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I want to begin by telling you the story of a very unusual specialist record. Cast your minds back to 1992. I was in a band with Tracey Thorn called Everything But The Girl. We had had 10 years of making successful albums in the 80's but by 1992 a new generation had emerged and we were all but washed up in the UK. To make matters worse that summer I was admitted into hospital, where I spent 9 weeks, almost dying from a rare illness that only 40 people had suffered from since the 2nd World War. You could say the bottom could not have been more rocky.
But a year later on the road to both professional and personal recovery, I sat down with Tracey and we wrote a song called 'Missing'. Nobody thought much of it when we first delivered it.It appeared on a very heartfelt album we released in 1994, still one of my favourites, but our record company at the time, Warner Music, were not impressed. We were called into their offices in Kensington and they announced that after 10 years on the label they thought it was time to call it a day. They were going to drop us. We turned to the MD at the time, Rob Dickins, and said 'Fine, but can we play you two things we have just finished working on.'
He said yes ...
We played him a remix of 'Missing' we had just commissioned from Todd Terry, and a track called 'Protection' we had just recorded with a Bristol band called Massive Attack.
Rob Dickins said - 'No, I don't think it'll work. We're still gonna drop you'
Well, of course, the rest is as they say, history. 'Missing' went on to be a number 1 record in 9 countries. America's Number 1 airplay record, and number 2 sales record, staying on the Billboard charts for over a year, a feat which took it into the Guinness Book of Records - something that has brought me much kudos with my ten-year-old daughters. The Guinness Book Of Records is very important when you are ten.
But why is that relevant to today?
I tell the story because the trajectory that it took to success was that of a specialist record.
'Why?' you may ask. 'You were on a major label. Surely you had marketing and promotional budgets, club promotion, pluggers at the ready?' Well, the reality was the opposite. Because we were dropped, so were all the budgets and so was basically any interest in the band. 'Well, how did it become a hit then?' Well, what Warner Music hadn't counted on was that our American label had already pressed up the Todd Terry mix onto blue vinyl as a 12 inch promo and had circulated them among the DJ community. The record was simply out there on its own. Like an indie 12 inch. Underground DJs started playing it, other DJs started talking about it. To think that the record even today is a stalwart of daytime pop radio in America but began its life in the dark, heavy, gay clubs of Florida and San Antonio. In Europe it was Italy. Rimini. It spread to Ibiza and Ayia Napia. The message spread.
Then specialist radio picked up on it. Late night dance shows in Germany and Italy were spinning it. Members of the public were calling the stations asking what it was. Daytime radio producers were feeling the heat to programme it. DJs were doing customized edits. Todd Terry's original was less than 5 minutes long. Mash ups started arriving.
Warner Music's European affiliates started calling the London office. 'We must have some money to promote this. It is a hit.' 'You can't,' they said, 'we've dropped the band!' Reluctantly London finally relented. They released some cash and the record took off like wildfire. 10 months later, Warner Music ate humble pie. They bowed to public pressure. In spite of no longer having us on the label, they agreed to a UK release. When it was finally re-released, it sold over 600,000 copies in the UK alone.
I said the story was like that of a specialist record - or I should say a specialist record that crosses over - and it is true in the sense that it started with heat from below, from tastemakers and the underground. There was no fabricated hype and little or no marketing spend in its first three-four months. The dots were joined from club DJs to specialist radio in Europe and America, to specialist dance radio in the UK, to street magazines and up to the Dance Press, and finally through accumulated pressure and success stories, into playlist meetings and from there onto national daytime radio and from their onto TV. We performed 'Missing' on Top Of The Pops several times, and in Italy where the record had first caught on in Europe we ended its run of success performing in front of a live TV audience of 250,000 people gathered in the Piazza dei Populi in Naples who were happy, as is the strange Italian custom, to watch us, and many others, simply mime the song in a stylish new outfit.
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These days of course is another time and place entirely - back, you might say, in the more realistic world of day to day specialist labels and specialist radio. Out of choice I work largely under the radar running two independent labels helping young artists and producers at a much more roots label. Buzzin' Fly, now 5 yrs old, specialises in largely instrumental deep house and techno. It's sister label, Strange Feeling focusses on alternative and indie.
Now I am not pretending for one moment that every deep house instrumental I have released on Buzzin' Fly could replicate the journey made by 'Missing'. Of course not.
