them as ‘a very northern Johnny Rotten fronting a slowed down Status Quo’. A few drinks are offered out, and the bands and crew join us, until at about midnight The Driver notes that he has had a long week, has to do the Bucket Cabaret tomorrow, and so therefore the bar, even of the lock in variety, is now closed. This declaration is met with disbelief by the opening acts lead guitarist, the man who will later go on to reveal that he had, indeed, spent 30 minutes writing their debut single, who decides that this is totally unacceptable and he wants a Gin and Tonic. The Driver declines, even though he notes the sterling attempt to sing the request at him. The Future of Rock and Roll, and after all his other attempts and suggestions this time Alan McGee is 100% correct, stares him in the eye and says:
“When I’m famous I’m going to buy this place and sack the lot of you”.
Noel Gallagher never did make good on his promise to buy us out. But within weeks he and his brother’s band are certainly famous enough to have warranted a slightly more attentive audience on that night in 1994 when Oasis played the Holy Toilet that is Tunbridge Wells Forum.
The Forum means an awful lot of things to an awful lot of people. Probably the most important thing that people feel about it is that it is their space and it belongs to the community, something that had given the venue an initial 12 months of trading that had seemed like a dream come true. But The Forum in 1994 was a business, and it wouldn’t have survived if it hadn’t started being more things to more people who perhaps didn’t feel so closely attached to it. We had an incredibly dedicated hardcore audience of some of the best people it has ever been my privilege to meet. But the closeness of that relationship didn’t generate the money we needed to make it viable; in reality it made it less economically likely to survive.
What we needed was something that would bring everyone else in, widen the audience, create occasional visitors who didn’t feel so strongly but would show up with their wallets open. That was the balance we needed; a place that belonged to a community but was also attractive to people who didn’t care about that. We needed to adopt Idris Elba’s approach to acting to create something that would survive - the occasional Hollywood blockbuster that pays for the five films he actually wants to make.
The first Oasis single didn’t suddenly catapult them to worldwide domination, but when Definitely Maybe came out in August that year it became the fastest selling debut album of all time. This ‘overnight’ success, a much overused term considering the band had originally formed in 1991, had a massive ripple effect on the whole grassroots music venue scene. Oasis weren’t just the band you wanted to listen to, they were the band everyone wanted to be in, and felt like they could be in. LIterally hundreds of bands eager for success sprang up, bands that audiences wanted to see, that wanted to be seen. The music press had a field day calling it all Britpop but the truth is that the term was a meaningless catch-all to describe a sudden upsurge in alternative music and alternative lifestyles.
We lost money putting Oasis on at Tunbridge Wells Forum. Most of the rest of the venues on that tour would have the same story, and would probably love to tell it if it wasn’t a sad fact that of the 25 venues they played in that first run only 9 still survive. However, we gained something much more significant and valuable than the short term return of a profit making show. We were suddenly the place everyone had to play. On every tour, part of every schedule. Within two years I would begin to be asked to tell the story of the night they played there by journalists, the underlying narrative being how was it possible that this disused toilet had become part of the story of the biggest new rock band in the world? It’s a question I’m still asked today.
Being the person who booked Oasis is a big tick on your personal history and definitely helped my ability to secure a list of astonishing bands across the next ten years that I would actively be involved with booking the venue. Some people make good things happen and some good things happen to you.
If you’re really lucky, it’s both.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: