Slow Life

24 January 2009

Opportunity knocks

This is the second series of the show and the standard of the artists involved this time around has been nothing short of astonishing. Record deals are few and far between, lately. Having spent years watching bands it always surprises me how very little hugely successful bands differ from the unsigned obscure also-rans. Just like the difference between a chip in a café in Clerkenwell and a chip at Mark Hix oyster and chop house it is really a matter of fine detail. They are 99 per cent the same thing, but a completely different experience. It’s the attention to detail, the noble aspiration, the certain knowledge that there is no finer chip to be had that makes it difficult to get a table at Hix. It’s hard to tell what people will like, too. I’ve found second guessing is more or less impossible.

I had a record label for a very short while in the late Nineties. I went to see Coldplay with Damien Hirst and Joe Strummer — my fellow record company executives — and we all thought they were ordinary and passed on them. I think everybody did, except Parlophone, just like happened with The Beatles — and Blur. Then again, I still think Coldplay are a fairly ordinary band, although the singer is good.

It’s quite easy to make a nice noise, and immensely satisfying, but it’s quite hard to make a succinct three-and-a-half-minute pop song. The trick, that almost no one in town can do, is to write really good words to simple melodies. Anyone who can do that will not only get a record deal, they’ll have hit records, too — of course the deal is usually the beginning of the journey, rather than the end.

I’ll stick my neck out and say that I think Tommy Reilly, a teenager from Glasgow, will not only win the series, but have a long and successful career. I’ve been inundated with people asking me for his phone number, wanting to manage him, represent him, meet him, touch him. I guess that means he’s a star already. Unlike the other two bands in the running, he doesn’t need to win the competition in order to succeed, which is probably why he will. Still, ‘Murray the Hump’, who were the band we at the label all preferred to Coldplay, will happily tell you I have no idea what I’m talking about. Murray the Hump. What a great band.

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matt

January 29th, 2009 1:32am Report this comment

Murry the Hump (corrected spelling) are by coincidence my favourite band. They're called something else these days, but you can catch up with them on the Facebook group named after them.

Great to hear they live on in the hearts of a select few.

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