Post #13 — The Recipe

Last week ended on the two best yeses of my year, both delivered on a particularly lucky Friday the thirteenth: a man who produced Wham! putting himself on our team, and a senior vice president at EMI promising to help an unsigned band. All in all, a good day.

Now, let me take you into May 2007, where it still felt like the doors were swinging open and not, as it turned out, swinging shut very slowly so you couldn’t hear the latch. And the hinges were very well oiled.

May 2007 was, I should warn you now, a month largely concerned with two things: powerful men in the music industry - and urine. I didn’t plan it that way. The diary just turned out like that.

11.05.07. Myspace friends: 4291.1

“It’s now a year today that The Foxes had their first ever gig at The Hope and Anchor in London, and it’s a day full of good news!”

One year. On 11 May 2006 we had walked into the Hope & Anchor in Islington, the venue with the sign on the door calling itself “The Most Famous Music Venue in London,” and played our first ever gig as The Foxes with my voice in tatters by the end. (If you’ve not heard the last two minutes of it, it’s back in an earlier post, and yes, I’m still slightly hoarse.)

Incredibly, I have just dug out a CD which contains a piece of music Jonno put together which we played just before hitting the stage for that first gig. It was designed to whip the crowd into a frenzy of excitement and I’d not heard it since 2006, as we used it for a few gigs after that and then thought it was a bit…pretentious? The lyrics are, at least, extremely accurate. Judge for yourself:

Anyway, one year on, to the exact day, two pieces of news arrived that made twenty-seven-year-old me feel like the whole thing had been worth it. The diary, as ever, gets there before I do:

“Firstly, we’ve been asked to support The Magic Numbers at The University of Exeter Summer Ball….and we should be on the main stage with them. It was through Geoff, the head of Ents there who I used to know very well, and Alex knew too. The Big are also playing so it’ll be quite a big homecoming gig for Alex and I…to say that we’re happy at the news would be a ruthlessly pathetic understatement!”

A homecoming. Alex and I had both been at Exeter, and the man booking the Summer Ball was Geoff, who ran the Ents and whom we’d both known back then. So this wasn’t some cold pitch that had finally landed. This was somebody we actually knew, on the inside2, putting us on the main stage at our old university, supporting a band who’d been on the cover of everything the year before. The Magic Numbers had been Mercury-nominated, had been on Jools Holland in exactly the way we hadn’t, and had the kind of warm, harmony-soaked sound that made you want to be in a band with people you liked. And we were going to open for them at the Great Hall at our old uni.

The gig itself was weeks away — Monday 25 June, as it turned out — so for now it was pure anticipation, which is sometimes the best part. We’ll get to the night itself, what happened with our logo (how we laughed!) and a certain Mercury-nominated singer watching us from the wings, very soon.

And then the second piece of news, in the same entry:

“The other great news is that Dave Ambrose called me yesterday – the last contact I had with him was to leave a message on his mobile phone 2 weeks ago letting him know about our Water Rats gig, which he didn’t respond to, nor did he attend. But he called to say sorry he missed the gig, and could he come and see us rehearse soon, as he’s away for our next gig as well! I’ve left him a message today (he NEVER answers his phone!) giving him some dates. If he likes us, then that’s it! WOOSH!”

Dave Ambrose. The man who’d signed The Sex Pistols and Duran Duran (did I mention that?) who’d told me a month earlier that our recording sounded “tinny,” and who had then, like so many before him, gone quiet. I’d left a message on his mobile about The Water Rats. He hadn’t replied. He hadn’t come. And now — on the anniversary of our first gig — here he was on the phone, apologising, asking to come and see us rehearse.

“If he likes us, then that’s it! WOOSH!” I love that WOOSH. That’s the sound of a young man who genuinely believed that the distance between his life and the life he wanted was one good rehearsal, witnessed by the right person, away. And maybe it was.

15.05.07. Myspace friends: 4312.

The first thing the diary records is an email from Jonno about the new flyers:

“I really like the photo you have used Alex, i love the way that nigel looks like he is actually producing light from his body. like a god.”

— Jonathan Bretman

Producing light from his body. Like a god. I have been described in a great many ways by a great many people, but I would like it on record that our lead guitarist, in May 2007, compared me to a deity emitting his own light, and that he did so in lower case, deadpan, as if it were simply a technical observation about the flyer. And quite frankly, who’s to argue with Jonno?!

The rest of the entry is where the month starts to show its real shape. First, the strange social weather:

“The reaction to our playing with The Magic Numbers has been quite bizarre, and possibly a taster for things to come – lots of people who haven’t contacted us in ages have sent us warm messages of praise and are suddenly enthusiastic about the band again. I suppose when people start to think you might be going places they want a piece of it!”

This is the most clear-eyed thing in the whole month, and it’s filed away as an aside. The instant we got attached to a name everybody recognised, people who’d gone quiet for months reappeared, suddenly delighted, suddenly involved. Past-me (what a guy) clocked it precisely — “when people start to think you might be going places they want a piece of it” — and then moved straight on, because being warmly congratulated is lovely and twenty-seven is no age to be suspicious of warmth.

Meanwhile, the man who produced Wham! (did I mention that?) had gone the way of the man who signed the Sex Pistols:

“No word back from Steve Brown – goes to show you can’t rely on ANYONE and don’t believe a word anyone says. They’ll promise you the world….only to later find out it’s Cadbury World. And it’s shut.”

Five weeks earlier Steve Brown had emailed “you’ve got my support, stick me on the document.” Now: nothing. (He does, in fairness, surface again later in the summer — but in May, the silence was total, and the diary’s verdict stands as the truest sentence a young band can learn: the world they promise you is usually Cadbury World, and it is usually shut.)

And then, nestled between the disappointment and the flyer, this:

“Had bizarre dream about Alan McGee – I was in his kitchen talking about the band with him when, for no reason at all, I started to piss on the floor. Tried to clean it up, but there wasn’t much kitchen roll left. To his credit, he was very good about the whole situation.”

I want to be clear that that is a direct quote from the diary. My subconscious, in May 2007, put me in the kitchen of the man who discovered Oasis, talking about my band, and then, for reasons unknown, had me urinate on his floor for no reason, run out of kitchen roll, and be graciously forgiven. If you wanted a single image for what it feels like to be an unsigned band circling the music industry — desperate to impress the powerful, humiliating yourself in front of them, and clinging to the smallest scrap of their tolerance — you could not do better than that dream. Freud would have had a field day.

We were, in among all this, gigging more or less constantly, Bedford at the start of the month3, the Barfly in Birmingham, a festival up at the Cavern in Liverpool - but the diary barely pauses on any of it, which tells you where my head was. My head was on the phone, waiting for it to ring.

30.05.07. Myspace friends: 4361.

“Well, the big news is that Dave Ambrose seems to love us…so he’s human after all! He called me just after the above entry saying he wants to see us…and that he’s ‘got great plans’ for us…or something like that.”

He’s human after all. After weeks of unanswered messages, Dave Ambrose had not only called back, he’d called back with great plans. What were the great plans? The plans were great. That was the headline. The detail was somebody else’s problem.

What he wanted was a rehearsal he could attend, near where he lived. A private gig at his convenience basically.

“Anyway, he asked if we could find somewhere to practice in Twickenham on the Bank Holiday Monday as that’s where he lives (and he’s away for 2 weeks so would miss our Water Rats gig). As there’s NO WHERE at all there we had to book our normal Survival Rehearsal Studios place (Room 10 right at the back!) but he didn’t get back to me. He never got back to confirm but we went along anyway to rehearse…”

A&R legend asks four men with day jobs to find a rehearsal room in Twickenham, at no notice, on a Bank Holiday Monday, because it’s convenient for him. Naturally, we tried to accommodate. There is, the diary reports with magnificent flatness, NO WHERE at all in Twickenham. So we gave up and booked our usual place in North Acton and waited for him to confirm. He didn’t confirm. We went anyway.

And then comes the moment this whole post has been walking towards, and which past-me, blessedly, recorded in full:

“…it wasn’t till I was standing at the urinal holding myself that he called and said he was very sorry but something at work had come up that he had to go to, but he really wants to see us play, and wants to sort something out when he gets back….ALTHOUGH he said (quite seriously) that we may be signed already by then but what could he do! He also said that he’s ‘got the recipe’ for us!”

Fifteen days after I dreamt I urinated in front of Alan McGee, I was standing at a urinal, literally holding myself, when the man who signed the Sex Pistols4 rang to cancel and to tell me he had “the recipe” for us. The recipe. He didn’t specify the recipe. To this day I do not know what was in it. But it was the recipe, the definite article doing an enormous amount of work, and he delivered it to me while I was mid-flow in the loos at Survival Rehearsal Studios, and I believed every word, because:

“All very excited of course (even Geve who turned up LATE and was most viciously attacked by all!) as he must have plans…he’s a top A&R guy, and wouldn’t say this without meaning it.”

“He’s a top A&R guy, and wouldn’t say this without meaning it.” Reader, I now know that the entire job of a top A&R guy is to say things like that and not necessarily mean them. But also: Geve turned up late and was most viciously attacked by all. I loved being in this band. A music legend has just cancelled on us AND promised us “the recipe”, and the drummer has wandered in late5, and the headline emotion in the room is a unified assault on Geve. Priorities.

The strangest line, though, is the one he threw away: that by the time he got back, we “may be signed already.” Signed by whom? On the strength of what?

“We wondered why he said that we may be signed already….who has he been speaking to and what does he know?!”

The diary then offers a theory….that Alex had been emailing a London promoter who said he met A&R people “all the time,” and that maybe word was getting around, maybe things were “working in combination.” Maybe. Or maybe a charming man said a charming thing to a man standing at a urinal (because the call was too important to ignore and I simply refuse to stop mid-flow for anyone). The diary footnotes its own optimism here with two words: “Oh, God.”

We find out, eventually. It is not, let’s say, the outcome the exclamation marks were hoping for.

Here’s what I can see now that I couldn’t see then. Every single thing that happened in May 2007 was real and potentially game changing for the band. Dave Ambrose really did call back, twice, sincerely, with great plans and a recipe. People really were suddenly warm again. None of it was a lie. It just wasn’t, yet, anything — and the difference between warm and anything, in the music industry, is the entire difference, and it is invisible from the inside. You cannot tell, at the time, which of the kind phone calls is the one that changes your life. They all sound identical. They all make you walk around for a week feeling chosen. Some of them are even from a urinal.

But the Magic Numbers gig was something, and it was going to be one of the best nights of the whole story. So let’s not be cynical yet. On 30 May 2007 a top A&R guy told an unsigned band he had the recipe, and The Foxes stood in a small room at the back of a rehearsal studio and believed, completely, that the oven was already warming up.

Next week: the band Ash buy me dinner, I fail to meet Chris Martin for the second time (the toilet, again), a friend at XFM tells me, kindly, to my face, that The Foxes are never going to make it and I should go solo.

Share