20.9 F
New York
Monday, December 23, 2024
HomeArchiveTMV Interview: i.e music's David Enthoven and Tim Clark

TMV Interview: i.e music’s David Enthoven and Tim Clark

Date:

Related stories

Homeless Hell: The Camp That Could Kill Rock History

Sunset Studio, one of the few remaining recording studios in Hollywood after many closed due to high costs and new technologies, faces a danger worse than a single wild rock star. Sunset Sound’s three studios have produced more than 300 gold records but they could be ruined by a filthy homeless camp next to the building. Garbage is stacked high, needles and pipes are scattered on the ground and homeless people use the street as a toilet.

TikTok vs Universal Music and The Music Businesses Coming of Age

Well, it’s definitely been an interesting few weeks, looking across the ballfield of TikTok vs Universal Music. What is heartening to see is that major labels such as Universal Music seem to have finally learned from previous mistakes made initially in the 1980s. 

Unleashing Chaos: How To Get Free Music- And Why The Music Industry Can’t Stop It

The same platform that brought you cat videos and cringe-worthy influencers is now the go-to place for snagging every song imaginable. Thanks to some clever websites, you can rip the audio from any YouTube video, download it as an MP3 or .wav file, and sail the seas of free music. No subscriptions, no ads, no hassle.

February Round-up: Four music events to attend

Winter holidays have passed quickly, and there are the...

Pitchfork Effect

Last week, media company Condé Nast revealed its plan...

 

TMV’s Laura Thorne recently sat down with i.e.music co-Directors David Enthoven and Tim Clark for a chat on a wide range of topics. 

LGT: My first question is how did you meet, and what events led up to your partnership and the forming of this company? What made you decide to work together?

DE: We met in 1968. I had a band called King Crimson, which was as very sort of avant garde band; Island Records was my chosen destiny, I didn’t know much about anything except that Island Records and Atlantic Records were the two labels I wanted to work with…and, met Tim, who basically was put in charge of making what I brought in a reality. Tim was doing all the artwork, and was responsible for all the artwork and marketing at Island Records at that time. From that blossomed a wonderful relationship. We’ve been together, joined at the hip, ever since!

LGT: …and so what year did you form the company?

TC: Oh, this company…we worked together in this first iteration as it were when I was at Island and David had started his management company EG – famous management company – we worked together for the next eight-odd years. You know, I continued at Island, I became managing director of Island, and then David decided he was going to take the king’s schilling or whatever it’s called – Polydor’s money – and left me in the lurch. Just as I’d taken over as Managing Director, he pulled the rug from under me. (laughs)

DE: It’s a testament to our friendship that we actually – after I’d snorted my way through all my ill-gotten-gains – got back together again, when was it? 1980’s? Christ?

TC: ‘90 or ‘91?

LGT: All dates approximate.

TC: I’d popped in to see David, I think just to have a chat. I was actually doing a book for Island Records, and needed some old EG stuff, Roxy Music, King Crimson and so on. So I popped in to see David, just at the very point when he’d lost somebody that he’d been sharing the office with. When he told me this, I had an office at Shepherds Bush and the lease was going to end, so he said, would you fancy working here? So, I looked at the rent and I could just about afford it, so we got together. But I said to him at the time, I said David, well, I will, but if you think that I’m going into artist management, just think again. Ain’t going to do it.

LGT: Famous last words.

TC: Famous last words indeed.

DE: I fucked off on tour and left him.

LGT: I think that’s a good segue, because my next question is what are the essential qualities of an effective artist manager?

DE: Slightly deranged. No, you’ve got to be quite caring, quite compulsive, good attention to detail (got to be able to see the bigger picture), you’ve got to listen to artists, you’ve got to put up with quite a lot of creative hullabaloo, but most of all you’ve got to be a real enthusiast for artists. To be a good manager, you’ve really got to love the music your artists are doing and what they are trying to do. Otherwise, it’s virtually impossible to get out of bed to actually deal with some of the nonsense that we have to deal with…it’s a very odd job for grown men, but frankly, when the two of us were standing on the stage at Glastonbury just looking at this sea of muddy people…we couldn’t ask for more really, could we?

TC: No, it was brilliant. There they were, all singing “Angels” back at Rob. It was a pretty emotional moment.

DE: Glastonbury is a sort of a lion’s pit where he’d been booed off stage a few years previously.