As many of us know, much of specialist music has a glass ceiling beyond which more mainstream exposure is unattainable. And of course in so many cases, crossing over isn't even the ambition. Simply getting some exposure for alternatives to the mainstream is a noble enough cause in itself. But if 'Missing' proved anything, it proved that the connective tissue that joins the underground to the overground was fully functioning. The message was able to be passed down the line.
That feeling of 'joined-up radio' is still very much the culture in which we live. But it wasn't always like that.
In the early 80's, the era where I was making my first tentative steps as an artist, national radio in the UK was dysfunctional. If these days the leap from Rob Da Bank to Jo Whiley and Edith Bowman seems a mere hop and a skip with a good specialist record with crossover potential, in those days the distance between the edgy enthusiasm of John Peel's evening show and the self-satisfied conservatism of say, Simon Bates or Steve Wright seemed like light years.
Daytime penetration with records originating on specialist radio seemed utterly impossible. In fact, let's get this straight, it many cases it wasn't even desired. Labels like Rough Trade and Factory prided themselves on cast-iron agendas of non-promotion. It was uncool. No free records. No free guest lists. No press officers. It was all deemed far too corporate. There was a genuine feeling of us v them, of a proper counterculture. And what's more, it was part of a wider social movement that embraced other countercultural issues of the time - issues that it is hard to believe were once considered fringe topics - issues that have now been absorbed into everyday life - vegetarianism, anti-racism, anti-sexism.
But for all the earnestness and imagination going on below, above the waterline, a new form of pop music was starting to dominate the airwaves and it certainly wasn't being fed from the specialist network. It was its anthithesis. In spite, ironically of some roots in the underground fashion and clubbing movements of the early 80's, it surfaced with an egotistical and apolitical agenda that set it entirely against the world of John Peel listeners. I mean of course the era of Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Go West and the rest.
And, as the doors through which specialist music in the UK could progress remained bolted, the pressure to conform increased. Even now I can remember the night sweats as we all tossed and turned worrying about whether we should 'go pop' or 'sell out' and sign to a major, because crossing over didn't mean what it means now - perhaps an easy-going session on Later with Jools Holland, or hanging out in the unplugged VIP tent with Jo Whiley at Glastonbury, or making a cool 250 grand from a phone advert without anyone batting an eyelid.
It meant dealing with the enemy. It meant possibly shaking hands with Simon Bates.
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How different it is now in the current age of joined-up radio! Everyone seems to be on the same page. Specialist radio presenters gravitate towards daytime shows. Radio producers move around from night-time to daytime and back again. We casually talk about the 'underground' and the 'cutting edge' and the 'counterculture', but most of the time we are just paying lip service to these ideas, using them to add a veneer of credibility to fairly mainstream marketing techniques.
Let's face it - alternative music is now very much part of the new mainstream. Daytime radio wants it (they didn't want The Smiths, they didn't even want REM until they were on their fourth album), phone companies want it, global banks want it, festival promoters want it EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND at a hundred quid a time.
To me a festival was something I tried once when I was 15; Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton at Blackbushe Aerodrome in 1978, something me and friends in part went to laugh at, because it was not aimed at us at all.
If this makes it sound suddenly very commodified and mediated, the answer is, it is. That is the nature of music, and most things we consume, these days. There is barely any noticeable counterculture to react to, because when it does crop up it is jumped on so quickly by the corporate brands and the mainstream media because they now employ people to watch for these things. They don't want to be caught out again, as they were with punk. They want to be seen to be there on the barricades under the hail of new ideas, shoulder to shoulder with youth.
A few weeks ago I was in the kitchen and I turned to Tracey and I said: 'I must play you something by this new Brooklyn band called Vampire Wee ... oh, here they are on the front cover of The Guardian weekend supplement.'
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So how did this absorption of the underground happen?
The smart people in the American industry learnt their lesson with their own version of a punk explosion - the Seattle scene of the early nineties. Nirvana's brilliant appeal to youth caught them momentarily offguard, but they soon saw the way the wind was blowing and I remember my astonishment when I was told that Nirvana's manager, Danny Goldberg, had been put in charge of Atlantic Records, which in spite of its glorious 60's and 70's heritage of blues and soul and jazz, had by the 80's been turned into an accountant's dream with the lightweight pop of Debbie Gibson and Tiffany selling millions and not an emerging underground artist in sight. They didn't waste as much time corporatising the hip-hop boom a few years later.
