Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 27
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 27: Life is Unpredictable, That’s Guaranteed
(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)
The band has been working on something and they’d like me to pop in and see it.
Artist management used to fall into two possible categories of outcome. Either the artist is successful, in which case it was because they are being rightly recognised for their genius. Or they were unsuccessful, in which case it was because the management has been terrible. Since the advent of online streaming, it’s become increasingly difficult to identify exactly what a definition of success might actually be, and even more so who or what might be responsible for it.
It’s 2013. I’ve been doing full time management of an ever increasing number of artists for ten years and have a feeling I might be nearer the end of doing it than the beginning. Confronted by an industry that cannot work out how to create an economic climate that might actually allow artists to eat three square meals a day, or have somewhere to live, the artists I have been looking after have started to make some decisions which, politely, might be considered interesting.
For three years the little team I have assembled to take forward the careers of acts from Spain and South America has been looking after a highly talented singer songwriter with real global potential. Potential in the Spanish market, such as it is, tends to mean ‘can headline a free festival for a very large amount of sponsor or government money’ but our ambitions for this act are substantially bigger than that, laying mainly between the USA and the UK. We think she could actually sell tickets and music almost everywhere. We’ve already proved this to be true by selling two bits of music into commercials, an activity the artist despises and asks us to stop doing, although does not seem to object to the money it puts into her account or the hotels and flights it pays for.
Big Paul and I have been showcasing her and her really remarkable band in places around the world, at not inconsiderable expense, because there is clear international potential that vastly exceeds where she currently sits in Rock’s Rich Tapestry. At each of these showcases we court and dine some of the music industry’s biggest players, whistling through the streets of New York in a fleet of HumVees one weekend with Universal and sitting on the top of a Skyscraper in Madrid for a bucketful of Mojitos with Warners the next. Everyone agrees. This artist, and I am going to christen her Missed Opportunity which is a clue to where this is going to end up, has huge potential, able to bring a room to silence with just her voice and a guitar, able to light up an arena with a band that has taken all the best bits of Echo and the Bunnymen, welded them on to the Bad Seeds, written some actual radio hits, then got PJ Harvey to sing them. The act is perfect for US College Radio, Pitchfork and NME. And we know this because US College Radio, Pitchfork and the NME have told us they agree. There is just one problem: The artist herself, Missed Opportunity.
Artists often have a vision of themselves and their music that it is the role of a good manager to support or to gently try to correct and steer towards reality. The very best artists have a clear sense of what their creative goal is, or at least can be persuaded to consider the opportunities and limitations of what their cultural output is. The artists that are the most problematic to manage are those operating in a specific field of creativity and commerciality while thinking they are standing in a completely different spot on the cultural radar. Making music in the same range of public interest as Minor Threat is a very valid artistic space to occupy. But if you’re in that space and want management to make sure that you get a Saturday night TV show so you can tap into that all important Ant & Dec audience then that can be quite challenging. Beyond these slightly deluded dreamers, into another category of challenge, and in my experience almost the worst type of artists, at least to manage or to encourage and support, are the ones who consistently tell you they want to achieve one thing but actually don’t want that at all. I say almost the worst, because just below that on the ladder of manageability is the absolutely worst type of artist to manage; the one who genuinely believes the things they are telling you they want to achieve are their ambitions and goals but who don’t actually want those things at all; what can best be described as undiagnosed cultural schizophrenics. Missed Opportunity has given us quite a lot of clues that she might be in this last category but we have stupidly ignored them because everyone thinks it’s going to happen for her.
I arrive into her circle after her first album is already in the can, and quickly manage to sign it to an indie label in Spain and a world wide distribution deal outside. There’s not a lot of money because this is unproven product, and Missed Opportunity really needs some in the bank and is quite insistent on this point. I explain what placements and synching are and tell her who I can phone to try and get her some, a suggestion she warmly greets and describes as essential. The music is the right side of commercial alternative, and within a week I have signed a deal to sell two parts of it to two big companies, which neatly results in offers for publishing and publishing advances. We sign both these deals for placements under direct instruction from Missed Opportunity and begin inviting offers for the publishing which now has an established worth. Six days later my phone rings at 3am. She wants to know why we have sold the music for advertising, it should not be on there, how can we get it taken down? I’m a little surprised by this, as I’ve performed the most basic function of what the manager should do, done it three times more quickly than is usually possible, got the outcome the artist wants and agreed to, and am now being asked to undo it while being mildly chastened for having got it so wrong. I negotiate my way through it explaining what it enables us to achieve, but she’s plainly unhappy with getting the thing she asked for which she assured us would make her happy.
