Post #16 — Let's start a bidding war

Last week ended on a promise. A woman called Bexy who worked at MySpace had told us, at a gig, that she was going to make The Foxes a ‘Featured Music Artist’ — that our photo would sit in the corner of the screen every time anyone, anywhere, logged in.

She kept her promise.

29.06.07. Myspace friends: 5230.

“Well, it’s been just crazy….we can barely keep up with our friend requests!1 So far it’s 747 new friends, and loads of them have said they’re coming to see us play, and loads more have added songs and banners to their page. We’ve also been getting countless gig offers, one of which we’ve accepted in Leicester….but others lined up in Ireland and all over!”

Seven hundred and forty-seven new friends in a couple of days. The counter, which had crept up over fifteen months like a slow tide, had started to spin. And with the friends came the inevitable companions of any sudden attention:

“We’ve also had a few twats which is to be expected – some dickhead said that we ‘sucked’ because he preferred the band called ‘Foxes!’ Hilarious. The bigger you get, the more people are going to want to knock you down.”

And then, at the bottom of the very same entry, the thing that the friend requests were really only the warm-up act for. A message arrived. Not a promoter, not a fan, not another almost-manager called Darren. A record label. I reproduce it exactly as MySpace served it up, because the gap between the flatness of the message and the size of what it represented is the whole story:

From: Nikki Date: 29 Jun 2007, 15:33 Subject: info

“Hey Guys

How’s it going? Please could you send me a demo? The address is:

Nikki White epic-sony BMG 69-79 fulham high street london sw6 3jw

Many thanks

Nikki x”

Epic. Sony BMG. A demo, requested, by name, unprompted. I forwarded it within five minutes — from, I should note, my work account, under my full job title of ‘Mental Health and ECR Business Manager’ — with a subject line that consisted entirely of the word XXXXX preceded by seven exclamation marks2. The diary’s verdict was more concise:

“BOSH!!!!!!! Let’s start a bidding war!”

Let’s start a bidding war! But there was no war. There were no other bidders. There was, in fact, no bid. A demo posted to BMG in Fulham is a long way from an offer, as a wiser man would have known. But I would like to defend twenty-seven-year-old me for a moment. He had spent fifteen months posting CDs into the void and getting nothing back but silence and the occasional “we’re not blown away.” Now a major label had asked him to send one over. If you can’t type BOSH at a moment like that, when can you?3

Which brings us, finally, to Dave Ambrose.4

Regular readers will remember Ambrose, the A&R man who had spent the spring promising to come and see us and then, with magnificent consistency, not coming. He’d cancelled because he was knackered. He’d played our CD to people who weren’t blown away “but he didn’t care.” He’d promised us “the recipe” from the other end of a urinal. For months he had been a voice on the phone and a name in the diary, and never once an actual man in an actual room watching us play.

On Sunday 1 July, he turned up to a rehearsal.

04.07.07. Myspace friends: 6392.

“We played about 6 or 7 songs to Dave Ambrose on Sunday. Scruffy looking chap! He seemed to enjoy it and smiled quite a bit, and clapped at the end of Let It Go….at the end he said thank you and asked me to give him a call…quite mysterious, but then that’s the way these people work I suppose.”

Scruffy looking chap. Six months of build-up, the man who put his name to “Anarchy in the UK,” and the first thing the diary records about him in the flesh is that he could have done with a tidy-up. He smiled. He clapped at the end of Let It Go5. He said thank you, and asked me to call him. And we read mystery into all of it, because when you want something badly enough you can read mystery into a man simply being polite and then going home.

So I called him.

09.07.07. Myspace friends: 6905.

“Email to the band this morning:

Just spoke to Dave – he said he thought we were good but that we didn’t have enough of a ‘style’ at the moment and needed to develop more. He said we had all the ingredients – good songs, we played well but needed to develop our own style more. He also said he’d definitely want to come and see us again in the near future.

I think this goes along with what we’ve said all along about record companies not wanting to spend any money developing artists any more, and wanting as much of the finished article as possible. But I think we’re definitely moving in the right direction…if he thinks we lack our own style consider how we were 6 months ago, both musically and visually.

I’m actually quite encouraged by what he said, as it shows we’re progressing and it’s good to know we have all the right ingredients. This guy doesn’t mince his words, and yet had nothing more negative to say than we are under-developed. The Beatles had a far bigger rejection from Decca.

Let’s take on board what he says, and move onwards and upwards…

Nigel.”

There it is. The man who signed the Sex Pistols and Duran Duran had finally watched The Foxes play, and the verdict was: good songs, plays well, no style yet, come back when you’re finished.

Not long ago I had the pleasure of hearing Dave Rowntree, the drummer from Blur (with whom I’d later DJ with many times at Death Disco), among a great many other things, talk about his fantastic book of photographs, No One You Know from the band’s early days. Someone asked whether a band like Blur could still happen now, and his answer: he’s fairly sure that if they were starting out today, they simply wouldn’t make it. Coming from him, that isn’t modesty. It’s arithmetic. Blur put out two albums of gloriously unfashionable music6, Leisure in 1991 and Modern Life Is Rubbish in 1993, before Parklife arrived in 1994 and made them famous. The better part of five years, by his own reckoning, between the unfashionable beginning and the mainstream catching up. As he tells it, the usual story is bleaker: a band gets signed, puts something out, it does all right, they get dropped, and they go back to their day jobs. Blur were just stubborn enough, and lucky enough, to be the exception…and that was in the boom years of the music business!

I think about that whenever I read Ambrose’s verdict back. The machine that let Blur become Blur - a label willing to fund two commercial misfires while four men worked out who they were, was, by the summer of 2007, quietly being switched off. CD sales were falling away, labels were thinning their rosters, and the slow, expensive business of developing an artist was the first thing to go. “Not enough style yet, come back when you’re finished” wasn’t one man being difficult. It was the sound of an industry that had stopped paying for the becoming and wanted only the finished article. We were asking, without quite realising it, for a patience that had already left the building.

And then, buried at the very bottom of that same entry, after the Beatles, after the onwards and upwards, dropped in so casually you could miss it entirely, this:

“It’s a good job Jonno and I decided to leave our jobs in 3 months…we’ll use that time to work on and consider what David said.”

No fanfare. No exclamation marks, for once. Not even a proper sentence about it — just a subordinate clause, tacked onto the end of a pep talk about an A&R man’s lukewarm review, as if quitting the careers we’d spent years building were a minor logistical convenience that happened to dovetail nicely with our artistic development plan.

Two of us had decided. Quietly. Me and Jonno. We hadn’t told Alex. We hadn’t told Geve. By the eleventh, the plan had a date attached:

11.07.07. Myspace friends: 7100.

“Jonno and I have decided to hand our notices in at work…I’m going to finish 1st October. We haven’t told the others yet, and will do so just before we step on stage at The Borderline on Saturday.”

A leaving date, in the diary, in writing. No regular income. No safety net.

We were going to tell the others at The Borderline gig on Saturday. Just before we walked on stage.

Next week: an email lands from EMI in America, a mysterious woman wants to fly over from the States just to watch us play, and a fan corners me to show off her specially made fox-head necklace.

Share