I said ‘bollocks’ on live daytime television last week, on a Sunday of all days. My children were watching, too. There were complaints, and quite right. I felt bad about it, even though it was absolutely the mot juste. I got rather carried away, frustrated that a good-looking boy with a lot of potential had apparently missed the point of everything so completely, and chosen to spend his three-and-a-half-minute stab at glory yodelling. And how far he had come to stand there, live, live, live in front of 12 cameras and a million people watching, stand there and blow it so utterly.
Back in October we’d set out with a field of 1,600 bands that we’ve narrowed down over the past few months to a mere handful. This coming weekend, the outright winner of Orange Unsigned Act, the TV show in question, will be decided by public vote and receive an album deal with A&M records, to include a cash advance, marketing and video budgets, endless taxis and the special blessing of my fellow judge, label boss Simon Gavin. He signed last year’s biggest-selling artist Duffy, so it’s a big deal, and for most of these bands this is probably their best shot at a career in what’s left of the record business, the best chance of all their dreams coming true. If it doesn’t happen now, it’s fair to say it probably won’t ever happen.
That was what frustrated me so much about the yodelling. All successful bands need a little push, a break, and this is as good a chance as any of them will ever get. It’s harsh. Last weekend, of the five bands left in the competition we watched the TV audience vote out a dazzling, talented and preposterously tasteful 16-year-old sex puppy and a none-too-ugly aristocratic chanteuse with the best song she’d ever written. I found it impossible to tell which of the five were for the chop. All of them were good enough to get this far and all of them good enough to have a hit, with a following wind.
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.
Comments