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Home , Asian Underground, Bat for Lashes, British soul, Channel U (UK), Cookie Crew, DJ Semtex

Treasure the Nuttiness

Introduction

Art and music critic Kevin Le Gendre discusses the creative case for diversity in music. How hard have black and multi‐ ethnic British artists had to struggle to be recognized over the years, in order to break through in the mainstream on their own terms? For decades, they were seen as inferior to Americans, particularly if they were doing soul‐ or jazz, and the very idea of a ‘homegrown’ talent with, crucially, its own specific vernacular and modes of expression had little currency. Was there a turning point? Have things really changed? Are there still enough black powerbrokers in the and media to ensure that original black voices are given a platform to do what they feel is progressive without pandering to expectations from ‘inside’ and outside their own community?

Along with guests, and Kwame Kwaten, Kevin Le Gendre also considered both the diversity within black and multi‐ethnic music and the influence of the images that have derived from its legacy. What were the implications of a British‐Asian appearing on Top Of The Pops in a sari in the 80s way before anybody had coined the term ‘’ – or even coined the term British‐Asian for that matter? The panel will investigate this and the creativity shown by multi‐ethnic musicians in the field of sartorial and visual style, and debate on the cultural and political ramifications of the evolution from Errol Brown’s baldhead to Jazzie B’s funki dreds. Kevin Le Gendre: I want to start off with a general picture; we’re going to go into a bit of history and talk about how things may have developed for Black British artists over the last 20 years or so, or maybe the last 30 years and take us right back to the 70’s and 60’s which is the time when Black British artists have been contributing to the music industry. But I’d like to start by asking the panellists how they feel about where they are today in the year 2009 where we have the likes of or or enjoying phenomenal success with number one records? They are headlining at major festivals; just won the Mercury Music Prize, Bat for Lashes is doing really well; she is critically acclaimed, so on the one hand we have all of this success and I would like to just, without too much prompting or leading, just throw it open to the two panellists. How do you feel about where we are in the music industry for black and Asian artists? Are we in a good place?

Sheila Chandra: We’re definitely in a better place than we were. When I started at 16 (I’m part of the older edge of the second generation),there were very few Asian people in the media. Now it’s common to have reporters and journalists and presenters who are Asian as well. We’re being represented as part of the mainstream much more, just in terms of personnel. Back in those days we weren’t and with the likes of and the huge success that he has had, Chucky D and , it’s great that these people are making inroads to mainstream charts and mainstream music and not entirely in a diluted form. I mean originally, I thought it would be much easier for artists to get through who completely denied anything of their culture to the point almost of changing their name and not really referring to it, but that’s not the case.

KLG: Having to compromise basically.

SC: Yeah, having to compromise. In fact, those are artists that experimented with our own forms, whether when they do, they are accepted by a wider listening public as making music that belongs to and represents that wider listening public, is the question. I the question with is that you always want it to be ‘ours’; you want it to represent something that is ‘us’. And the difficulty with artists that are working in diverse music forms, whatever their ethnic origin, is that those musical forms appear as ‘other’ to the mainstream audience. So there is always this question of, “Are we going to sit down at the end of a hard day and put on something that is a little bit mentally challenging?” Because we didn’t grow up with it. So now it’s much, much better than it was. It’s very, very encouraging to see that, but I would have liked to have seen the stuff that and were doing [in the 1990’s], get a little bit further. I felt that was more intellectually challenging stuff.

KLG: Okay well, there are some great points that you made there, several issues that you raised there. I particularly like the point about representation and ‘the other’ and how that plays out in the longer term, so there’s already some food for thought, if you can just keep those things in mind, because this is just the opening salvo at the moment and we will come back to those in greater detail. Kwame, let me hand over to you, hear you bounce off that idea of where we are today, that kind of premise with the success of the artists that I mentioned and all that kind of stuff and maybe if you could react to some of Sheila’s comments.

Kwame Kwaten: Where we are today? I guess in order to look at where we are today, if I take it that in probably 1988/89 when D‐Influence started, it was thought of as a very special occasion when a black artist got a video or a budget for a video on any form of TV to where we are now. I think to me, if you’re looking at it in general terms, that kind of shows you where we are, looking at a channel like Channel U or AKA which is almost predominantly video and from this country as well, so that shows you a kind of leap from where we were to where we are now.

KLG: So the importance of a video, I take it in pop terms, that’s a pre‐requisite to sell a song? So having a video in the first place puts you in the game.

KK: You’re talking about a time – I can recall being told back then –“Oh, no, no, no, black acts don’t get videos,” I mean it was a standard. We at the time were guilty of saying, “Oh yes we do, we do get videos,” it’s easy to put it in those terms, but once you actually look at the kind of thought pattern that goes into someone presuming that that’s okay to say, it kind of lets you know where things were.

KLG: It’s an outright form of discrimination to say that black acts don’t have videos.

KK: Well, that was then.

KLG: And where did that come from specifically?

KK: You’re looking at the fact that someone like CBS had to threaten MTV with pulling most of their rock acts from MTV viewership in order to get , one of the biggest entertainers in the world at that time, on to MTV. It was as simple as that; it was leverage, it was, “if you want this, MTV, then you have to do this.” And they played ball and some of the walls came crashing down. And then through that, other stuff happened and then other stuff happened and obviously people like Soul II Soul being in the frame and them having the huge success they had, meant other people could then go through as well, of which I think we were one of a few.

KLG: So we are talking about a good 17, 18 years; I mean Soul II Soul was the early nineties, 1990 thereabouts, D‐ Influence, for those that don’t know, had major success in the early nineties as well with tracks like ‘Good Lover’ and by the mid‐nineties they were kind of peaking commercially, selling out venues like the Jazz Café; you guys played the Shepherds Bush Empire and venues like that, as well as The Forum. So you know, fairly substantial venues, so D‐ Influence wound up ...

KK: Really about ’98, ‘99.

KLG: So that would take us to a good ten years. Think about what you’ve seen change in that time, ‘98 to 2009.

KK: Again – 1998 – this is quantum leap stuff, this really is. I’m lucky because ... I’ve got to write a book, haven’t I?

KLG: Absolutely.

KK: I had first hand knowledge on a lot of the things that went on, so for instance, Jazzie B I still count as a friend; I still know the Young Disciples; Galliano’s people, if I see them on the tube we’re chatting about then; – Stuart Zender from – all of that is wrapped up in UK music Brit. history and soul and funk and everything else that goes into it, so it’s hard for me to talk about it because in a way, the battles that people have had to go through have been that severe in order to get to where we are now, which is weird. Okay, let me go the other way – if I go Dizzee, Tinchy, Chipmunk, , , , – these are the new kind of pack of rappers that have all of a sudden come and gone, “Okay, we are going to blend and incorporate the mainstream sound and actually take that and add our music to it.” So, what they are doing is likened to what happened with rap in America in the early 90’s is what they are doing now in the UK, so that is what is going on. In terms of revolution musically, that to me is what is going on now. We’re at a tip, I think, or the sharpest point of an iceberg, but underneath that point there’s a whole load of ice that has had to form and make strong for even that to be there in the first place, of which we are part of but then there are people before us, Eddie Grant ... xyz …

KLG: Do we have any idea – can we put our heads together and maybe try to work out why there has been this breakthrough in the last few years? Why we have had people like M.I.A, Tinchy Stryder, this new generation coming through and managing to sell records, managing to do pretty well? Has there been some kind of change, either in the music industry or the infrastructure or perhaps the advent of new media, the internet, digital distribution, Myspace, all of these electronic revolutions that seem to happen on a daily basis when we hear about all these new means of actually reaching an audience, direct marketing – all of that kind of stuff. Has that, do you think, pushed things forward, has it changed things? Or are there are other factors that we need to take into account?

SC: For me, from the Asian perspective, traditionally, you know according to the caste system, jobs were inherited, and each of them carried a connotation of rank. So being a musician is actually quite low on that scale and not something that the largely bourgeoisie business class of Asians who tended to emigrate to Britain, encouraged their children to go into. I personally faced a lot of opposition to become an artist, over a period of years, and some very severe opposition from my family.

KLG: Was that because they felt you would be demeaning yourself by being a musician?

SC: Oh yes! I mean I should’ve been a doctor because that’s the family tradition and of course, that’s a respectable profession. It got really, really, bad to the point that I didn’t see anyone I knew before the age of twenty, for ten years, because I had to make that clean break with my family in order to carry on as an artist.

KLG: Does that mean that when you were doing ‘Monsoon’ in the early 80’s and you were on Top of the Pops, – I remember it very well – you were on Top of the Pops in a sari?

SC: Yes, that’s right and by the way, people said that Asians weren’t on Tops of the Pops so I couldn’t be Asian, in a sari no less.