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I think the UK industry was secretly watching as America got this message. We partly scoffed at Pearl Jam and Soundgarden over here, but we got the point: Let subculture help dictate the mainstream. And that lesson could not have been made any forcefully over here than by the success of rave culture. In the time it took to 'get on one', the whole message that had dominated underground UK music had changed from one of intense moral concern about the world to the politics of sheer ordinary joy. When Shaun Ryder was asked about vegetarianism in his first major interview with the NME, he memorably said: 'Animals are just there to chopped up and killed and eaten. Cows, they freak me out.'
In a way, a whole generation of music buyers stopped caring so much. Friendly bubbly people were everywhere. Friendly bubbly young people. To some it was an intense relief. To others it took years to get over. But 'friendly' plus 'bubbly' plus 'young' was a perfect recipe for a new era for radio.
By the time Brit-Pop was gathering a head of steam a new generation of cool young presenters were ensconsed at Radio 1. Lippy kids like Chris Evans, Mark Radcliffe, Sarah Cox, even an ex children's presenter turned raver, Zoe Ball. Their connection to youth culture seemed believable and authentic but populist and accessible. They could marry Fatboy Slim but still be a daytime BBC radio DJ.
Brit-Pop helped Radio 1 remind itself of its roots. It is worth remembering that Radio 1 was launched as a specialist music station in 1967 as a direct riposte to the perceived threat of the original specialist radio - Radio Caroline, the first offshore UK pirate station. It was perceived as such a threat that it was actually outlawed by the government to make way for Radio 1. Radio 1 even stole its first DJs from pirate radio and the underground - the original specialists: Tony Blackburn, Ed Stewart, Kenny Everett, Jimmy Saville ...
Ironically, however, only a few years after the heady days of Brit Pop, Radio 1 managed to repeat the same mistakes. By the turn of the millenium Brit Pop had faded and the station was once again split. Joined-up radio had collapsed. It was boy bands by day, niche music by night.
It was only with the resurgence of modern day street rock in the form of The Libertines and the generation that followed that Radio 1 once again reminded itself of its specialist roots, while DJs like Pete Tong steadied the ship for dance music creating a creditable bridging point between the ever-mutating undergound scenes and weekend radio.
If there is lesson in this, it is surely that daytime needs night time. The energy comes from below. When specialist music is strong, all radio benefits. When it is weak, well ... how many Westlife records can we really take ...
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So where does that leave us now.
Well, joined-up radio is again the norm, and essentially we should rejoice. We can imagine the trajectory of a good record with commercial potential from specialist to daytime without much trouble. We can also imagine a wholly uncommercial record like that by the Hungarian band, The Unbending Trees, who I recently signed to my Buzzin' Fly's indie offshoot, Strange Feeling, getting a sympathetic hearing on a show like Rob Da Bank or Jim Gellatly and using that exposure to the band's benefit.
In the case of The Unbending Trees, both Rob Da Bank and Jim Gellatly in fact played it. It was a moment of high drama in Hungary. Apparently several thousand fans in Budapest were mobilized, and internet radio URLs were tuned to the BBC one Sunday evening.
Radio DJs these days at all levels do their best to come across as music lovers first. They are largely approachable. Their producers and assistants are fans too. Some DJ in clubs and ask for promos. It seems like a level playing field again.
For me, now running one specialist independent label focussing on deep hosue and techno, I know that the limit of my ambitions must normally be a spin on the Essential Selection, a Rob Da Bank play, maybe a John Kennedy, some John Digweed and Joe 90 at Kiss, maybe some Andi Durrant and Roger Sanchez at Galaxy, but I also know the connective issue exists to go further. When I recorded a club record under my own name three years ago called and asked the then largely unknown London singer Estelle, to perform the spoken word story that made up the top line, I felt instinctively it had a chance.
Sure enough, the network of tastemakers got talking, the underground DJs reported it, it made column inches in the news pages of the dance press, I hired a plugger and bingo, it went from Tong and Da Bank to Zane Lowe and Jo Whiley, stalling only at the playlist meeting where it almost made the Radio 1 daytime playlist.
Whichever way you look at it, the framework is there for the right records and the sympathetic ears exist. If specialist radio is your be all and end all there are a whole host of DJs who can give you spot plays. If you have bigger fish to fry, then joined up radio these days should help. The producers of the bigger shows can be contacted and lobbied. Email addresses are not hard to find.