TC: one of the great things about management is the huge range of things that you have to do…everything from wiping botties so to speak to arranging huge deals. I mean, what can be very big deals, huge tours, and so you are doing the whole gamut, making videos and songs. So, there are lots and lots of things, and like any job, there’s tedium, tedious bits, but there’s lots of very exciting and great bits too.

DE: We are close to, it’s the closest for a non-artist that you are going to get to the creative process, having a little bit of a say in what the public at large will see.

LGT: Just as an aside, do either of you play an instrument?

TC: I play the mouth organ rather badly.

DE: I try to play the trumpet even worse.

LGT: What are the criteria you use when deciding which artist to work with?

DE: The music.

  1. The music and the songs. We always, always listen to the songs. If an artist can’t write songs, it’s pretty much it for us. We really listen to the material. If the material’s not there, it doesn’t matter how good the voice or whatever is, it makes the job much, much tougher. Of course, you can put them with other writers and so on, but we tend to work with people who write their own material.

LGT: So, someone can’t lobby you just because they are good at self-promotion and very likeable, if they don’t have the material…

DE: We have fallen into that trap, we have made that mistake, and it doesn’t work. We’ve learned, really. But then, we’ve had what we think are very successful artists, we’ve had some we haven’t been able to develop. But we love what we are doing, so we don’t mind going the extra mile for them.

LGT: Do you think that the quality of songwriting is as good today as it was in the halcyon days of yore (however you define them), and if it isn’t as good, does that explain why consumers aren’t buying music the way they used to?

TC: That’s a very good question! I certainly don’t think that there’s a dearth of great songwriters today. I think that there are lots of very good songwriters around, and that coming from us is quite a statement, because we come from that period when people look back and say, my god, we were in the golden age. But there really are, there are some fine songwriters.

DE: We have been talking recently about what we need as a new movement. We need another punk movement, don’t we, or something to shift things on. We’ve all gotten a little bit complacent. All of the movements up to punk, and what came after, had a social voice, and we haven’t had a movement with a social voice. Apparently, there’s something coming out of Canada at the moment…it’s called…indie hip-hop.

TC: Indie hip-hop.

DE: Which is actually more social voice and I’m really interested to hear some of it. That’s what needs to be galvanized, it’s too bland at the moment.

TC: Great songwriters do usually have something that they particularly want to write about. There’s lots of songwriters who write about looooooooove, but when you think of Bob Dylan-who arguably was one of the greatest all-time songwriters-he wrote about political issues, and he gave that whole generation a voice really. He was able to put into words what we were thinking. There was a lot of anti-war rhetoric and so on, but he really was putting what we thought into words. I think David’s right, through this period there has not been any sort of real movement-

DE: …or voice…

TC: That people are prepared to voice. I’m sure that’ll change, something will come along…

DE: There’s lots of anger around, which usually does produce something. People are getting pretty fucked off.

LGT: Talking about something that’s relevant to the opposite spectrum…what’s the effect of TV programs such as American Idol, X Factor and Glee on the business, and do you notice an influence of these shows on up-and-coming artists, writers and performers?

TC: It’s a one-year life, in a word. I think it’s great television, don’t get me wrong, it’s great TV, but what artist, I mean there’s been a couple more in America that have come up, Kelly Clarkson, there’s another country singer who came out of it. We’ve had nothing here, Will Young’s the only thing that’s come out of it here. So you get a year, that’s all you get.  Very few of these artists become worldwide stars.

DE: Localized.

TC: I suppose for us it’s that thing of, we’ve spent our careers working artists who want to be singers or musicians or whatever, their starting point is not that we want to be famous. We want a career in music, we want to be in a band on stage and we recognize that it’s jolly hard work, and that we are going to have to do all the horrid things before we can ever think of making it.

LGT: When you receive tapes – I mean mp3’s these days – do you hear any of that influence, that American Idol sound? It seems so over-the-top, great singers often, but not so much substance in terms of material.

TC: Fortunately, most of the stuff we get is not influenced by that. If anything, the influences fall into categories – you get heavy metal, you get rap, and its very much that, it’s not really influenced by the TV shows. Glee, of course, is something else again, it’s really great for catalogue sales, they are playing and singing wonderful old songs that deserve to be heard again. I think Glee is a different kettle of fish, I think it’s rather good.