The band is an essential element of her sound. They are an astonishing live force, sparking off each other and her to create music which is unique to each night and vastly in excess of the quality of the record. Everyone wants to book them, but the artist has been treating them as volunteers in her drive to build her career and pay for creating her recordings. There’s nothing particularly unusual in that, but we have a grand plan and the band are essential to it. I reach a deal with her to put them on a retainer, an almost unheard of luxury for a musician in Spain, but one she can afford thanks to the advertising money she wanted but doesn’t like. We start booking them for every show going, because they can now afford to be full time members of the band. A tour of 20 shows is arranged, again, an almost unheard of escapade for a Spanish band. 20 shows where people buy tickets to see the band and enjoy them. We are playing for what people will pay to see us, a feat so astonishing in Spain that other managers question me on how we are doing it. The day before the tour starts Missed Opportunity rings in at what is becoming her preferred slot of 3am to express her displeasure that the band she is reliant upon for this groundbreaking activity are contracted to get paid every month. I explain that for a 20 date tour in 30 days it ultimately works out cheaper for her and better for the band, but she is plainly unhappy that the thing she agreed would be the best thing to do to secure their future together has been done. I am starting to get a bit suspicious about whether she has a hearing problem.
We negotiate a contract for her to appear in and write the music for a theatrical piece based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. As part of this contract she not only gets a substantial performance fee, we have retained the rights to create the songs in the piece, keep the publishing rights, and even got the producers to give us a budget to record the songs and release them as an album and make that available at the booked events. And, wait for it, to keep all the money from that activity. Honestly, I know most of this book seems like a series of weird accidents, but underneath all that I do actually know what I’m doing. Sometimes. Missed Opportunity goes into a creative bubble of one and emerges with a remarkable set of 11 songs which demonstrate why everyone thinks that whatever it is you need to have, she has got it. A studio is booked, we are all good to go, the band start learning the material and working it out in rehearsals. 3am phone ping. Missed Opportunity thinks the musicians in the band, the guitarist, bassist, and drummer, everyone thinks are essential to her sound, aren’t up to it. She’s spoken with some other musicians and is going to take them to the studio instead. I am told to let the existing band know their services are not required, which I decline to do pointing out that at her insistence she makes all the artistic decisions and I make all the business ones. Not using the best band out there to make your record when you’ve been playing with them for ten years upwards, and one of them is her own childhood friend, isn’t in my side of the contract it is in hers. If she wants to do that, she should tell them. She doesn’t, but a new band is brought together to make the recording, and duly do it to about 70% of the standard that her own band would have done it anyway. Never mind, it’s still great, very alternative but very heavy on hooks and melodies.
It is while recording these songs that my phone pings again at 3am so Missed Opportunity can explain why she needs to sack the band she has on retainer and use the band she has in the studio for live shows from now on, mainly because the band she has in the studio are apparently happy to play for nothing. I decline to accept this decision, whether it’s artistic or not, because at this point it’s just stupid. We have dates lined up in London, New York, Austin and about thirty other places, and there is no way to replace the existing band and do the dates. Missed Opportunity suggests that if she were in charge of the finances then this could be easily achieved and requests that all money raised from now on be paid into her personal account so she can stop paying musicians she doesn’t want to work with. And keep the money herself. I say no. Eventually she gets bored and hangs up.