KLG: So, no Asians on Top of the Pops, no black videos, it’s not good; ’82, not a year to be remembered but I do remember you were on Top of the Pops in a sari.

KK: It was a good year for music, mind you!

KLG: It was a very good year for music. Does that mean that in the wider Asian community there was opposition to what you were doing, that people were generally looking at you as somebody who was beyond the pale?

SC: No, I think they were there already. There have always been wedding bands for instance, so you know, the second generation was starting to grow up. I was 16 in 1982, so they were all starting to get to marriageable age. That’s where the rise of Bhangra bands were really; on the wedding circuit, before the huge raves in the West End where they hired clubs like the Hippodrome in the daytime for all day Bhangra events. The training ground for that was the wedding circuit, so that was coming up but no, there wasn’t a wider objection to me, although there was a tendency within the Asian community to see any artist from the UK, with a kind of snobbery, “Oh, you’re a cultural outpost.” looked down on us and unless we were part of a community event, there was a sense of, “We look to India for our mainstream cultural stuff; we look to India for ; we look to India for classical musicians who’re touring; we look to them for all the big musical stars and what you’re doing is really inferior to that ...”, so that was the attitude of the community. I mean, you’ve got a generation of musicians at that point probably the age of 16; Nitin Sawhney is exactly the same age as me, for instance, so I know he would’ve felt this, too. But there is this cultural pressure to go into a profession, or to go into business and I think the thing that’s changed and only in the last seven years, is that the fantastic musicians who were in those Bhangra bands and learned so much about the UK market, and being in the UK music business – that their children are now inheriting that knowledge of some of the players and how to use the system – plus the fact that they’ve got all the new digital developments, they’ve now got direct ways of reaching their audiences.

KLG: OK that’s a great point, so we are talking specifically about knowledge being passed on from one generation to the next.

SC: And approval, because if your dad is the singer in a really famous Bhangra , then there isn’t an issue with you pursuing music and having an investment, maybe even from your family, certainly in time and emotional support, if not actual financial support – because everyone knows it’s hard to get started as a musician in your own right. You need that kind of family support and I think that’s only just coming through with a new wave of musicians within the Asian community because of all these cultural factors.

KLG: Kwame?

KK: Great to listen to.

KLG: We are trying to determine why we might be experiencing this breakthrough now with this new generation. There are some great points there made about culture, about how traditions and skills might be passed down from one generation to the next, that kind of stuff. What’s your point of view? What’s your perspective when you think about, okay, let’s just say a Dizzee Rascal or a Chipmunk or a Master Shortee or whoever it may be, if they are moving things forward and obviously Dizzee is selling a lot of records now and he’s headlining major venues and events etc., Why should he be doing it now when let’s say the likes of or if you want to go further back, the Sindecut or Jonzi D – why they couldn’t do it several years before?

KK: Okay there’s a few things here, why the breakthrough now? I think firstly, technology – obviously, internet revolution. If we look at the things that have been expressed just here alone, a lot of the time there was this kind of ceiling – motions, gestures, hand movements ... whatever, there was some kind of ceiling, so the gatekeepers as I would say – were those that basically were probably in fear of losing their jobs at whatever major stations at the time would automatically spout what they were told to spout, which was, “Asians can’t be on Top of the Pops or blacks can’t be on, can’t have a video.” So they would just spout down what they had been told. But the thing about the internet is that it slices through so much, so a kid doesn’t need anybody to tell them, other than their mate, that something’s really good and once you get that you are going to end up with Dizzee Rascal selling half a million copies per , on his own label for the last three releases, that’s where it’s at. Now, if you’re a , whereas before you might have been slightly hesitant in signing the next rapper, let’s face it, in the words of Dizzee Rascal’s DJ Semtex, only yesterday, he said, “British rap, three years ago was a **** stain on the British music industry”, as in, that was how the British music industry viewed British rap.

KLG: Well, I remember interviewing Wayne Bennett who produced Speech Debelle under the moniker of ‘Lotek Hi‐Fi’, there was this sentence he came up with that really stuck in my mind – he said, “British is great but the only bad thing about it is the British”, and it expressed so much and I don’t think we should take it lightly to actually understand how great the prejudice has been against British rappers having to overcome that – real discrimination.

KK: Amongst their own; let’s get this straight, this is like somebody releasing something putting something out on a record and someone going, “Oh it’s British, it’s no good,” and then being two roads down from the person who actually put the track out. Now if you’re talking rap as being street poetry and if that was the attitude that was so present at that time within the industry and on road [among audiences] then it shows you the kind of uphill path that had to be travelled. There was a UK/US snobbery definitely with UK rap and a couple of other things that have helped the breakthrough is that a lot of US acts have come to the UK over the last five or six years and basically taken the money and ran, put on really, really bad shows with just a DJ or if bothered, turning up at all, turned up, done the show and disappeared and British audiences have gone, “ Do you know what, I don’t know if I can part with another twenty five quid at the Stratford Rex to deal with that,” so that kind of stuff spreads and basically helps to diminish one side. I think the other side is that people from the UK have suddenly become more comfortable just in their own skins, and when I say that, just somebody walking saying, “Where are you from?” “Yeah, I’m from ,” or “I’m from the UK,” or “Yeah, my rap is UK based,” it’s become trendy. It’s become the way now. If somebody raps in an American accent, it’s not a done thing now, when we’re looking at people like Monie Love that had to do it with a little bit of an American twang in order to get through and she was a trailblazer – and the Cookie Crew, probably the same thing, a little bit of twang in order to be accepted and be played but they were UK, they were British.

The other thing, a major contributor is Channel U and people may not want to say it, or might know about it, but Channel U is on Sky, but I can’t remember the channel it sits on Sky – is a really simple text service – it’s called Channel AKA now and if you want to see a video you just text in. So again, that whole thing about the gatekeeper and kids from inner cities were getting all their friends to vote for their video when it came on TV. Now if you’re from a school and you have got that many people in the school and they’ve all got friends, you’ve immediately got three to four‐thousand texts going through at any one time to vote for a particular track and that track would be British. Before all of this was happening, you’re looking at a group like N‐Dubz who for four years were constantly being played on that channel, videos constantly being played, so by the time they were signed by All Around The World, all that All Around The World as a record label did was recognise that they were being played on the street for five years, so they just said, “All we’ve got to do is put these guys on TV, so we won’t spend on much else apart from TV advertising, we’ll let people know that their album is out.” And lo and behold, their album came out and is presently at 600,000 sales, which for a UK urban act – for a UK act, full stop – is big cheese and it’s the same with Dizzee and the same with Tinchy Stryder, he is the UK number one male artist selling today, this year, so in a way, all of these things have all helped shape and contribute and … the rest of it.

The Wall Comes Tumbling Down

KLG: So do we think that we are finally reaching that place where Black British artists and Black Asian artists are not seen as inferior in any way, they are not seen as second rate versions of what might be seen as the real thing from America? Certainly when I was growing up and this relates to the point about UK hip hop, it wasn’t just applied to UK hip hop, it was applied to as well. If you were a Black singer, who was trying to make it, then the immediate comparison was with Michael Jackson and it was not favourable at all, it’s like, “Okay, this guy is or this guy is Rikki Patrick or whoever it may be, he’s trying to be like Michael and he will never be as good” and I think that was a huge, huge psychological wall that people were trying to get over. Do you think that wall has finally crumbled now, or are more people finding ways of either jumping over it or getting around it?

KK: I think a bit of both. I think technology has made stuff accessible but that doesn’t mean to say that it’s not going to be harder, it’s still going to be hard because that much being out there means the amount of bands that are out there are going to be infinite; the amount of people trying to use the same tricks to actually get through – to reach the bullseye – is going to be many more people, so inevitably, there’s going to be wastage, there’s going to be spillage, there are going to be people that are absolute geniuses that are going to get stepped on. But that’s no different to what has happened year in year out, it’s just part of it. I still feel as though we are about to see an explosion. Because I feel that normally what happens with trends in music is it’s sort of cyclical; it reaches a peak and then it dies down, something else comes in – the thing that’s different here is that – if you take, when Soul II Soul came out, or when Loose Ends came out, it was really as if it was just them, maybe a bit of 52nd Street ...

KLG: Just for historical perspective, Loose Ends had a major hit with Hanging on a String which is like a classic UK soul track from the mid‐eighties, so it’s a long time ago, over twenty years.

KK: I think with them, they came out, it was just them, then as soon as their three years were kind of up, it died out. Soul II Soul came up but it was kind of just them. As soon as their three years were up ... the movement was very club based but it was crossing over to mainstream, it was really tough because again, the gatekeeper thing was still in effect, so getting above that kind of, “you’ll never be played on Radio 1”, was what was happening, then ...

KLG: If I can play devil’s advocate for a moment, why did a group like Jamiroquai who came from the acid jazz scene, why did they manage to make a breakthrough then?

KK: I think Jamiroquai made some really catchy records and I think they were pop. I think their marketing was always really smart, the whole thing with the hat, whereas a lot of us were at the time, were just the music man but they were like actually, “You need a gimmick. The hat is really important, what’s your logo? What’s your this, what’s your that?” They were really smart; it’s taken me years to be able to say that by the way, because at the time I was hurting, I would say that was absolutely true, and the other thing is listening to his ‘Greatest Hits’, he wrote some stonkers so he was really, really good so there is that as well. That’s another thing, Radio 1 at the time were perfectly entitled to say a few things like that because loads of us weren’t writing three and a half minute pop busters, we were writing songs for clubs, we were writing five and half minute songs and saying, “Hey, why aren’t we on radio?” And it was like, “Dude, get with the programme.” Whereas now, if Dizzee Rascal needs to cut the front end of his tune down from fifty seconds before the chorus comes in to five, he’s cutting it down with no hesitation because he wants to go on the radio, that’s the situation. There is a new kind of savvy with regards to these kind of things, savvy enough to realise if we want to be judged on the same kind of playing field, then that’s what we’ve gotta do. I do think now, just to sum up, because of electronic media, I think that we are in the midst of an explosion and I think we have scratched a surface; people have got a taste and they are about to be fed. That’s what I think.

Artistic and Creative Growth

KLG: Sheila, we haven’t heard from you for a little while. Lots of stuff in there, very quickly, straight off the bat ‐ the idea of the cycles Kwame is talking about, two or three years for acid jazz or for some Brit Soul and then it dies down, could we be onto something bigger, could we actually have an explosion and more to the point from my point of view as a journalist, could we have a time where artists have sustained careers, where you’ve got somebody whose making interesting music not just for 3 years, or 4 years 5 years but for 10, if not 20 years to have longevity and to have artistic growth and creative growth within those parameters as well?

SC: Well I’m not going to make any predictions. Obviously as an artist [for myself], I always try to predict what will happen. With Monsoon in ‘82 there was no such term as ‘’, then. What we had was a very, very heavily Indian influenced dance hit. There was no apartheid in terms of how we were shelved on the shop floor, so people would go into the chart listing section in HMV and buy us from there. Of course, there were all sorts of things that we wanted to see happen in the wider music industry and acceptance for that music and some of that has happened in completely different forms. I think in terms of sustained careers, it’s possible because the industry has changed so much. There used to be a two‐tier system – there are a lot of points to be made here – with Asian labels charging [differently]. First of all, lots of Asian pirates, selling directly into Southall shops and charging a different price and not therefore at the minimum price for those to be counted as chart sales, so those albums maybe have been selling 50,000 copies and none of those copies were being counted.

KLG: So there was a lot of success but it wasn’t being recognised by the mainstream?

SC: It wasn’t being counted by the mainstream because there were certain rules which the Asian labels either didn’t know about, or chose to ignore. So the whole industry has changed. In the early 90’s, all that stuff started to change. The Asian labels started to see that they needed to plug into the wider music business. When I talked about inheriting a sense of how the wider music business works, some of that knowledge is part of what is being passed on. But I think we also have to look at the kind of mainstream industry that new artists are entering now. I mean with the rise of X Factor and so on, yes, as you said Kwame, there’s a huge amount of diversity now, people are able to reach their audiences directly. But that also means, as you said that there are a lot more artists making music. And what you see is this incredibly safe, un‐risky policy [operated] by mainstream record companies. Yes, with the best will in the world, if you want to reach your audience directly, you can, but if you want to have a sustained career ... . Some people need time and they need investment if they are not very good at business, they need the kind of support that a record company and managers can provide and I’m just very, very concerned that the diversity is what’s going to get lost in all that. If you have got a very immediate form of music that you can dance to and all the kids immediately want, then yes, you are going to have a lot of success but if you have something that’s very slow burn – I mean with artists in the sixties, it used to be expected that you would take two or three albums just to hit your style. And you can’t always do that on a low budget, you can’t always do that without support, so I’m concerned about that. A&R Is Dead. Long Live The New (Street) A&R!

KLG: I couldn’t agree more, does that mean essentially that there is a problem with lets say, the vision of A&R, that actually having somebody in artist repertoire who says, okay you are a 17 or 18 year old artist or ...

SC: ... Oh, A&R doesn’t exist like it used to in those days.

KLG: Well this is it, has it changed to the extent that you don’t have somebody with that vision, actually saying okay, you are not ready now but in maybe three or four or five years time you’ll be fantastic. Because there is a story, kind of music industry folklore about as a teenager being signed and actually being developed for like two or three years before she even made a damn song, before anything was released.

SC: That’s true. I knew some of the people who were at Phonogram. They had been at Records and they all left and joined Phonogram and they had been around when Kate Bush was being developed. So that is absolutely true. She had a year, just to go to classes, develop her dance style, think about her writing and do the kind of development that artists these days don’t, when you’re pressured to reach your own ... you’re having to be your own promotion machine. You have to think a certain way and you are then being encouraged to think about immediacy all the time, rather than following that weird creative spark that is inside you. So if you are going to produce innovative music; if you are going to be a trailblazer; if you are going to keep your own pot of inspiration simmering over ten or twenty years, then that [creative spark] is something that you really need to pay attention to and that’s the kind of thing that concerns me about the current climate in the music industry. It is an incredibly exciting time, but it’s also changed from that point of view. It was almost like the Wild West in the ‘80’s when samplers came out, nobody knew how to deal with that legally. A whole legal system had to be developed and artists getting ripped off in the mainstream was much more common place, even then.

The trouble with the industry itself becoming much more codified, is that it becomes safer. It becomes less risky and it becomes the marketing people and the number crunchers who are making decisions about when to pick someone up and who has reached their audience via those direct means Kwame was talking about, so I still see less risky things getting prioritised and that’s my concern, because I think, if you are a black artist and you are coming from a soul RnB tradition, that is much more accepted as what I was talking about earlier, as ‘our’ music. If you’re coming from something like Bhangra or Asian Fusion, you’ve still got this whole other issue, the sense of ‘otherness’ to be thinking about and what I’m concerned about is this sort of ‘constant dilution’. Yes, I listened to Michael Jackson as a child; I loved , I loved all that classic soul stuff and in a way part of me just wants to go and do a soul vocal and that is something I’m definitely capable of doing. But there is so much more I can do and am I going to increasingly be encouraged to drop that and just go towards the soul vocal because I can and I look great doing it and because that’s what the kids want? And because it’s really immediate, rather than it being something they develop a taste for over time? And yes, we are not here to educate, we are here to entertain but neither are we here to lose the diversity and inheritance and the riches that we bring with us that we can put into a real context. Everyone gets poorer intellectually with this ‘immediacy culture’.

KLG: Sure, because there is no development. You made a really, really important point about the music industry and genres in the music industry in the early ‘80’s saying that at the time when Monsoon came out there wasn’t really a ‘World Music’ market as such. With the advent of World Music and the fact that we have this new genre which I feel had led to a certain amount of stratification, this kind of distance between world music, rock, jazz, pop etc., does that mean that an act like Monsoon for who were going into all these different areas at once, straddling these genres, being difficult to categorise, that it becomes more difficult to actually do something like that in the year 2009 because we have all of these boxes now?

SC: I think undoubtedly, of course Monsoon was very different. It was at a time when synth‐pop was on the rise. It was very acoustically based and it was a very different sound to what anyone else was doing.

KLG: You had sitars and didn’t you?

SC: It was an almost entirely acoustic track so yes, sitar, , jew’s harp, Chinese gong – all sorts of stuff; lots of percussion and stuff, as well as a crash beat, which was at the time the drum sound of the time. And I remember when DJ’s first got the ‘white labels’ and they were trying it out at the clubs, it cleared the floor – no‐one knew how to dance to it. But the point is, they got the white labels, they played it a few times and people got into it. Nobody made a big announcement about it being ‘different’ or filed it in a different section in the record shop; you could come across it when you were browsing. I’m not sure , even if it had been right for the time – updated and whatever – if Ever So Lonely would have been a hit if it were released yesterday, or last month, simply because all the marketing people would put it in a certain genre; all the people at radio stations would put it in a certain genre; all the journalists would review it in a certain way. And something that I found interesting on my last album which was released in 2001, This Sentence is True, is that there is very, very little actual Asian influence on it. I’d gone beyond that into sound collages. I’d gone beyond that into looking at how the structure of can influence modern music. So it wasn’t sitars and tablas or something you would recognise as a Bhangra beat or even specifically Asian vocal. There were things like Gregorian chant on there, there was lots of ‘lyric‐less’ vocal.

KLG: So you were going outside ‘your box’?

SC: ‘My box’ (nods). Interestingly, I was reviewed by all the same people and many of the comments made the assumption that in fact, what I was doing was very Asian, but I didn’t think it sounded particularly Asian at all. So I think that’s the other thing, once you do something that’s seen as ‘ethnic’, you are labelled in that way, as an artist. For you to go and then do something different! I think that’s changing now, but certainly in the last 20 years, that [ethnic music] is ‘what you did’, to people who reviewed you and journalists that knew your work and it’s actually quite difficult to throw that label off, even if you want to temporarily, which again pushes artists into, “Well hey, am I going to go mainstream or am I going to do something that involves my own culture. I know I’m Asian but I’ll go and make a great RnB record because I’m far more likely to get played.” I mean Kwame talking about being British and being marginalised in RnB ... actually, we are even more marginalised in a way. We are in a room beyond that.

KLG: Let’s do the kind of labels and genres thing and how problematic that can be as well. You must’ve seen a lot of that with both D‐Influence and the artists that you’ve been managing and your consultancy work as well – do A&R men or record labels still insist on this definition of where is this going to go, what is the market for it as opposed to, is this good music, is this interesting? Or are they thinking about the slots first?

KK: I don’t know, I just think the face of A&R has changed. This is ‘Uturnsville’ right now because whatever the idea was, whether you’ve read Hitman or Howling at the Moon or Geffen’s The Operator or any of those books, the vibe with A&R was very much like, “Okay, look, the older guys don’t know what they are doing but what we are gonna do is we are gonna shake things up by being passionate about a particular kind of music, sticking by it and then it breaks and then we make loads of money and then we can re‐invest in other types of music that we really like.” I’m just being general with the essence of what we figured was a really good A&R person, someone that stuck with it, that was passionate about the acts, as you say ...

SC: I remember them!

KK: ; four albums; dropped by her label and then Atlantic come in and bam! get her with the right people ...

KLG: But Aretha Franklin – and I think this is very relevant to the discussion – was a gospel singer and a jazz singer as well who recorded and jazz music before there was any thought of RnB or potential pop success. Her father’s a preacher, she’s in churches , and she was in smoky jazz night clubs as well.

KK: So it didn’t work on the label that she was on, changed – whatever, bought out of contract – I don’t know what happened but Atlantic got to her then bam! It happened. KLG: The rest is history.

KK: Exactly. Now we’re talking about a time when there is less time for the reveal; it’s very much like, you saw him on TV last week, if you haven’t bought their records within two months, near enough they’re dead. That’s really where we are at with main mainstream TV pop. A&R now – I’m not an A&R basher, because the way I look at it, it’s just changed. Those people have come into those jobs and that’s how it is now. You either know how to put records together and albums together or you know how to put an act together or you inherit it because it’s gained such large momentum by itself that it is ripe to be picked from the tree.

KLG: So they want more or less the finished product basically, they want that is going to land in their laps.

KK: Well those are the two ways; even pop is easy to get wrong. There are some A&R people, who have still got the nous. I look at someone like Nick Raphael at Epic and I go to myself, “actually he is pretty good at doing what he does.” If JLS had been in the hands of someone else I don’t know if they would be as large as they are now, even though they were a kind of pop phenomenon, it’s still easy to get that stuff wrong, so some people are good at doing that and then there’s the other strand of A&R, where an act comes through, it’s large and it’s got its own following of some sort and the A&R person plucks it from the tree ...

SC: ... and don’t you think that’s completely a reflection of how much power and status there is in that role? I mean, twenty years ago the A&R person still had some power of discretion over their budgets and some respect within the company to chase something that they thought would be good in the long run. It seems to me that it’s the way companies have been restructured and the eroding of the status of the A&R person within record companies that has meant that they have to now go for the easy fruit.

KLG: Is that because they are under a lot of pressure from accountants with figures?

KK: Incredible.

SC: Yes, it’s because they can’t spend money on research; in a sense A&R is research and development time and they just haven’t got or don’t want to spend the time and money on that. And that is why [watching] A&R departments is like watching fruits shrivel on a tree.

KLG: So essentially the art is getting lost or at least the risk on potential great art if they are working under such pressure and circumstances.

KK: It’s street A&R now. People are out there – they believe in themselves, they get their video together with their own money – Chipmunk hasn’t just happened overnight. He’s been going for x amount of years since he was however old and his manager nearly put up a house just to make sure that this guy that came to him, had his number one single two weeks ago. The rise of that took an amount of time, it’s almost like street A&R now. It’s taken its own time to get to wherever and it’s gained its own following and own fan base and then – okay.

SC: It’s like a stream, you dam it and it will get diverted. This has happened over and over, even within pop. You get technological changes like amplification and suddenly you get a whole new genre, you get a whole new audience, you get whole new ways of reaching people. This development within A&R and the immediacy of the internet, just means that different types of music will get prioritised, different types of music will get played and it will reach people in different ways; that grassroots stuff will get through in different ways.

KK: The funny thing is, there are some real ties with the past. If you’re talking about the whole thing with three albums, arguably right now Dizzee Rascal has taken three albums to get to a hit. So, there are some things that are a direct correlation like how he has earned the right to have number one records right now. But the interesting thing was, the label that he was signed to didn’t want to put out ‘Dance with Me’ which is why he left them to do his own thing.

KLG: Why do you think they didn’t want to put it out?

KK: I don’t know. All I heard is that they didn’t think that it was particularly good. Who knows, maybe their take on where they thought he was going was different to his own take, but what can you say? The rest is history. But it’s just different now. A&R is dead. Long live A&R.

KLG: Long live the new A&R.

KK: Yeah.

KLG: The street A&R.

KK: Yeah.

From To Mainstream

KLG: Could it be argued to a certain extent that if artists coming from black music, from either hip hop, Asian fusion, soul etc., if they want to reach the same level of success as either rock artists or pop artists that essentially even in the year 2009, they have to compromise and dilute what they are doing artistically, some way? It’s interesting, I have read so many articles over the last six months or so, talking about the way that Dizzee and Tinchy and some of the others have taken grime into the mainstream, which to a certain extent is a great thing. Any artist that attains success and manages to open up new audiences is to be commended for that. Yet on the other hand, there’s part of me that thinks, has he had to leave grime to get into the mainstream? Has he had to compromise, dare I say, sell out to do that?

KK: No, I don’t think so at all, I really don’t. I think some artists are just better suited. If you’ve had two or three albums as an artist of doing things in a particular way, then you reach your third and fourth albums, you start to change. Don’t forget this is Dizzee – he did Happy Talk back in the day sampling Captain Sensible. Let’s not make out like he suddenly just went – he didn’t. He was always interested in going, “Hmm, how do I take my art form and switch it up a little?” He was always on that thing. Now, the thing is, whilst he’s doing his thing, I know for a fact that there are children being born – when I say that, I mean there are kids that have gone, “Do you know what, I just saw him doing that with Happy Talk – Captain Sensible? Who’s he? I dunno know but you know what, I kind of like what happened with that you know, bruv. I tell you what, and they go, “Right this is what I’m gonna do.” I know with Shorty, for him, the fact that Dizzee had done what he had done meant that he was like, “Well I don’t have to just do lyrics that are about ‘x’ or have my beats go in a particular way. I’m going to do this instead.” So his thing was, he was chucking in , blah this, that, no samples, all played, so you know for him that is changing it again. Chipmunk – very, very good at ... he’s like the LL Cool J, but UK. When I say that I mean, you know that thing of, “ You know that I can give you a hook, I can really flow over the hook and I look good so you know what ladies, come get me, guys you’ll like the record too, let’s go.” You know, so you’ve got him, then each one has got their own thing, but they’re all in this pack at the moment that’s just out there and if you want a bit of that flavour, you take it, if you want a bit of that you take it. It’s what you do.

KLG: Should black and Asian artists need to compromise to make it big?

SC: I think it depends on how you define compromise. I think what you are talking about is really the ability to be accessible and there have always been differences in any individual or artist’s capacity to be accessible and to be short form. Pop is a short, immediate form. You had great musicians writing 27 minute prog‐rock tracks in the 60’s but most people were listening to at two and a half [minutes]. I think you can’t get the kind of depth and development in a two and a half minute track that you can in a 27 minute prog‐rock track and it’s going to be the same if you are looking at music in the modern day, drawing from other influences, particularly in the Asian tradition, if that’s what we are talking about, which has traditionally been a very, very long form of music; you know playing ragas all night. I think if you define compromise as, “Well, I am not going to be short form, I’m not going to be accessible ... ,” if you’re very ...‘closed’ about that, then yes, you would say that what they have to do, is dilute what they are doing. But I think they [musicians] can always point their way back if they do it with a great deal of quality in what they are doing. If individual artists have the talent of referring to other music in a quirky and creative way, they can point their way back to those traditions for new audiences and that’s always been a very important thing that pop music has done, going right back to the blues. But they also create new forms in themselves and I am not at all snobbish about this.

The ability to write a great two‐minute 30 [second] pop song is not a talent that everybody has. It’s an incredible talent to have and I think we are kind of in the hands of successive generations of artists who have that capacity. I personally don’t, I prefer longer‐form work, I prefer not to have to get to the chorus within the first 20 seconds. But you know what? When I hear a fantastic song that does that and speaks to my heart, I love it just as much as everyone else, so I think it’s a difficult question to answer. I think if you’re willing to be open minded about it, no, they don’t necessarily [have to compromise] within their music. Whether they are brave at championing that music and whether the music business, in its huge state of flux at the moment, is going to sit up and take notice of the diversity that needs to be feeding it as it goes forward [is the question]. And not to keep putting on the brakes and trying every safe strategy it can, going to stuff like X Factor – sometimes I watch X Factor and I think, you know, I watched this with my great aunt when I was 10; this is Opportunity Knocks. This is your cabaret pub singer and all they like in singers is ... okay, they’ll have a bit of soul ornamented vocal now, which is a move on from those old pub singers from the seventies, but what they basically love is a good belting voice like Shirley Bassey or Tom Jones. Well, even within pop music, I don’t want to be limited to that, that’s the depressing thing for me about diversity at the moment.

KK: And a good story, you got to have a good story.

SC: Oh yeah, it’s gotta have a sob story ... so it’s that kind of safety that I don’t like in the mainstream. I think that’s the thing that might hold us back.

KK: But then again, a lot depends on what type you are personally. I’ve never been good at writing pop singles. I’m okay at producing them, I’m not good at writing them and I’m good at picking them but I’ve never been good at writing them myself.

KLG: You should be a judge on the X Factor, shouldn’t you?! I’m being flippant!

KK: Moving swiftly on ... so from my perspective, the kind of things that I would love to see are probably things that I think to myself, “Do I prefer the short version of Good Times by Chic or the 12‐inch seven‐and‐a‐half /eight‐minute version – give me the seven or eight‐minute version, anytime.

KLG: I’m with you on that.

KK: So it depends.

SC: But they gave you both, that’s the point. They didn’t just give you a 12‐inch version and expect you to discover it.

KK: No they didn’t, you are right.

KLG: Well I’m glad that you mentioned Chic because a really important thing about Chic was that they were a band and they played instruments – an African American group from the soul tradition from the tradition who were musicians who played and I wonder today, just to move the discussion in a slightly different direction, whether there is a great divide that has opened up between new young black artists using samplers, beat machines, etc. and white artists, for want of a better term playing rock, playing guitars. I noticed it, and talking to young people as well, there is this kind of dichotomy saying the black kids do the beats and the white kids have the guitars and they play rock and the whole tradition of the black band, the soul band with the three or four‐piece rhythm section and a horn section, Chic being an obvious example, the likes of Cameo, P. Funk, all that kind of stuff, that seems to be withering on the vine and there definitely hasn’t been as much commercial success in that area. Is that something of a concern? That there may be fewer younger black musicians playing instruments?

KK: I don’t know. Commercially on the face of it you are absolutely right. However, I would also say that if you are looking at what is happening within the indie world right now and rock, what you will find is that it is a lot more regular for a black face to front a band with a multi‐ethnic group behind, white this, that, xyz. Give me an example someone? Dele what band is he from ...?

KLG: Bloc Party.

KK: Right, so Bloc Party, now, is not such an, “Oh my God, look,” moment. It’s very much a, “Yeah, ok, there’s a black guy with a .” It’s not so much of an issue now or a ‘wow’ moment. The Invisibles are another example. They were nominated as well for the . Again, the music is like funk mixed with rock mixed with folk mixed with all sorts. So I think there is a – to quote Elvis – A Whole Lot of Shaking Going On, and I think there is going to be more in that kind of area, so I would say with soul music, in a way, if we take it as cyclical, it had such a good time in the 80’s and early 90’s that in a way it is having its beat down now.

KLG: And you think it’s going to come back at some point?

KK: I think it has to. It’s the nature of the beast. How it comes back I won’t know, I haven’t got a clue. Let’s face it, it near enough had the 80’s and the early 90’s wrapped up. If you wanted to be in the music business, you found a band to be in and then you played and that’s what you did, just like with jazz and be bop before, you found a band and you became part of the band. With everything became focused on the solo artist again for a short amount of time.

KLG: I just want to ask Sheila to quickly respond to that. You are a musician; you have done some very experimental work with instruments, with your voice. You mentioned Nitin Sawhney who as we know is a great multi instrumentalist – I wonder, kind of on the back of that point, have there not been enough people from the Asian music scene who followed in his footsteps to a certain extent? Do we need more successes of Nitin Sawhney to come through as really great multi instrumentalists?

SC: I don’t think there’s an issue over whether you are a good musician or not. I think there’s less of a divide with us, because we have a great tradition of DJ’s and we also have a great tradition of people who are good with beats and stuff in the UK, coming out of the tradition of learning your instrument. There is still a tradition of you going and studying with your guru. There are ethnic instruments particularly the tabla and ghatam and so on, which still cannot be played on a ‘Fairlight’ or a synth or whatever else is current at the moment. That’s not something I get into. You can’t fake it, you have to sit there and learn the taal at your teacher’s feet and so I think it’s far less of a schism. If you are going to produce Bhangra, you do have to be able to play the taal and you have to be able to understand those structures and so I think, yeah, there should be more of them and more getting to Nitin Sawhney standard and getting to that level of attention. And maybe there will be.

Q & A

Politics In Music

Audience – David Porter: Really interested in hearing the discussion about outside of the mainstream; surprised that you haven’t mentioned the word ‘politics’. The last 20 years, there’s been a great change in the UK. When I was a young boy, the first music I heard was classic jazz and Tamla but I didn’t realise that was a black music perspective, I just liked it. And then we went through great political movements like Thatcher, pirate radio going and Radio 1 coming on and being taken over by a kind of Thatcherite DJ and oldie music – I thought – and people getting sick of that kind of music and creating punk. Then we had that with people looking for new outlets. I could afford to buy one single a week and then suddenly Thatcher goes, Major is much softer, the lottery comes in, there’s lots more opportunities and then the Tony Blair experiment; technological change, politics really changed the UK, and for me, personally changed for the better and we are obviously in a much better place now than we were 10‐20 years ago – what are the thoughts of the panel? Politics has really changed people and that’s why I think that politics must still be important. Any views about the next 10 years?

KLG: Great. That’s a very good point . Has music become less political?

KK : Short‐term answer is yes, I think, but bear in mind, one thing we have stressed all the way through is that there does seem to be this strange cyclical thing with music. Obviously, within black music, politics has been a huge influence, Marvin Gaye’s, What’s Going On? through to Public Enemy – I don’t even know where to start or finish, really. Rap, hip hop being the voice of the people, even down to ’s outburst at Bush for what happened in New Orleans; it’s been huge but how influential at the moment that is going on at the moment in the UK, I would say, not very. And I would say, probably because we are dealing with Thatcher’s children or the offspring of, and I guess once you break the backs of miners and the rest of it, there is almost this kind of de‐politicisation – I’m not going to do that, because if I do that, it doesn’t do anything, kind of thing. But I also think that whenever someone says something to me like what you just said, it means we are due. So that is my answer to that – we are due.

I don’t know if right now, artist wise, they’ve worked that out yet. At the moment there is a lot of – I don’t know if they have worked it out yet – you have got industry in a state of flux – you’ve got – CD’s? What do we do? Do we sell them, fling them? Downloads yes, but you can get them from anywhere. It seems like people’s brains are on that at the moment, but once the whole moneytarisation bit gets sorted out ... I know that shouldn’t have anything to do with it, but I think it does.

SC: I think certainly with Asian UK musicians, there has never been much of a tendency to make overtly political music. I can’t quote the kind of examples like Public Enemy that you have been able to. I think on a more grassroots level, Asian musicians have sought to make a statement about their presence by being present and by being popular and by getting through to their audiences. And in a way saying, “We are not going to change, we are not going to be different, we are not going to deny who we are and we are not going to go away.” It’s almost a stereotypical thing to say but there is an incredibly rich tradition of business nous in the Asian community and I think some of that is now being applied to the business of music whereas a generation ago it wasn’t. And I think once, as you say, once the download crisis, the ways in which we earn from music as artists gets sorted out – which I think is still going to take a while because it’s been in the throes for so long now – but once that is sorted out, I think those very creative brains will make their presence felt again and will learn to play the system again, maybe not in an overtly political way in terms of content, but certainly in terms of presence, in the sense of, “You can’t ignore us and even you will start to feel that we are part of you.” And I think that that is a profoundly political statement too. But I think it’s going to take awhile. The fact is, that the wider industry, as we’ve been saying, is focused on marketing. And if artists understand marketing and understand business nous, then that is the way they are going to get through it. And that’s the way I think the new wave is going to score.

KLG: I’d just like to quickly round off by echoing what Kwame said; the fact that there is still a lot of political music being made, but it’s not making the impact that it made back in the 70’s, certainly back in the 60’s as well. I’m just thinking, off the top of my head, about some of the acid jazz artists, back in the early and mid‐90’s which is the scene that D‐Influence came out of, loosely, and you had a group like Young Disciples, remember, who were incredibly political and the record that they made – Apparently Nothing – which was probably their finest hour, which was a direct response to the Gulf War. And to me – I remember buying that record, listening to the words and saying, ‘This is really saying something about where we are right now.” But I think the point is, it didn’t go on to sell anything near, like the quantities of a Marvin Gaye, or a sold in the 70’s, making the very political music that they made, so it wasn’t so much that the music was less political but the idea of being able to sell political music – when you think that Motown didn’t even want to release, What’s Going On?, and you think about how overt a statement something like Stevie Wonder’s, You Haven’t Done Nuthin is, a lot of James Brown’s music, is Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud, – these very political records that also sold a lot of quantities and I think that is probably what’s happened. Kwame talked about Kanye West and the outburst about Hurricane Katrina, one of the most important records, political records again, a soul record, is one of the most overtly political records about Katrina is Jhelisa Anderson’s A Primitive Guide To “Being There” which is largely inspired by her experience of living in New Orleans, and having to leave. Now to me, that is an absolute masterwork, it’s a great piece of art, it’s a great record, but nobody wanted to sign it, so it kind of comes back to what we were talking about before, this idea of A&R taking risks or not taking risks. It’s a very, very political record, and it’s a very accomplished piece of art as well but nobody actually wanted to sign it, so I think the politics is actually still there, but it’s a question of, if the music industry really wants to accept it, and whether there is an audience for it as well.

KK: And it’s that thing again as well, a politicised thing of music, it’s a kind of odd thing, I would say, coming from acid jazz time; there was a lot of stuff happening news‐wise, that we agreed, then didn’t agree with, but because our first port of call was not getting a major label deal, for us, it was like, “Well of course we are going to talk politics in our music, because we’ve got nothing to lose, it’s the only way we are going to get heard in a club, so we may as well put out a really loud message and talk about that.” So we had records that echoed thoughts of ours at the time, however loosely political they were. We knew that we would sell just as much as anything else. I know that sounds odd, but that’s the truth – we were free to say it – we were not going to get harmed by it. The kind of people we should be worried about aren’t going to play us anyway, so we are not going to be harmed by it. But I think now, to ask Chipmunk to write, about what’s going on, to me, I can’t see that happening, it’s like, why? KLG: And he has a right to refuse as well. As much as I like political music, he has the right not to be political too. You’ve got to have a ying and yang really. Great question.

The Live Component

Audience – Tom: Is live music going to be more important than CD sales etc., with the product declining? Is live music going to be the ?

SC: There’s always going to be something special about seeing someone live; there’s always going to be something special about being within a few hundred feet in front of them; the chaos factor, about the artist’s own decision about playing it differently that night and in a way, what a lot of the new technology is about is, ‘immediacy’. Social networking is really about being part of someone else’s experience, via or whatever they are doing, so we haven’t lost our taste for social connection and immediacy, that says to me that live music is really going to continue to be psychologically important to us. Yes, [it’s important], certainly in the short term, if it is going to happen, that CD and download sales trough because you can get everything for free and because everyone discovers how they can do that, and everybody decides they are going to do that. I know that there are people who are going to try and change the intellectual property laws in this country now and I don’t know quite what they are proposing, but if they succeed with that and if everybody agreed and I know a lot of people do think that music should be for free, then, yes, obviously live performance is going to be popular, but I think, it’s going to rise in prominence for the next few years until we get those issues sorted out. I think then, we will be on another cycle and people will discover that actually, if you want good music you have to invest in it, and to invest in it is via the product. But yeah, that hunger is never going to go away, so it’s always going to be important.

KK: 70/30 yes. Live music forms a huge part of the future, which is ironic as it was a massive part of the past. But yes, the simple factor is, as a manager, if an artist can’t perform live, I’m less interested because I’m thinking to myself, how am I going to feed my kids if this person is just currently putting music out there that can be gotten for free? That’s it in its most brutal and blunt form.

KLG: So the live experience is giving you something that the CD and download experience can’t?

KK: Absolutely. I’ll give you a really good example. Yesterday I was with one of my artists at a launch of their new trainer line that is being launched throughout the UK. The artist went and performed four tracks, in a store in Birmingham. The trainers are on sale for near enough 60 pounds. Inside the trainer box is a CD, so you get the album with the trainers. The trainers are selling. People are coming for a free live show, they are then really liking the live show, then they are going and buying the trainers, so how important is live in that? Well, the ‘Pied Piper’ effect has come from the fact that the artist is in the store playing live, so – you know what I mean? So how important is it? Like really important. We’re looking at examples of merchandising where everybody from Nine Inch Nails doing premium deluxe packs that have got album, out takes, special leafleted box sets, etc. And I work for ATC management who are partners with Courtyard; Courtyard manage and Radiohead, the deluxe box set is forty quid – those things were flying out. They gave the album away online, and said it’s not going to be on order or anything, but if you want the tracks or anything, there you go, go get them but if you want the box set, come see us. The warehouse couldn’t print them up quick enough. Radiohead? Live music band. So how important is it? Important, really, really important. People probably talk a lot more now about Pink Floyd’s reunion concert recently, well when I mean recently, I mean within the past four years, live again, that is the thing that sparked and made the internet lines go crazy. So, it’s tremendously important.

KLG:Is the artist one of yours, selling the trainers?

KK : Yes, Master Shortie. Again, I would say that with regards to music and ways forward, I would say that right now, free is one thing, but it’s not so far away, this whole thing about subscription as well. This whole thing of, you can get music delivered to your handset, there will be one charge, which could be, I don’t know, 10 pounds for a year and then you can download whatever it is you want. That kind of thing is being spoken about at the moment, in a massive way. Many of the things that I’m being asked to talk about, at the moment is about that, about subscription. Okay, Spotify has changed the whole game, in itself, just in terms of streaming and you can go online and can hear near enough what you want, not some of the great records, but okay, there’s a lot on the horizon, and there is this idea that if you can get 10 or 15 quid off a person in a year, and it’s almost like a hidden charge, so for instance, they buy their handset and on top of their handset there’s 10 or 15 quid from a person in a year and that goes into one central pot and then every time you download a piece of music and that gets split up, the royalty gets paid through to the artist (Ha! Ha!), sorry I have to say that, as that is always going to be the problem area, but you know, that is part of the new way forward, but then, once that’s all been done, what else is there? Live once again. What am I saying? Prince proved it in regards to his gigs. 21 dates at the 02, for a guy that basically hadn’t played for ages. Hadn’t really sold any records. Strikes a deal with the Daily Mail so yeah, goes on the front cover, however many millions he got from that is one thing, then you go to the gig and get the album again, for free. Some people had two, three, four albums. Did you go to the gigs? Yeah, I went to the gigs too! It worked! Not only did he fleece me once for that, but then he fleeced me again because I went twice! Would I buy the Daily Mail otherwise? Probably not. This is it. So live music, man, that’s the sticky, that’s the glue, that’s the fly paper, that’s the Pied Piper, that’s the thing that drives people towards things and of course, as much as people want to talk about – what are they talking about now for the Jackson gigs? Holograms and all this kind of stuff but it’s that thing, exactly as Sheila put it. It’s the things going wrong, things blowing up, guitars smashing, Whitney’s dress coming off – yeah, look at that, what a talking point! I mean, wardrobe malfunction, stylists sacked immediately on the plane and on the plane home, weeping – I mean, what are you going to say? “I didn’t mean to?” She’s not hearing it, surely! I don’t know, it’s the live thing.

SC: You know as our artists get – well they‘ve always been phenomenally talented, jaw dropping musicians all throughout time, but as that talent gets delivered to us through increasingly distant means, via the internet, I think there is nothing to compare to the magic of standing in front of them and realising that they really can do it. It’s even more important now, because of the technologies we have, than ever before.