LGT: In terms of promoting the artists you represent, are you more old school in your tactics (advertising, interviews in traditional media) or have you embraced the social media community engagement prototype? What’s the value of social media in today’s promotional landscape as you see it?

TC: I don’t think that social media has yet reached its full capacity if you like. I think Facebook has been going, like what, five years? You can discount the first couple of years in that, so in three years it’s expanded remarkably, but people are still learning, it’s still not entirely clear how the model will actually work. There are all sorts of things they are talking about and discussing that will change, things like Facebook having its own currency and so on. These are very interesting things. Are we engaged in this sort of media? Absolutely. We, for a couple of old boys, we have to be engaged. It is a revolution, it is a commercial and industrial revolution, it is more far-reaching than any that has gone before in the sense that it changes the way people communicate with one another. There are all sorts of ways that digital technology is having an impact on our lives; it is quite extraordinary and we are very engaged with it. The thing of doing interviews remains, it’s just that you do it with a blog, you’re not necessarily doing it with a newspaper or magazine, you are doing it online.

LGT: Do you have any particular examples of how this has been successful with an artist who’s utilized this approach?

TC: I think that what we did with Sia, for instance, first of all, there was an incredibly successful video that I think she made for, literally, seven thousand dollars. It was incredibly successful, and it became the ultimate viral, it just sizzled everywhere. That sort of established her as a digital artist, and we put her album online with not much protection it has to be said, you had to do a couple of things in order to hear it, but you could hear it for free. We released it some seven months later and the album went in at #26 in the US charts, without any hit singles. So, I think this is all to do with digital, and we had fantastic support from the American blogger, Perez Hilton. He really did make a big difference, but then so did KCRW. So, you still have to have all the mix of media.

LGT: So, we are in a landscape now where an entire generation of consumers think that music is free at the point of use and are resistant to paying for it. Is there any way to turn that around, or has that horse already bolted from the stable?

DE: Well music is like water, it’s our job to try and monetize it, but not by the draconian methods that the major labels are using. They are our customers that are consuming it, so somehow we’ve got to find a way of actually monetizing it.

TC: Actually, we don’t believe that the consumers think that it should just be for free. Most people, remarkably, are reasonably honest, so most people understand that if people work hard to make something, it should be paid for. I think that, as an industry, we do have to point fingers at the major record companies and major publishers. As an industry, we have prevented digital entrepreneurs from really getting started, really getting stuck in. Lots of little digital startups have been throttled at birth. That’s been the thing, the thing that’s most prevented the digital environment from flourishing.

LGT: So suing consumers and things like that, not necessarily the way to go?

TC: No, no absolutely not.

LGT: Statistics show that more music is being consumed, it’s just not necessarily being paid for.

TC: That’s true.

LGT: I’d like to find out more about one of the things you are best known for, the “360 deal.” What were the elements of Robbie Williams’ deal with EMI in 2002 that made it unique and groundbreaking, aside from the amount of money that was involved?

DE: We actually don’t want to call it a 360 deal because that has been corrupted by Warner Brothers.

TC: Well, I suppose it really was a deal that allowed EMI to invest in all of Rob’s rights. They had a share and a stake in all of his revenue streams. What we were trying to establish was a real partnership with an investing company – EMI – who also happened to provide some services. It wasn’t as successful as it might have been, actually it wasn’t a true 360-degree deal in the sense that the record side was treated separately from the other side, which was where all the other rights are, and that inevitably led to some conflict, not nasty conflict, but it did lead to conflict. What we know now is that for an all rights deal to work, you have to put all of the rights into one basket. So, we work out a proper business plan with all of the things that are going to sit in this basket, and then we invite investment in.  The key to it really is that the investor, if it is the record company, that investor stands with us in trying to make sure that we get the most competitive services at the most competitive rates. So, we go in and we say, what are you going to give us and what are your distribution fees, what will you charge for marketing et cetera so that we have a very clear understanding of what all the costs are. And we try to get those, as we say, at proper competitive rates, and the benefit of that will of course go back to the investor in time. So, it’s actually trying to change the balance of how we work together, so we want, we need a big partner to supply money and so on and to help secure some of these other services, but there has to be a very clear split between the investor and the services that are provided.

LGT: So, it sounds like you want everything to be more transparent?