The band hit the road again and the audiences start getting bigger everywhere we go. The press attention is building and building, and we move out of the Pitchfork and NME territory and into mainstream monthlies. An offer comes in from a Spanish Vogue equivalent, who want her to front a special piece on the next wave of female musicians that will revolutionise the industry. A big interview and an even bigger photo shoot is delivered and the magazine duly comes out with Missed Opportunity gracing the front page. My phone rings, of course it does, it’s 3am, to announce that copies of the magazine should be pulled because she is unhappy with the way she has been described and would never have agreed to any of this if we had told her that it would mean her photo was on newsstands everywhere. This I find quite difficult to accept, given that I have sold the opportunity to her using the exact words ‘your picture will be on newsstands everywhere’.
We complete a development deal for one more album with one of the three big majors. They want to sign for more, but Big Paul and me are pretty convinced this is about to take off in a way that Spanish labels simply cannot understand, or indeed deliver on, so we stick to our guns, keep the publishing, accept a small recording advance and a very profitable royalty. Missed Opportunity again tries to sack the band and I again tell her no. We stand on the corner of Passeig de Gracia in the centre of Barcelona while she berates me in a loud voice about their incompetence, uselessness, and extraordinary expense. They are on 800 euros each a month, she’s earning 2000 and building up a very valuable catalogue of which she has the exclusive rights. A new set of songs are recorded with her widely admired band and it contains at least two potential radio hits. Missed Opportunity insists on making a video for a third song which isn’t as radio friendly, it duly misses, but not even that can stop her almost inevitable ascension to the premier league.
The three albums we have got out of her are being critically acclaimed and everyone wants in. We move round the big three labels, declining to work with the local national offshoot and insisting on direct deals with either the US or UK, which is where we know here future lies. We line up a publishing deal with a $140,000 advance, tied to a three album deal with recording time, tour support money, and a focus on international development. I’m in London meeting for an international publishing deal for her when the phone rings. Unusually, it is 3pm in the afternoon, so it must be serious. Despite it being a civilised time of the day, it’s Missed Opportunity, or at least it’s her plus her boyfriend and they want to chat about money.
The boyfriend is a failed musician himself, a man with a long track record of idiocy and a poor relationship with the truth who you wouldn’t trust to tell you if your house was on fire even if you were in it and could feel your head getting a bit too warm. He has never successfully run anything, written anything, negotiated anything, or managed anything, not even, perhaps even especially, himself. What he has done, however, is to spot that Missed Opportunity is on the cusp of signing several deals we have spent years building, and he, and therefore she, want to talk about how he and she could run those deals more successfully themselves. I explain very calmly that this is not how the industry works. I go to some lengths to explain that the deals we have set up are between us and the labels, and rely not only upon the creative output of Missed Opportunity, but also her essential band, and that the manner in which we have nurtured and developed these deals also has a fair bit to do with people’s confidence in our own work. He goes quiet, she does not. She demands to see her accounts. I explain there is no such thing as ‘her’ accounts, there is the financial record of everything that has been done to get her career to this point. She’s not very happy with this reality, so returns to her persistent point that the band, without whom she is not the proposition the record labels thinks she is, must be sacked. I say no. She says yes. I say no slightly louder, she says she cannot be challenged on this point. If I will not sack the band, she will sack me.
I point out that she currently owes in the region of 20,000 euros in advances and investments, a position we have only permitted to exists because we are on the cusp of completing deals worth upwards of 250,000 euros. I highlight that for this reason it would probably be best to have this conversation in precisely 26 hours after we have signed deals with two major industry companies that will secure her future. That way we can clear all her debts and leave the pathway open for her to make any decision she wishes to about her career and how to run it. Even letting her boyfriend have a go at banging a tambourine and running her publishing if she thinks that’s a good idea.
It is at this point in the conversation that all of the other little and not so little grievances she has raised flash through my mind and I realise with absolute clarity that Missed Opportunity does not hate the photo shoot, or the magazine cover, or her band, or the placements, or the regular money, the shows, the tours, the international acclaim, or anything else that she has thrown in our way as a dreadful inconvenience to try and stop her own progress. She, despite all the bravado, doesn’t believe in herself. She doesn’t think she has actually got what it takes to make it, and crucially, and this is a far more common occurrence in the mindset of artists than you might think, she doesn’t want to give it a go in case it fails. The truth is she would rather stay where she is, a big fish in a tiny pond, than get into the big ocean and try to swim a marathon, even though everyone thinks she would win it, because she fears she will drown. The reality is that she is right to have those doubts, because in the music industry there is no such thing as a dead certainty. If the music industry is a game in which the aim is to roll a six, I liken really great management to buying more dice. There’s still no guarantee of a six, you’ve just given yourself more chances. Missed Opportunity has in her hand the most amount of dice I have ever seen a potential mainstream breakthrough artist ever hold. But she still doesn’t have the confidence to to throw them in case there is not a six among them.
