Charts, and why I feel pleased today

I have a band signed to Columbia Records, a band signed to Sunday Best, and I work out of the office of Wichita Recordings. Though I’ve not really worked with Sunday Best very much yet, I like to think that working with these three gives me the potential for quite a broad spectrum of different sizes of label knowledge.

I like most of the people at Columbia immensely, indeed I can’t think of anyone there I don’t like. But I’m constantly amazed at the behemoth that is Sony BMG’s incompetence and inconsistency, forged not via the people who work there but merely by the size and general backwards-ness of the company – mostly, I think, via the ‘company policy’ brought over from the US. Added to that is the fact that my music taste is a little leftfield and therefore I think that quite a few of their recent signings are, well, a bit shit. I like pop hits immensely, and to prove it I’ve been listening to The Lexicon of Love all week, but I can’t be doing with rubbish pop songs that are pretending to be cool. Step forward, Ali Love!

Wichita, on the other hand, are as far as I can tell pretty much everything I like in a label. Brilliant bands of varied genre and degrees of success (even their two most commercially successful acts, The Cribs and Bloc Party, are totally different to each other musically – add Euros Childs, The Bronx and Los Campesinos! to the clan, and it’s an eclectic stable), lots of amazing licensed records from the US, Canada and Europe (this week I have been enjoying Menomena, and on Monday I went to see Arts & Crafts’ Stars at the Scala); an office with lots of boxes and a comfy sofa; the right level of cynicism and loveliness combined in the people that work there; Mark Bowen at the helm (an unfair advantage, given that there is only one MB, but an advantage it remains). Wichita are indie but not snobs about it, and they are certainly not evil. Sony BMG quite possibly are.

It’s for the reasons outlined above that I feel quite pleased that Peter Bjorn and John find themselves sitting at number 20 in the top 40, a few places down from last week’s #13. Ali Love, as far as I can see, isn’t even in the top 75. This feels like justice in the battle between good vs evil. While I want Columbia’s releases to go well for the sake of my band, not to mention the marketing and A&R teams who often work similar bands, there is a point that my magnanimousness stops. I can’t help but feel that while the label is signing dross like Ali Love then it possibly deserves everything that it (doesn’t) get, and while Wichita continues to put out great records with integrity and none of that sueing downloaders lark, then their success is to be celebrated.

Sportsday GO! Megaphone

I started working with a new artist, Sportsday Megaphone, at the beginning of September. I was ridiculously excited then, and continue to be now. Hugh is massively talented as a musician, remixer, and indeed video-makerer too. Check out his video collective O W L S‘ new video for Wax Stag at the end of this post. He’s signed to Sunday Best, Rob da Bank’s label, and is working on his debut album at the moment. It’s due for release in the spring of next year.

I came across Hugh having seen him play with GoodBooks in Cambridge at Kill Em All’s night at the Junction in July. I was a bit blown away and after when he said he didn’t have a manager, I said “oh don’t tell me THAT”. A couple of months later, after a lot of “But I don’t see why I need a manager!”, Hugh asked me to arrange a show for him so an agent could come down and watch him just before he played at Bestival. After the show I gave him a lift home, and he said “so about this management thing…”. Awesome. The next day we got phone calls from said agent saying that he would indeed like to work on project Sportsday, and thus my involvement with Sportsday Megaphone began in earnest.

To celebrate the whole thing I went down to Bestival that weekend, where Hugh was playing on Saturday night. I continued my habit of arriving at festivals in the middle of the night and pitching up my tent (wrongly) in the dark, and on Saturday night watched Hugh play a great show, complete with dancers! Amazing. His girlfriend George had painted a multicoloured skeleton onto a white bodysuit thing (with legs too), and it looked mental – but totally awesome. Later that night I watched Foals and Patrick Wolf, then broke into a stall with Hugh, Jack from Friendly Fires, Dan from Bolt Action Five and his girlfriend Sarah, and sat there for far too long wearing stupid hats. We surfaced at about six in the morning to find a lot of unsavoury characters wandering about, and promptly lost Jack to the hippy drummers of Bestival. Such is the way of the festival.

One of the nicest things so far about working with Hugh – aside from the total excitement about how brilliant his music is, and him being a joy to work with, etc – is that he and GoodBooks all get along very well. Whenever I am with Hugh and one of GB ring, they say “send our love to Hugh!”, and vice versa. Life is much easier with artists who get along and enjoy hanging out together, and hopefully there’ll be remixes and the like in the future between the two bands.

Working with a talented one man band is interesting, because a lot of the time it feels more like a collaboration than a management-artist relationship. I know from early days with GoodBooks that that’s likely to change – as bands get more used to having someone around to help them out, they use the resource even more. But Hugh does his own artwork, wants to make his own videos, and when he tours he can potentially do it on his own. In a business sense, it’s great – all of his releases going to be very Sportsday (rather than very someone else’s idea of what Sportsday is/could be), which these days I think is crucial. The more artists put into a release, the more the audience has to connect with – and that can only be a good thing.

Not only that, but in a bit of a money-making, cynical sense, if we can limit our spend on all of those things (artwork, videos, touring) then, well, that’s brilliant. Less spend + more income = profit, and as I am learning rapidly, one’s artist and one’s self being able to afford to eat is always beneficial to the cause.

Here’s the O W L S video for Short Road by Wax Stag: