Emiliana Torrini

Friday, February 27, 2009

Over a week ago we know, we had the pleasure to see Emiliana Torrini live in Zürich. A great evening: live performance adds a very noticeable edge to her performance, and her banter and humour really won over the audience. The band was pretty special too. Some of the songs, like “Birds” and “Gun” were incredibly powerful, whilst the more intimate stuff was not overwhelmed. Very impressive.

A Singularly Fine Day

Thursday, February 12, 2009

I’m pretty sure it was in 1980. I was in the VUB Aula something or the other (that’s Flemish University of Brussels in case you didn’t know) impatiently waiting for my then fave band, Barclay James Harvest, to come on stage. While I was waiting, I flicked through the standard issue glossy tour brochure, without finding much of interest. But one page caught my eye. Presenting the evenings’s support act, it was illustrated with this fairly wild record sleeve (you know, LPs).

Well, that support act, Nigel Mazlyn Jones, never performed. I never found out why, but I was certainly intrigued enough to try to track down the record. Of course, back in them days you couldn’t just go on to Amazon - or BitTorrrent for that matter - and get it. Oh no. You had to embark on Ye Olde Record Shoppe Pilgrimage, an experience sadly denied to today’s teenagers. I eventually tracked down “Sentinel & The Fools of the Finest Degree” in one of the big music emporia in London’s Oxford Street - either HMV or Virgin - HMV, I think. I was pretty impressed, and it formed a major part of my first year university student soundtrack in London. The fact that it was as obscure as you get get didn’t do any harm, of course, but the blend of electronic-tinged folk, wonderfully constructed songs, multilayered lyrics and sheer charisma was irresistible. The next step was to track down Nigel’s first LP, “Ship to Shore”, which was something of a quest.

Now, however, it’s got a lot easier. Nearly 30 years after their release, both LPs have been remastered and released on CD, with, gasp, extra tracks and lovingly crafted booklets. The sound quality is quite amazing, although knowing what a perfectionist - not to mention audio engineering wizard - Nigel is, I guess it is only to be expected. And you can buy them online.

I feel really guilty about this, but I still think Ship To Shore is his best work. It is incredibly mature for a first album, easily standing comparison with, say, John Martyn, Nick Drake, or Richard Thompson, whilst maintaining a strong personality all of its own.  The songs on Sentinel, and indeed later albums, are often just as good, but somehow there is a balance of urgency, clarity and drive in Ship To Shore which was never quite regained. The bonus tracks on Ship To Shore are really a revelation. Two songs, “All Brave Men”, and “The Hunter and The Lady”, easily compare to his best work, and I amazed they were never released. The lyrics are maybe just a touch immature, but hardly cringe-inducing. Anyway, it’s great to hear them at last.

In the late 80s, now going under the name “Mazlyn Jones”, he released a third LP, “Breaking Cover”, now sadly unavailable. Breaking Cover is his most “electric” work by far, as well as the most overtly political (from a committed, sincere and heartfelt green perspective), and songs like 20th Century and The Hare’s Leap remain all too relevant today.  After Breaking Cover, his work took a new direction, embracing some elements of the New Age movement, although personally I always felt a bit uncomfortable about the whole Glastonbury crystals stuff. Nigel himself was hardly likely to get trapped in this cliché ridden world, but some of his followers… well, I may be an uncharitable cynic, but I couldn’t, and still can’t, take this stuff seriously. Anyway. Breaking Cover was followed by “Water from the Well”, half songs and half instrumental. Much more laid back than Breaking Cover, although still remaining very much thematically linked. Water from the Well included what I think was his first attempt at a radio-friendly song, Papa Echo Alpha Charley Echo, and in generally had much more of a “studio” sound than previous albums.

As far as I remember, it was around about this time we met in person, and became friends, although like all my friends, I’m afraid I totally neglected the relationship. During the late 90s I tried to get Nigel signed up to the music label I was running at the time with David Wright, AD Music, but we could never work out how to keep everybody happy. Just as well, really. Never mix friendship and business, even with the best of intentions. Also at that time I seem to remember some talk of a “Ship To Shore” CD release. Recently I discovered a letter from Nigel, with a marked up and corrected print of a CD inlay I had designed. I’d completely forgotten about it. AD Music did at least try to promote and distribute Nigel’s instrumental album, “Angels Over Water”, which incorporated the instrumental half of “Water from the Well”. Also during that period I organised a gig for him at, I think, Christ’s College in Cambridge, and, along with Andrew Christy, performed a very short support set, possibly the last time I ever played live, certainly the last time I sang live.

When I moved to Switzerland, I cut the chord with just about everything and everybody, for a host of reasons. It was time for a new start. Nigel released two more albums during this period, a live CD from performances at Glastonbury and elsewhere (and which I’m afraid I can’t get into at all), and his most laid back songs album, “Behind The Stone”. He also embarked on the writing, recording and promotion of “Planet For Sale”, with a host collaborators. Actually, I’ve still got an early DAT master of “Planet”, so my chronology may be a little confused.

But finally I reconnected when I discovered that the two early CDs were released. Yesterday, Ship To Shore arrived, and blasting out “A Singularly Fine Day” on my iPod this morning almost brought a tear to my eye. It’s maybe time for another new start.

my (lack of) taste in music

Monday, August 13, 2007

So Apple has finally entered the social space with my iTunes. Fairly limited, and focused pretty much on Apple's needs (shifting units) rather than the user's, but whatever, it's better than a kick in the teeth with a sharp trowel. It would also be nice if the instructions did not switch to the default language of the local iTunes Music Store (German in this case, since Apple appears to think all of Switzerland is German speaking - which is a bit like saying "everybody uses Windows") I'd prefer to be able to show you what I've been listening to, but for what it's worth, I can destroy any semblance of credibility by showing you what I've been buying: Pretty eclectic, non ?

It was in the summer

Friday, July 20, 2007

Today's great lost & found iTunes album (or whatever you call 'em these days) ... Bill Pritchard's "Jolie", featuring the wonderful "In the summer" and 9 other gems. Strange character, Bill Pritchard. From somewhere Up North in England (Lichfield ? Is that Up North ?) but somehow spiritually a native of Paris. Totally wonderful songwriter, and a brilliant, idiosyncratic performer. I only once had the pleasure of seeing him play live, but his rendition of "Kenneth Williams is a sick man" will never leave me. Never hit anything approaching the big time, but he was quite hip around the mid 90s if I remember correctly. I'd be very surprised if you could find this anywhere other than iTunes these days. I've still go my vinyl copy in a storage unit somewhere...well, I won't be needing it anymore. (album cover scrounged from the apparently defunct Bill Pritchard discography site.

Magnatune & AD Music

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

A couple of days ago, on a whim, I bought a download album - or whatever one calls them these days - ''Touch" by a band (l assume) called "Falling You". I bought it from Magnatune, a company which if you don't know about, you certainly should. Actually I have a kind of history with Magnatune, or at least with the people behind it. Magnatune is the brainchild of John Buckman, who discusses why he started the company on the website:

When my wife was signed to an Indie record label, we were really excited. In the end, she sold 1000 CDs, lost all rights to her music for 7 years (even though the CD had been out of print for many years), and earned a total of $137 in royalties paid (some of it paid to her as CD copies of her own CD which she then gave away for promotion

Well, I was a co-founder of this Indie record label, and I'd like our story to be heard as well. John's comments sound harsher here than they are if seen in context, and he is not being unfair. There are a few details to comment on though - it is true that we had the rights to the CD - without this, we wold never have secured the publishing advance which helped to pay for manufacturing, distribution and promotion. It isn't really true that it was out of print, as we still had stock and so did the distributors - we just couldn't sell it. And I'm surprised that John says we sold 1000 - as far as I know it was closer to half that. 1000 would be a pretty good result, all things considered. Anyway, here's the story. Back in 1991 or thereabouts, I signed Jan Hanford, now John's wife, to AD Music, the independent record company I founded with David Wright. We manufactured and released Jan's album "Vespers" and did our level best to promote it. We paid for everything except the recording costs. The significant thing for me is that I think this is a strong candidate for the first ever such deal to be made entirely on the Internet: as far as I recall, we first "met" on either Usenet or a music mailing list. All discussion was entirely by email, and I didn't speak to or meet with Jan until some time later. ''Vespers" was one of four titles we released at the formal launch of the company (another was the wonderful and equally problematic to market "The White Sail" by Chris Harvey, which I'm delighted to see is also on Magnatune - although that's a pretty old photo, isn't it, Chris ?). AD Music was operating in a small niche market, British electronic music (or synth music, or ambient, or whatever), a terminally unfashionable genre associated with single men, bad science fiction, and extremely bad clothes, at least in mid-90s Britain. With AD Music, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to take the best music we could find out of this area, and to reach a wider market. We wanted to keep the core audience, but to reach out to the mainstream. We established several basic principles, including good design and professional packaging, and especially ethical and equitable dealings with artists. AD was genuinely run by artists for artists. Contacts in the music industry thought our revenue splits were crazy, much too in favour of the artists. We did require that artists sign up for 3 years, but this was actually because we had the philosophy of developing their careers, not just selling their music, which I believe to be one key differentiator between AD and Magnatunes. I guess John Buckmann would say that our mistake was trying to work within the industry instead of outside of it. He'd be right, to some extent, but in the mid 90s this was not really an option, especially not in Europe. Although we had some pretty bad experiences, these were balanced by some very good ones. The whole team at Notting Hill Music, our publishing partners, were wonderful, and treated us with as much respect as their megastar clients. In the early days, the help and support of Klaus D. Mueller was critical and allowed us to build a level of credibility way above our weight. Certainly we were aware of the Internet option. Some voices within our ranks were vociferously in favour of it. But we held fast to the idea of a physical product, at least as a base, and I still believe in that. Alongside all this, in my "day job" in the late 90s, I was working with the very first satellite broadband internet systems from Eutelsat and Hughes. We were developing and building proof of concept services and demonstrating them at large shows such as Internet World and Cable & Satellite. One of the services we built was HiFi quality music preview and download. Taking full advantage of the synergies, obviously I used AD Music as the source, and the title in heaviest rotation was Jan's Vespers. Nevertheless, I was skeptical about the true value of this channel. To me, we were losing a lot of the mystique and culture associated with the physical product. Not only the qualities of a tangible artefact such as the artwork, and the sleeve notes, but also the thrill of the chase looking for a special, hard to find record or CD, the random chance of finding something new & exciting, and most ironically, given the current Web 2.0 hype, we were losing the whole social aspect of showing and sharing record and CD collections. Ok, this was pre-iTunes, pre-MP3 even, but to me at least, losing the visual and physical aspects of exploring, buying, and sharing music was unthinkable. Somehow this download idea, and the instant gratification which comes with it, kills something of the romance. It was clear that we could not sustain our ambitions by selling to a small market sector, so we attempted to get into mainstream distribution channels, into shops and major online retailers in the UK, the US, and worldwide. We had some success at this, but we also encountered some very nasty business practices. The majors have economies of scale on their side, not to mention all the money they don't give to artists. We also pushed very hard on the music publishing and licensing side with Notting Hill, and that, I think, is a strategy that Magnatune would agree with. But we got CDs into mainstream shops, including "Vespers". In the town I lived in at the time, Guildford, at least two main stores stocked "Vespers" without any direct intervention on our part, but still it didn't sell. Why not ? It got good reviews, which it deserved, and was well promoted. Yet this, and the Chris Harvey title were our worst sellers. What did they have in common, apart from excellence ? Well, this may sound harsh, but both had very weak presentation, and both artists were very reluctant to participate in promotion (albeit in different ways). Whilst we had strong ideas at AD about packaging and presentation, we also allowed artist to have the final veto. Both Jan and Chris insisted on using their designs (actually with Chris it was just a graphic), and despite misgivings, I conceded. So we ended up with strong music from unknown artists packaged in totally anonymous designs. Anonymous is maybe unfiar - certainly they were tasteful - but they did not scream "look at me, pick me up, read me, buy me" at all. They may have worked for established artists, but not newcomers. And, again, I still maintain that personality and image counts. We also could not persuade Jan to record a follow-up, which we felt we needed to build her as an artist. She had a different view, and she was also tending to go in different directions artistically. Whilst we were very much stretching the boundaries of our typecasting, we could not really release Jan's "24 Preludes" - even if if she wanted us to, which I'm not sure she did. Of course, I've looked at Magnatune's statistics to try to find some correlation with what I'm saying, but unfortunately I can't - it seems that both artists sell well there, and I'm pleased that this is the case, especially as both were my "pet projects" at AD (or lost causes as some would put it). However, I've got two Magnatune albums on my iPod, and despite the fact that I mentioned one of them at the start of this rant, I actually have to look at the iPod to remember what they're called. Maybe it is because I've got a memory like a sieve, but maybe also because I have nothing tangible to associate them with. Magnatune will sell you a burn-to-order CD, and they allow their artist total freedom to sell through other channels. But they do not, as far as I know, help with promotion, management, touring, or all the other things that we believed were part of the package. They are essentially selling a service to artists, and one side effect, for me at least, is that the artist's identity is lost in the Magnatune identity. I don't think about having a Bjorn Fogelberg CD, I think about "that music I downloaded from Magnatune". Does it matter ? Does anybody else care ? Probably not, but it matters to me, and it mattered to AD Music. AD Music as a limited company lasted about 10 years. We were drastically under-funded, despite having a well-regarded business plan, and various investment promises failed to materialise. The label still survives, run in a rather different form by David and Elaine Wright (who did the most of the work attributed to "we" above) as a private company, and I am still nominally involved, but I take no active part at all. For me, the highlights were the live events, especially the launch concert at Derby with Klaus Schulze - really, nobody believed we could pull that off - but also the Code Indigo concert at Guildford where we tried hard to drag Chris Harvey out of the shadows. If were to do it all over again, I guess I'd do pretty much the same thing, although maybe I'd have made more of our contacts with Johh Buckmann, I'd have insisted on a redesign for Vespers, I'd have forced Jan to go on stage at Derby, and, well, I'd probably have ended up making a complete mess of things as ever. I guess the Magnatune way is the way of the future, but I'm a little sad to see the mystique and romance disappear from music. I can't really imagine Nick Hornby writing about a guy with a 60Gb iPod. The total sum of my reward from AD Music was a lot of good times and meeting a lot of great people. It also cost me a great deal of money, contributed to a failed relationship, and killed my music career stone dead. But that's all in the past. Oh, and "Touch" ? It's pretty good. But I'd love to know a bit more background