I try as hard as I can to give her the confidence she needs, but this is something that is about her that only she can solve. And she chooses not to solve it. By 5pm I am no longer the manager.
Her boyfriend attempts to take the scheduled meetings but no one knows who he is and doors start rapidly closing. Her career nosedives, back to a footnote also appearing added to the bottom of the festival bill. Over the next few years she runs through a remarkable six more managers, all of whom she dazzles with her potential, her goals and ambitions, before sacking then if they come even close to trying to make anything of them.
To me this is a story about lost potential, but I guess it is only that if she continued to tell herself that she wanted to be on the Tonight Show if what she really wanted was a brief appearance at 1.30am on Hospital Radio. I checked in again on her career while writing this down and sure enough, she’s back showcasing the same run of shows we had her on, only the fourth or fifth time around the audiences and the radio shows and the record labels and the publishers all got a little bit smaller than the last time, and the last time, and the last time, an ever decreasing circle of interest which seems like a terrible waste. I really hope she found happiness but I sadly suspect she could not. Her band certainly did not; she split from them shortly after walking away from the deal that would have guaranteed their income for at least a decade, painting me and my terrible mis-management as the reason for it.
That’s management for you. Success, you see, if or when it had come, would have been a result of her genius; in her case actually quite a reasonable assumption because whatever ‘it’ is, she definitely had it. Failure, even the type of failure she deliberately brought down upon herself and those around her because of a genuine fear of trying to achieve her aims and ambitions, a lack of belief which she could not admit even to herself, was entirely the result of bad management. That’s being a manager for you.
Meanwhile the act who started me off down this fourth or fifth career path have had enough of being the ambassadors of cool, jetting about to obscure locations around the world to perform confusing electronica sets on top of skyscrapers to bewildered Russians. They ask me to pop by the studio one day, where they announce they have made a book and album of kids music. It’s joyful, witty, clever and beautifully assembled. And I have absolutely no idea what to do with it or where to even start. We try applying what we know about PR and promotion in rock music, and taking a few clues about what to do with it from They Might Be Giants, but despite some limited success I can’t find a way to bring together what they want to do with their future careers and the skills and experience, such as they are, that I have. I know exactly how to get an artist a hotel room near to an advertising executive with a large budget and thereby engineer a chance breakfast encounter that might eventually result in a high value placement for a pair of football boots, but nothing at all about how to get a dual Spanish/English adventure book for kids onto the curriculum or into a library. They are still as talented as they were when I first met them, but my own understanding of what to do to support that talent is sitting firmly in a different territory from what they want to do with those talents.
We stumble through a year or so of this, during which time I increasingly realise that I’ve lost the single most important quality any manager is going to need to succeed, for themselves and the artists they represent. When the phone rings at 3am, not only have you got to be willing to answer it, you’ve also got to be willing to listen to a long story about the duvet being the wrong colour in a hotel in Denver you’ve never been to. And then you’ve got to ask what colour the duvet should be and try to make that happen.
I’ve had a great run. Management has taken me all over the world to parts of the planet I never expected to see. I have stumbled into extraordinary situations of opportunity and luck, been ripped off, ripped some people off in return, been chased down dark alleyways, and gazed from executive suite windows across the world’s brightest cities. There’s little of the experience across these years that I would change, but I have been changed by it and am no longer comfortable with what I’ve learned. I’ve had a long hard look at the industry I work in, and I’ve realised something is terribly wrong with it.
It’s time to try and put it right.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here:
Oh god, this brought back all the nightmares of band management I had successfully buried in my subconscious. I did eventually stop answering the phone in the middle of the night.