Post #12 — Friday the 13th

At the end of last week’s post I told you the music industry was already a series of (usually) polite nos wearing the face of polite maybes, and that I hadn’t yet noticed. April 2007 is the month I should have noticed. It is also, by some distance, the month it was hardest to.

Dave Ambrose, the man who’d signed The Sex Pistols, and who, on 3 April, had told me our recording sounded “tinny” had gone quiet. We were “playing it cool,” which is the thing bands tell themselves they’re doing when in fact the other person has stopped returning their calls. And then, in the space of one week, two things happened that made the cool-playing feel, briefly, like the right call.

The first arrived on 10 April. I sat at my desk — still at the NHS just off Portobello Road (where I would later bump into Damon Albarn and give him a CD) still on the civilian payroll, and fired off this to the band:

10.04.07. Myspace friends: 3983.

“Can everyone please send me the details of every music industry person who’s ever shown an interest in the band?! i.e. whatshisname from Radio 2 who Alex emailed, and that booking agency XL productions or whatever it is?! I’ve just been speaking to a top producer/developer STEVE BROWN INDEPENDENT MUSIC PRODUCTION… He produced the Manic Street Preachers and The Cult amongst others, and is interested in potentially developing and producing us! He’s asked for details of music bods who’ve shown an interest to think about getting a team together for us, including serious top level management.”

Let me tell you who Steve Brown1 was, because at the time I only half knew, and the half I didn’t know is the better half.

Steve Brown produced Wham!’s first album, Fantastic, in 1983, the one with “Club Tropicana” and “Young Guns (Go For It).” He produced The Cult’s Love in 1985, the one with “She Sells Sanctuary,” the riff he reportedly suggested they stick on the front of the song as well as the middle. He produced the Manic Street Preachers’ debut, Generation Terrorists, and “Motorcycle Emptiness.” He’d worked with ABC, Alison Moyet, The Pogues. He had, in short, helped turn a long line of fledgling British bands into hit records without flattening what made them themselves.

And he had emailed us. A four-piece from London with beige jackets, an EP and four day jobs. Why? I’d met a top music lawyer, Nigel Dewar-Gibb at Joe Trivigno’s Notting Hill party. Naturally, I had a load of Foxes CD’s with me and gave a load to Nigel, and he passed one on to Steve.2

His emails came with a superb signature because it told you everything about the man and the business he was in. It quoted Hunter S. Thompson, the line about the music industry being “a cruel and shallow money trench” where good men die like dogs, followed by a deadpan rider that there was also a negative side.3 I read that, at twenty-seven, and thought it was brilliant. I read it now as a warning I drove straight past.

Here is where the superstition comes in (and when it comes to superstition, I side firmly with Stevie Wonder4).

That Friday afternoon, Alex got Caryn Tomlinson on the phone. Caryn was SVP, Artist Relations Global at EMI Music, and I want to correct something from an earlier post, because the diary corrects me itself: she was not head of A&R, however much past-me wanted her to be. Her actual job was, if anything, better placed to help. Within minutes of the call, Alex emailed her and I’ll let the thread run, because it’s perfect:

From: Alex Douglas (AlexD@fridaysmove.com) Sent: 13 April 2007 16:51 To: Tomlinson, Caryn Subject: From The Non-Flood Alex!

“Hi Caryn, Fantastic to talk to you. Just a quick email to ask for your address… Thanks very much, Alex. The Foxes”

Three minutes later:

From: Tomlinson, Caryn (caryn.tomlinson@**) Sent: 13 April 2007 16:54 To: Alex Douglas Subject: RE: From The Non-Flood Alex![Scanned]

“Dear Alex, Nice to chat too! Send me the music, address below. If you do me an email that is full of THE FOXES information, websites, NME action, dates you’ve performed, approaches you’ve had. I will try and help you. CARYNx CARYN TOMLINSON SVP, Artist Relations Global EMI Music”

And Alex, four minutes after that:

From: Alex Douglas Sent: 13 April 2007 16:58 To: Tomlinson, Caryn

“I will compile the best email you have ever seen………give me the weekend to work on it! I will also send you the CD asap — your thoughts, of course, will be eagerly anticipated. Have a great weekend, you’ve made an unsigned band very happy. Alex.”

That’s right, “you’ve made an unsigned band very happy”. We were, reader. We really were.

Alex texted me straight after the call. I kept the text in the diary:

Al text 13.04.07: “Just to let you know that I have just come off the phone from Caryn from EMI. She’s not A&R but she’s going to help us…BIG STYLE!”

And then — the same Friday evening — I forwarded the EMI news to Steve Brown, just to keep the new producer in the loop. At 5.41pm he replied:

From: Steve Brown (steve@stevebrown.info) Sent: Friday, 13 April 2007 17:41 Subject: Re: The Foxes

“Well . . you’ve got my support. Stick me on the document.”

Two yeses. From a man who produced Wham! and a senior vice president at EMI. In one afternoon. On Friday the thirteenth. Smash that mirror and rejoice!

I genuinely go out of my way to walk under ladders, that’s what I think of superstition.5 13 April 2007 is the date I point to whenever anyone tells me a Friday the 13th is unlucky. It was the luckiest day of my year.

