POST #11 —URGENT!

From: Vanessa B vanessab@poptones.co.uk Date: 5 March 2007, 14:13 To: thefoxesband@hotmail.com Subject: death disco march 14th

“hi all,

pls find attached the dd scoop which gives you all the info you need for next wednesday’s show, stage times will be as follows;

11pm THE FOXES 10.15 DEAD PIXELS 9.30 HELLO GEIGER

you should contact the other bands on your bill directly to discuss equipment share.”

That email is, on the face of it, a simple piece of admin. But for me, looking at it the day it landed, “11pm THE FOXES” was the most beautiful sentence in the English language. The same room we’d opened to that arty, professionally-unimpressed crowd two months earlier, we were now closing. Top of the bill. McGee’s flagship night. Us.

The gig itself was the best one we’d ever played. I’ll let the diary tell it, with the deadpan recall of a 27-year-old who had absolutely no idea what was about to happen:

“Our Death Disco gig was our best EVER. People just loved it – some guy came up to me after the show and asked us to support The Guillemots and others in June at Koko! Another guy asked if we could come and play in America! Then Jonno forwarded me an email from a woman asking if we wanted to tour China!!!”

Read that again. Koko. America. China.

Two different strangers, on the same night, in the same west-London basement, walked up to us at the bar afterwards and offered us things that bands dream of for their entire careers.

The Koko guy was never heard from again. We chased but no luck. Maybe he sobered up and remembered he actually worked at a fish & chip shop. We’ll never know.

The American — a man called Joe Trivigno — would turn out to be very real, and would loom large in our lives for the rest of the year. The China woman was called Gina Langton. She sent this email the next afternoon at 4.25pm:

SPOILER: eight months later we still hadn’t toured China. Two years later we still hadn’t toured China. Nineteen years later we still haven’t toured China. But on the morning of 15 March 2007, being asked to tour China was, in itself, a fact you could carry around in your head all day like a warm bread roll, dripping with fame butter.

Here, at this point in the story, I really do need you to understand what the inside of my head felt like. Three strangers. In one night. We’d headlined Death Disco. There were photographers asking to shoot us. There were Americans offering tours. There was a woman from Asia asking us to tour China.

By the morning of Friday 16 March, I had completely lost it. I sat down at my desk at the NHS in Kensington and Chelsea, I was still working there, still drawing my civilian salary, still answering emails about Primary Care Trust mental health providers and I typed this to the band, in a subject line that I now find very funny and also slightly sad:

The email began:

“Right,

Just had my chat with Joe Trivigno, but before anything else here’s a list of things we need to do AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

1. Get a video done for ‘Lover, Killer’

2. Get decent photos done — doesn’t matter if it’s not Ben1 — but photos of us in our new gear looking good.

3. Get a proper press pack sorted, with proper flyers.

No more bullsh*t messing around and time wasting — we need to get these things DONE, and we should cancel any other commitments to get it sorted!”

That, dear reader, is the email of a man who genuinely believed he had three weeks to prepare for the rest of his life.

We had a half-mastered EP, no proper band photos to speak of, no videos, no press pack, and four day jobs.

But Joe Trivigno had, the previous evening, invited me to a party.

Joe ran what he called university showcases in America, sponsored by Red Bull, basically, gigs in student unions across the eastern US. He was one of those people you meet in the music business who occupies a slightly fuzzy space between connected and connector. He knew people. People knew him. He lived at 10a Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill2 a wonderful address, just off Portobello Road — and he was hosting “a big industry party” at the house with a musical showcase.

I went. Mostly out of curiosity but mainly because by this point in March 2007 I was going to absolutely anything anyone invited me to in case it led to something.

The diary, written a few days later:

“He also runs a show which goes round universities in America which he’d love us to play at. Anyway, he invited me to a big industry party at his house (10a Kensington Park Road) where there was going to be a musical showcase. I met a nice music lawyer, with a great name (Nigel) and a writer for Rolling Stone magazine…I also met a guy called David Ambrose who worked for EMI for 20 years and signed The Sex Pistols and Duran Duran!”

David Ambrose was one of the towering A&R figures of British rock. He’d been at EMI Records for two decades. He’d signed Be-Bop Deluxe and Wishbone Ash. He’d signed Duran Duran. He’d signed Talk Talk. He’d been involved in signing The Sex Pistols (the fact that EMI then dropped them, six weeks and £40,000 later, is one of the foundational chapters of British music industry mythology, but that’s not Dave’s fault). In 2007 he was at Sanctuary Records, which, while no longer the major it had been, was still a serious label with serious money.

He was at Joe Trivigno’s house party in Notting Hill, drinking a glass of something or other, talking to me about The Kinks.

He knew Chris Welch. (Of course he knew Chris Welch.) When I mentioned the band he asked me to drop off a CD at Sanctuary Records on Tuesday, they were on Sinclair Street, near Kensington Olympia, because he had a “big meeting” on Tuesday. I said I would.

The diary, vibrating slightly:

“It was great going to the record company HQ (dear naive child!) especially as the first big poster I saw when I went in was for The Kinks ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ (much underrated in the past, but a great album on the whole). I stole the guest pass I was given to put in my Foxes collection. Rock and roll!”