KLG: It’s almost a contradiction in terms isn’t it? We have all this amazing technology which enables us to access music but ...

SC ... you know when I came into the business, it was when synths and videos were just coming in and people were actually asking if live performance was dead, [and asking] if people had to do that anymore.

KK: It’s all we have right now.

SC: And how ironic, that we are sitting here 30 years later, saying, “No, this is the thing.”

KK: Acoustic live lounge, you hearing that on Radio 1 – and you are going to yourself, “You know, this person can really, really do it, that’s the sound now.” I know it’s one of the only things keeping all of my artists alive, really, bar none.

The Creative Environment

Audience – Wesley Zepherin: I’m interested in the creative process. We’ve talked a lot about the sustainability, the cyclical nature of the music industry – but I think I agree, yes, it comes in cycles but I’m not actually sure we have got a breakthrough in 2009, in the sense that, for every half decade when something new has come out and then moved on, disco, – my era – British Soul in the early 90’s, underneath all that and also how the audience respond to that. A lot of stores have closed down. If I went to get my Japanese jazz, I can’t go down the road to Groove Records anymore and get it. It’s not as instant. I have to go online, get it on CD because you can’t download it and it takes 5‐10 days to order rather than going down the road, listening to some fantastic music, picking it up, going home, playing it to death, playing it my friend next door and so forth and all that for me, underpins the creative process – it’s about those environments and picking up that information, how instant it is, how good it is and how you can actually transform that into your own practice. So the question is: do we have a good creative environment today? If we do, what do you expect that to look like in 10 years time?

KLG: What exactly do you mean by a good creative environment?

Audience – WZ: A lot of stuff we talked about happens decade by decade by decade; we talked about A&R; a process of art being able to be developed at that time – which has gotten less now; a lot of people are working in their bedrooms rather than actually working with bands; they are using electronic equipment to good effect for some people, as opposed to instruments – putting all this together, the holistic you, is this, 1. a good creative environment? And 2. If it is, or if it isn’t, what is the attitude to make it better than it is?

KLG: The practice of playing instruments, and also the very important practice of researching old music, buying records, having the information circulate, which is part of the growth of a musician as well, actually having access to information, other musicians saying have you heard this, check this out ... etc. I think reading between the lines, there’s the suggestion almost that there is a paradoxical situation in that we are almost literally flooded, surrounded, swamped by music; there is so much availability of music yet at the same time, is there perhaps a situation where, there still isn’t music getting through to people, so that they can develop as artists?

Audience – WZ: Part of the music getting through to people is very similar, it’s the same type of thing and that ...

KLG: ... too homogenous.

WZ: And that aligns with the same point about labelling.

KLG: We are on the same page, so, is there a need perhaps, when you talk about this creative environment, I interpret it as an open minded environment, perhaps where there is a greater breadth of information and maybe a greater breadth of possibilities of making music, which goes back to my point of not just having ... let’s, say black musicians using samplers and beats; white musicians playing instruments for example – a wide range of possibilities ...

Audience – WZ: Can we create the environment to inspire somebody – is it a good model for creativity, now? And if this isn’t, what do we need to make it happen?

KLG: Now that we have defined the creative environment ... can you respond to that?

SC: I would say there has always been, from the most creative people, on the margins of society, limitations. For example, whether they could afford their instruments, whether they could afford even a radio and going back 70, 80 years whether they could even afford to buy records; that didn’t mean they didn’t come up with great music. In a way, sometimes the isolation and their disgust with what was around them musically, made them come up with something more creative. So I think we are talking about the creative spark and I don’t think people are going to lose that because the environment is changing.

I also think that the possibility of communicating with musicians, which is part of your point, are people getting enough feedback from other musicians; people are able to do that remotely now. I can do that with musicians around the world, in a way that wasn’t particularly, practical, and financially feasible, 10‐15 years ago. If people decide to use those technologies as part of that creative process and fileshare and get opinions on mixes and things like that, then obviously ... that is going to be an enhancement to their creative process.

But I think the other thing is, we are talking about an industry where people are running scared and they have been for a long time. And things are being consolidated and consolidated and consolidated. And all those little cracks that you are talking about, which might be represented symbolically, by your independent record shops, where you can go down and browse and find all sorts of things that had a certain immediacy to them – those little creative methods of delivering music that fill the cracks – haven’t had a chance to develop yet. I think once this crisis of whether product continues to be important; how artists get paid; whether they can make a living, whether the whole live thing becomes huge ... once all those issues become resolved in a much more concrete way, then I think we will see what we always have, which is creativity where music is marketed to sub‐genres. People will get involved and find another way of doing that and people will use new technologies to do that.

I think we are in for a wait though, probably quite a long wait. But in the meantime, there will be people who are as much alone in their bedroom, with their computer and their keyboard and their as an old blues musician with a beat‐up guitar on his porch in 1930. And if all they are able to access is X Factor because they can’t go out and buy records and all they can do is tape stuff off the radio – that was all I could afford to do as a kid – then sooner or later, if they’ve got the guts, they’ll give voice to what’s inside them; they will find a way of bringing that through.

KK: Good answer. Black music I think right now is in a strange kind of saturation point in that on the face of it, it has become , very popular music, so much so that it’s popping like Rice Krispies, but I think that we’ve only seen one part of it, so what that has done is enable people to dream. To me, the difference with where we are now, as to where we were before, every five years, something comes, it would come, but what would happen is that there would be this underground stuff happening and generally one or two things would go forward and would obliterate the charts and then they would disappear and because they disappeared, the underground, which wasn’t visible anyway, would perish even more, and then take a minute, carry on being the underground and then rise to the surface again and something else would come.

I think the difference now is that actually the things that would have been considered on the underground then, are right upfront now and they are going, “Actually, your daughter, and your daughter, they all are into me and they are buying me regularly”, so in terms of pop chart, popular, that’s it, we’re it. That’s the situation.

However, I think that is only one face of it, that’s right now just the popular side of it, and has become something the newspapers feel okay to talk about and not only to talk about it but support it. You are talking about The Sun, you are talking about The Rappers Delight tour that they are just about to start – that they are going to back fully. To even think that would be like The Sun embracing acid jazz at that time and going, “Yes, we are fully behind it” and we would have gone, “No chance, not in a million years.” But this is where we are now, and you know what, they are going, absolutely, it’s popular, this is what kids want and we mean to appeal to our kids and this is what we are going to get behind.

So creative environment wise, I think because – something that Sheila said – this whole diversity issue is missing and I say this as a manager of a popular act, the diversity issue is really missing. It’s very hard to stand there as a new act and say, “You know, I am different, I really am different.” It’s almost like the difference now is in, you know, “I really am different, but you know what, I’m the same as the rest – but I’m kinda different.”

This person, or this type of music, is actually truly inspiring, I think we are a minute away from that. I think dubstep, , they are throwing up things and they are going to themselves, “Whew that’s menacing, that is.” An example, La Roux – In For The Kill – the pop version of that, was what was heard at radio level, but the actual version that broke it was Scream’s mix of that song and made it huge, so you are talking about a dub step remix of a track that made a pop song huge. He was just making stuff for clubs: yeah, it had a commercial edge to it, but it was really where his heart is from – sweaty clubs that are probably no bigger than half the size of this room, with sound systems that make your insides rattle so much that it makes you want to pee … that is really where he is from.

So the creativity in that, and the creativity in the amount of people it reached, but it hasn’t necessarily been followed through, in those forms, and other forms; there is a lot to come. So on the face of it, this is happening, but there are loads behind the door, to come through. So the next 10 years, to me, is going to be pretty exciting, because we’ve got so much at our disposal now. The kind of gatekeeper thing that used to be there – it’s still there but not as much and it can be gotten around, and through – you know it’s leaking right now. There are many ways to ‘storm the Bastille’ now, so I think the next 10 years are really exciting because of all of that.

SC: It’s academic to ask whether we can change the creative environment; it just happens. You can’t change it. Too many factors. We can’t make things more creative for musicians even if we could predict what they would do – even change the environment.

Fertilising The Future

KK: I think half of what excites me is that I don’t know what’s going to happen. Funnily enough, the panel that I was on yesterday, ‘Do You Think That Rap Could Have Made It This Far?’ And the answer is no, no way. If you would have said to me, two‐and‐a‐half years ago, would UK rap be at the place it is at now, I would have said no way.

But if you want to break a UK hip hop act now, you have to seriously put your hand in your pocket, that is how far the bench mark has moved. I take that and apply it to other music as well and I still sit there as well and say, we’ve only scratched the surface – Norah Jones sitting there and saying, “Now how many do I really expect to sell?” Honestly, I can tell you as a fact, having spoken to the MD’s of the record labels, they honestly expected it to sell 45,000 copies, that was her first album – what is she at now? 19 million of that first album. And that is from a kind of very cool, underground sounding, very smooth, bluesy, folky album to 19 million sales – no‐one could have predicted – not her – not her label – and what spread that? Word of mouth – dinner parties. How old is that? Was she played on Radio 1? At first, no, nothing to do with it. Dinner parties. Food spread her message. Not even the net particularly, it was probably more dinner parties that did it, so we are in for a time.

Audience – WZ: I think that some of the best things that are coming out, are coming out of this country. What I’m interested in is making sure that there are environments that are making that creativity happen in a way that it should happen, in a way that people want to be creative and people can be creative in any way they want to be. How do you nurture that creativity environment to allow that creativity to happen?

SC: I think you give people access to what they have always needed: information. Access to methods of distributing their music and taking control of that process and training, where they need it and then let them get on with what they need to do. They have always needed support like that. And they need the support of the public; they need people to vote with their feet either to come and see them live or to support their product so they do get out to the wider world, and for the wider world to take notice. And sometimes, yes, they need a funded platform to do that. They need an agent to come along and say, “Yes, I’m willing to support you. I’m willing to help you with this skill or with this contact,” or whatever. And it’s luck, isn’t it?

Whether you get that or not, it is luck. And yes, you can help it along and you should, but ultimately what you are talking about is a huge number of factors involved in the whole creative environment for musicians in a whole cultural country – you can influence it to a degree but you can’t really do that much.

KK: Creating beds for that to happen ... fertiliser ... all of the things that Sheila has been talking about; they are almost like part of the fertiliser to help the seed. The seed though, do we know what is coming out? Do we know if it is going to be a geranium or a daisy? We don’t have a clue, but the other thing I wanted to add to her pot, was indulgence and I know it sounds nuts, but everybody kind of skirts around that fact that basically, we look at music and some of the greatest albums in the world are flights of indulgence and they are people that have been allowed to get away with murder – and this sounds terrible coming from a manager, but I would only say as a message to other people in management or in forms and parts of government that can allow indulgence – allow it. Allow it as in, let it happen because unless people are allowed to be that kind of mental, and really to be that indulgent and to be that crazy, and to be that off the wall and reverse their sleeping patterns, to eat ice‐cream at four in the morning and hire a jumbo jet to get from ‘blah to blah’ to pick up a sampler in Portugal in order to drop off some beats in ‘blah’ in order to pick up some musicians, to walk barefoot in a park – unless they are allowed to do all that nutty stuff, you are not going to get the real stuff, the stuff that – you know Stevie Wonder being locked away with Bob Margouleff, you know those kind, geniuses and “Oh yeah – go ahead – just do it – it’s okay. I know it’s taken a year, but you know what, its going to take another half a year. It’s okay, just go and do it.”

SC: And the thing is at the time, [other] people don’t necessarily know they are geniuses. They are just young kids who are taking an awful lot of time and money to do something that should have been done in a week. And that seems incredibly indulgent, but you are right, that’s where great music is made; that’s where artists grow; that’s where they develop their voices and their sense of self, especially. Whenever I hear the phrase, “You can’t do that,” then I go charging forward.

I remember the first album I made on Real World was a solo voice and drone album and I went to them saying, “I want to play live for the first time, I don’t want to play live with a band.” I had been a recording artist for 10 years by that time, and put out six albums. “I want to understand that interaction between myself and an audience. I want to be able to go in any direction. I want to be alone on stage with just drones or nothing and my bare voice; I want to make an album that reflects that.” And because Real World were allied to WOMAD, they said yes, but you could see they were going, “She’s crazy, you know, singers don’t do this.” Then I did it and they said, “Oh, please don’t do it again!” But those are the albums that are regarded as trailblazing because they gave me the room to take from lots of different vocal traditions, and move between them without chords or any other structural issues getting in the way. They’re regarded as radical albums and now they are glad they said yes, but was it indulgent at the time? Of course it was. I had never, ever, played live. It was utter madness to let me do it.

KK: This is the thing. And we are talking about music, art, Picasso at the time, whoever at the time ...Van Gogh at the time ...

KLG: ... being out of step ...

KK: ...yeah, now people will buy and treasure – that’s what I’m talking about treasuring, the nuttiness. And this is the other thing as well – from nuttiness, actually comes vast amounts of money. If we are looking at it in government terms – music as an export from this country or as an import, people coming in, people visiting Liverpool because The Beatles came from there, or London because they heard about the club scene or even Ibiza because they have heard about the British DJ’s playing there and the club scene – music is often blamed for a lot of things, but there are vast sums of revenue that it brings that are associated revenues that come into this country because of protecting the nuttiness. It’s huge, it’s massive and it’s so important, to just understand it, revel in it and just to let it happen like that, you know. Coming from a manager I know it’s a terrible thing to say, because I know all of my acts will be like, “Kwame, yeah!” But it’s the truth.

Audience – Member: The effect that the has had on black artists over here. Did The Beatles and that wave of the British invasion – did they influence black artists?

KLG: Let me just say, that’s a huge question. It’s a great question but that’s another session, another seminar, basically. The effect that the British invasion might have had on black artists over here. Did The Beatles and let’s say that wave of what’s called the British invasion, say The Stones, The Beatles, Jerry and the Pacemakers ... did they influence black artists over here? Did it help put black music on the map?

KK: The short answer is yes, because it is part of – music has this strange – it’s carnivorous. It has this strange way of eating itself. So yes, four guys from Liverpool who go over to America or conquer England, conquer America then come back here and in their interviews readily state – if it hadn’t been for Blues artists – Rolling Stones went so far as – you now what, you [blues artists] are going to be my support act for this show, well did that influence? Yes, because you have then got a load of the acts, black acts that might have frequented the ‘Whisky a Go Go’, we are turning to this and listening to it on our jukeboxes, on our systems ... I know this because I talk regularly to a cab driver called Mac who told me exactly what it was like at the time – (much thanks to Mac!). Yes, what it did was, it was validation. It was like that thing of actually a lot building were the amount of flashing cameras. Eight months ago, if he’d walked into a room, people would have been like, “What?” Now he really is – he’s just elevated. It happens and it will keep happening; it took somebody else to actually inform me.

KLG: The really interesting thing about the history of is that the distance between rhythm and blues and rock wasn’t so great and the whole idea of going to a jam session with Jamaican musicians, there would be musicians like Tan Tan Thornton the trumpeter who plays with Jazz – he would be at a jam session with The Rolling Stones, as would a musician like Harry Beckett, the jazz trumpeter, who would also be there, probably with Eric Clapton; so I think there was probably more interaction and cross fertilisation among these different genres and let’s say from that, The Beatles, The Stones, The Yardbirds, etc., certainly in the case of The Yardbirds stayed very true to their blues roots. Cream? Kind of power rock trio, okay, fusion, whatever, but underneath you still have blues, you still have a real root in black music.

That in the late 60’s going into the early 70’s was loosely connected to what we could describe as the birth of the call of the home grown soul scene, in this country with artists like Eddie Grant, Cymande who had that connection with Jamaican artists; from , the – there was a lot of interaction, across the genres between rhythm and blues and rock, so in a way, yes as Kwame said, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles saying, “Yes, black music is amazing”, covering Twist and Shout, bigging up the Isley Brothers, covering Charles, all that kind of stuff that was really important, but because of the connectedness of the genres and the fact that you had that first wave of home grown soul, that was really important, too.

KK: And don’t forget a lot of those artists actually at the time, a lot of the American artists still quote their first visits to the UK, touring‐wise, as their best experiences live – ever.

America and the rest of the world still emphatically acknowledge the breadth and depth of talent in Black British music, and that is something to celebrate. Both the critical acclaim and commercial success enjoyed by artists who have brought a distinctly ‘homegrown’ flavour to their work, as exemplified by the likes of Dizzee Rascal, mark a contrast to the second class citizen status frequently granted black artists from the UK, who were unfavourably compared to their counterparts across the Atlantic.

On the other hand, numerous are the musicians, particularly the exponents of what passes for ‘older’ styles like , who are still struggling for recognition. There is a perceptible divide that has opened up between these different constituencies, and while this may be part of the perpetual tradition: modernity clash, there is a danger that new music may be impoverished if it becomes cut off from its deepest roots. It is absolutely crucial that different genres and sub‐ genres are not overly partitioned. Black British music stands to benefit by the interaction rather than the separation of exponents of soul, funk, jazz, rock, hip‐hop, broken beat, grime, dubstep and whatever unknown sounds may be on the horizon.

Kevin Le Gendre 2011