Alex spent the weekend compiling exactly that, a full Foxes dossier, every contact, every press mention, every “approach we’d had.” Some of those approaches were, the diary admits, “generously interpreted.” We sent versions to Steve Brown and to Caryn. The list ran to twenty-eight names and reads now like a roll-call of doors we were knocking on:

“-’Whispering’ Bob Harris — Radio 2 DJ… replied saying how much he liked them. -Keith Altham (formerly of NME, PR for The Rolling Stones and The Who, and the man who suggested that Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar) is a friend of Chris Welch’s and wants to see us play. -Right Said Fred — likes our stuff… Ongoing email contact with Richard Fairbrass. -Gary [Clarke] — Part of The Cure management team. Asked us to support The Cureheads and The Cure after seeing us at the 100 Club…”

The diary’s own verdict on the list is the truest line in the entry: “Some of them have actually been fck all help so far, while others have been terrific! But all contacts are good contacts.”*

Caryn’s reply landed on 16 April, and it is one of my favourite emails, not because of what it offered us, but because of what it accidentally revealed:

From: Tomlinson, Caryn Sent: 16 April 2007 15:06 To: Alex Douglas Subject: RE: Improvements to Email?[Scanned]

“You worked hard. I am in the middle of a big charity planning day today, so I am not even going to get to read it properly, but will FIRST THING TOMORROW, I promise. A wonderful charity called Chickenshed, can’t get to perform at the Princes Diana concert (1 billion viewers) if they don’t get a celebrity to perform with them — an international star, oh help! So, I am head down today trying all our girls — Kylie away, KT Tunstall in the US, Corinne Bailey-Rae away, Lily Allen doing show, Joss Stone doing show………help! Cx”

That was the real Concert for Diana, the 1 July 2007 show at Wembley for the tenth anniversary of her death, the one with the billion-viewer figure attached. And there was Caryn, really really busy on her charity planning day, running down EMI’s own roster — Kylie, Lily Allen, Joss Stone — trying to find a star, while messaging an unsigned band from London. What a star.

Alex, naturally, saw an opening:

From: Alex Douglas Sent: 16 April 2007 15:18

“What about Kate Bush? Most of her stuff was very theatrical anyway — quite a good marriage with Chickenshed. And hasn’t she just released new stuff, so keen to promote it? Or Shirley Bassey — she has just taken on a whole new ‘cool’ with her confirmation at Glastonbury… But if you want The Foxes to play you only had to ask……! Don’t be so shy. We had rehearsal booked for July 1 but that can be postponed. X”

But if you want The Foxes to play you only had to ask. He offered them the Concert for Diana. He generously offered to postpone a booked rehearsal in North Acton to perform for 1 billion people (without even asking the rest of us!) This is the same doctrine — just f*cking ask — that got us free clothes from Merc, and it is, I maintain, the single most useful trait any unsigned band can have.

My own head, meanwhile, had gone fully to the moon. From the diary:

16.04.07. “I think Parlophone was mentioned in a conversation, and I’ve always had a feeling we’d be signed to them…along with Blur, Radiohead, Supergrass, The Beatles etc etc…. yes, I know we could get screwed over by such a big company, but I think we have the talent to do it, and we KNOW we need to be careful. Even Geve.”

Even Geve. The drummer’s caution was, in Foxes lore, the last line of defence against our own optimism. If even Geve was on board, the optimism had won.

The diary entry for 19 April contains a single line that I now read as the whole of 2007 in miniature, and which past-me threw away as an aside:

19.04.07. Myspace friends: 4141. “No new EMI news…apart from they’ve removed their dividend from shareholders, so obviously not doing well. Ho hum, what did you expect?”

EMI was, in the spring of 2007, a struggling company being circled by buyers; within weeks it would agree to a private-equity takeover and effectively cease to exist as the EMI we’d grown up worshipping. Our golden EMI contact had arrived at the precise moment EMI itself was coming apart, and twenty-seven-year-old me clocked it in eleven words and moved straight on to the part where we printed 5,000 flyers and had a row:

“…some ‘discussion’ about the band taking priority over social events…primarily Jonno and I having a go at Al and Geve, bless their cotton socks! It’s great the way we’re all bastards to each other. Anyway, it’s all sorted and love flows freely.”

We booked The Water Rats for 30 April. Caryn had told Alex that all the EMI people drank there and we invited every name on the list. Phil Burbury from the NME was bringing “a gang from the office.” Dave Ambrose was invited. The whole industry, as we understood it, was coming to a 200-capacity room near King’s Cross to watch four guys play their socks off in beige jackets.

Can I shock you? Dave Ambrose didn’t come. The two yeses of Friday the 13th — the producer and the SVP — both, in the end, went the way of the Koko man and the China tour: warmly and sincerely into the ether of nothingness.

But that’s hindsight talking, and hindsight is cheap. On the evening of Friday 13 April 2007, a man who produced Wham! put himself on our team, and a senior vice president at EMI told an unsigned band she would try to help. I walked around for a week feeling chosen.

It was, I’m fairly sure, the best Friday the 13th anyone has ever had.

Next week: We have a feature in Kensington & Chelsea NHS Primary Care Trust magazine and Dave Ambrose finally gets back to us, telling me he’s full of “great plans” and “the recipe,” all while I’m standing at the urinal.

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