Should I have worried about another reason to explain why my record with Estelle didn't get playlisted? Was it about more than the music? Was it because it was on an a little known independent? Looking at the average daytime playlists should we alarmed at how many tracks originate from major label? Maybe. It is because they are better? Of course not. It is largely because they are less of a risk. Majors have budgets. They can spend a record into the shops. They can make a record visible with marketing. Radio likes this. It makes them look good. They played it first, and then there is was in the shops. A pat on the head all round. But then again, when was music EVER about just the music? It is also worth reminding ourselves that the history of radio is also littered with success stories of tracks that began as specialist records with an outside chance, but made it anyway. Yes, some were sold on to or exploited by Majors who added financial muscle, but some simply made it on their own terms because the people spoke first, the message was passed down the line, the pressure came from below, and a radio structure was there to enable it to happen.
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Before I finish I've been asked to give a bit of practical advice about submitting music to specialist radio. I have seen it from both sides in that not only am I constantly badgering DJs to play Buzzin' Fly stuff, but I have also run a weekly specialist show myself centred on house and techno and experimental pop for nearly two years now, firstly at Galaxy on their flagship Digital station, and now on Wednesdays on Kiss. So here are 10 rules for the day ...
1 Target your DJs properly. Don't waste money sending your latest minimal Berlin techno single to Chris Moyles. He is not going to play it. Build up a list of people who might realistically support you. Find their playlists online. Check what else they are playing. Service the big hitters like Radio 1, 6Music, Kiss, Galaxy and XFM, but find out if there are other regional stations who might support you in their evening shows. Focus your promotion.
2 Use electronic promotion but use it well. The e-promo, the link, is cheap and direct. The downside is everybody uses it now. For dance music, send high quality 320kbps MP3s, for rock no lower than 192, and label them well. We live in a blizzard of emails. Keeping up is the hardest part these days. Some weeks I receive up to 200 new pieces of music in my 3 roles as A&R for Buzzin' Fly and Strange Feeling, club DJ and radio presenter for Kiss. Make sure the MP3 files are properly named in the filename - artist.track.label.mp3 - I can't tell you the number of tracks I have been forced to reject because someone has simply sent track1.mp3 and I can't get any more info.
3 Make the delivery method efficient. Imagine how many links your target DJ or his producer is receiving. A lot of people use file transfer sites like YouSendIt and Sendspace because you can send big files for nothing, but the downside is the links often expire after 7 days, or there are time delays before the link will download. All very frustrating for the DJ. Ideally get the track up on your own website as a zip file with a simple direct link that includes the audio, some info, maybe even a packshot. At Buzzin' Fly we can track who has actually downloaded what. If you can't build something like that yourself, consider using one of the e-promo delivery companies who are sprouting up - like Fatdrop - for a fee they will encode and service your track, using web pages where DJs can stream your track before downloading and where they are even forced to leave a bit of feedback before they can access the track.
4 Don't overlook the value of a physical promo if you can afford it. Send a CDR in the post to your key targets to be sure. Sometimes we all like to swivel AWAY from the screen and just touch something real and put a CD in the player, or even touch a piece of real artwork. I find I almost always play promos from !K7 because they just look so nice.
5 Keep your press releases short and to the point. I listen to everything without reading any blurb to try and remain entirely impartial, but when i hit upon a track i want the information concise and condensed. Don't waffle. Artist. Title. Label. Release Date. A few lines of background and any decent quotes you may have already amassed. Google can provide all the detailed background.
6 Don't over-egg the pudding. I got one press release that actually started .. 'Don't sleep on this one! It tore the roof off Plan B in Clapham last Tuesday'. And don't overplay your hand, for example: 'This is the full package with remixes by the legendary Sven Bartles-Munchen from Estonia.' Frankie Knuckles is legendary. Sven Bartles-Munchen isn't.
7 Make friends. Nurture relationships. Be nice in emails. Go out to clubs and venues. Chat to people. Make connections. It sounds obvious but it works. Put a name to a face. Find something in common that isn't just the music.
8 Work with enthusiasts. And trust young ideas. There is nothing worse than embittered music industry people.
9 Play fair. The world of specialist music is peopled by those who are largely in it for the music. Respect that.
10 There is no rule 10. Make one up for yourself.
Thanks for listening.
A rainbow
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