Two weeks later, I went back to XFM (I think to see Kate Beveridge), and found Damon Albarn’s visitor pass on the floor. Reader, I pocketed it. He was in for XFM at 10.55am on 3 April 2007. I have no record of why I was there. But here’s his pass.

I waited.

The diary, 27 March 2007, eight days after the Sanctuary CD drop-off:

“No word from Dave Ambrose, and he’s not answering his phone at Sanctuary. Will pursue!”

Same entry:

“Sent CD’s off to Steve Lamacq and Radio One and BBC 6 Music, so fingers naturally crossed there. Our advert’s going in NME this week with a really good write-up (so I’m told) so lets hope that opens a few doors to other peoples perceptions of us. If not, we’ll break in.

We’ve been having serious discussions on leaving our jobs in 6 months or so and touring America, and China if we get it. Discussing taking a loan out etc…risky business, but worth it.”

We had taken the events of 14 March VERY seriously.

For the record: Steve Lamacq never played us (despite our mate Ash drinking with him at a pub in Soho and singing our praises). Neither did Radio One. Neither did 6 Music. And may God have mercy on their souls.

Lurking at the bottom of the diary entry was a line I’d nearly forgotten about: “Our advert’s going in NME this week with a really good write-up (so I’m told).” That ad — booked back in January with a charming man called Phil Burbury, “Classified Sales Executive, IPC Media, Music Titles - Uncut & NME” — was for the 31 March 2007 NME Unsigned Bands Special. £300.01 including VAT for a 1/8 page, 6.8 cm tall, 11 cm wide.

The ad ran. Next to The Culprits. In the same issue, the NME also gave us a column-inch write-up:

Two things to flag:

1. “Having turned down several management and label offers in favour of a strictly DIY route” is, generously, an artistic interpretation of what was actually happening, which was that nobody had offered us a proper management or label deal yet. But the NME said we’d turned them down. So in the rich tradition of unsigned bands everywhere, we let them say it.

2. The photo was of a completely different band. Some bloke with some kind of stupid Foxes hat on. Not us. Not even close to us. But there I was, in March 2007, in the NME, “spotted by the legendary Alan McGee” just illustrated by somebody else entirely.

We didn’t care. The “sizeable dent in a competitive scene” line went into every single Foxes email signature for the next two years.

But it was now eight days since I’d dropped the CD at Sanctuary, and Dave hadn’t called. That was an eternity in my mind at the time.

A week later, he called.

The diary, that evening:

“Dave Ambrose got back to me a few days after the above saying that he’s played it to his team (or whoever) and they liked it but weren’t blown away by it (Love, love me do!) saying he thought it sounded a bit tinny (it’s only a demo for goodness sake!) but that he wants to come and see us play live – which shows he’s interested. I think we’ve been a bit too keen though really, so will play it cool now and let them come to us – it’s the only way to get a decent deal.”

Tinny.

Mandy Parnell, who masters records for Björk and Aphex Twin. Dave Ambrose listened to the same recording and said it sounded tinny.

I’ve thought about that a lot. He’d just spent twenty years at EMI. He’d heard ten thousand demos. He’d signed bands you have absolutely heard of, and rejected bands you have not, and he knew the difference between this is the next Duran Duran and this is a good unsigned band from Fulham. He was being polite.

Tinny, in A&R-speak, means not interested. Not really. Not properly.

But because he wasn’t actively saying no, we didn’t hear no. He said he’d come to one of our next two gigs, The Horse and Groom or The Borderline. I emphasised the Borderline as being much better.

Vanessa from McGee’s office emailed to say the gig was off. The diary, 3 April:

“Luckily our flyers which included this gig had already just gone been sent to the printers – and you can imagine how much we chuckled when we heard that it was too late to change them. Ah well”.

Dave Ambrose didn’t come to The Horse and Groom either. He went quiet for the rest of the month. He went quiet for most of May. He would, eventually, on 30 May, call to say he loved us and had "got great plans" and that he had "got the recipe" for us.

But none of that was knowable on the evening of 3 April 2007, when I sat at the desk in my bedroom in Fulham and wrote in the diary that he’d said we sounded tinny.

What was knowable was that, in the space of three weeks, we had:

• Headlined Alan McGee’s flagship club night.

• Been offered America by an actual American.

• Been offered China by an actual woman who actually had a phone number.

• Been promised a Koko support slot by a man who proceeded to vanish into the London night, never to be heard from again.

• Personally hand-delivered a CD to the man who signed The Sex Pistols.

• Sent CDs to Steve Lamacq.

• Put an advert in the NME.

• Been told by the man who signed The Sex Pistols that our recording was tinny.

It was the most exciting month of my life.

It was also the moment when, looking back, I should have realised the music industry was already a series of polite nos wearing the face of polite maybes.

I didn’t realise.

Next week: The man who produced Wham!’s first album and The Cult’s Love puts himself on our team and Alex offers to cancel a band rehearsal to play in front of a billion people.

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