TC: Absolutely.

LGT: Not that I know that much about the specifics of this, but for some of the people I talk to – musicians for example – they feel the term “360” has become synonymous with shall we say adverse consequences, it’s shorthand for that, for things that they don’t want. Knowing what staunch advocates, you are…

DE: It’s shorthand for the fucking record company getting in and grabbing as much as it can, and paying the artist less. Then dealing with staff that think they have knowledge of art, but haven’t a fucking clue about A, being promoters; B, being…they think they are brilliant merchandisers; C: being agents, blah blah blah. Stick to doing your fucking job, which is selling records and selling music. Excuse me.

LGT: That’s what I gathered. It sounds like from where you started, it’s evolved and gone off and been applied in different ways.

TC: Undoubtably it has, and David is right. It is a way of grabbing shares of this other revenue, but they haven’t looked at the savings they might be making for instance on digital, and saying, well listen, we’ll give you a bit more of this. That doesn’t come into it.

LGT: It’s a one-way street. Now we get to put our hands into the merchandise cookie jar or whatever.

TC: Yes, it’s a one-way street.

DE: When you’re a Leo Kern and you have to pay yourself that much money, you’ve got to squeeze a pip, absolutely, without regard. Just as a quick aside, we had one of our dear artists in here and she said, “I can’t believe all these record executives getting much, much more than me” – and she’s quite successful – “they are getting paid more than me.”

LGT: That’s been one of the issues that the Music Void’s Wayne Rosso has been going after, he’s certainly been looking at executive salaries.

TC: What Wayne has done on Warner Brothers is just brilliant, and I’ve said it to a few people – David has said it to the whole bloody industry, I think! Even the people at Warner Brothers are embarrassed by it.

LGT: So, the music business is more “small m and big b” than ever and yet sales keep declining. Did the lawyers and accountants with their corporate mentality kill the goose that laid the golden egg?

TC: They certainly don’t look forward. We’ve discovered – well not discovered – we made a great realization, that lawyers always work to precedent which is one reason they are always looking backwards. They haven’t got a fucking clue about what’s going on in the future, and we are all about the future. They also fail to understand that if 75% of the population are ignoring a law, then its no longer a law in a proper democracy. It simply can’t be enforced. That isn’t to say that the basis of copyright law is wrong, but they haven’t realized that people are ignoring it, and they need to do something about it. So going out and banging people over the heads – or doing this ridiculous Digital Economy Act, which now of course is stalled, and probably will never ever be used – is a complete waste of time. Actually, what we have to do as an industry is to find new ways of getting to fans. Unfortunately, it is a lot to do with lawyers and business affairs and so on, who believe that they are behind this fortress. What they are doing is not helping in any way to secure a new kind of copyright deal, a new sort of copyright.

LGT: And do you think this is inadvertent stupidity?

TC: Well, I mean, they are in the trenches seeing the tanks coming toward them and the fucking tanks are five miles behind them. We see this at any time of great change. When you think of the way that the Western industries were decimated during the 60’s and 70’s, of people moving stuff to third-world countries to make things, the same thing happened then. You had people fighting rear-guard actions, the unions fighting rear-guard actions; the battle had been lost. Yet what they were doing was prolonging the agony, instead of really trying to find answers. They were trying to keep industries going that actually had gone.

LGT: Do you think that the people in charge now are any wiser? I am struck by how long these conversations have been going on, it’s been over a decade since Napster came along and everyone was so freaked out and it seems that the same conversations are going on without resolution. So have they gotten any smarter?

DE: I think the people in charge of these huge catalogues are no wiser at all. The same people are in charge. There are some very wise people out there, trying to make change happen, but unfortunately the majors have got the biggest share, they’ve got the biggest libraries so they can dictate still and they are not looking to change any time soon. I mean they talk a good talk about change, but they don’t actually embrace it.

TC: It has been one of the problems. If you are going to offer some sort of digital service, you need catalogue. And the record company realized, well, if we’re going to talk to Nokia and so on about a music service, we can get lots money out of them, and so they did. Nokia were the wrong people to be doing it with. Actually, it was good, smart, young digital savvy entrepreneurs they should have been doing the business with, like the people who first started Napster, Sean Fanning and so on. But they have concentrated on the big people to do these deals, and they’ve got lots of money out of them – even Spotify, they got lots of money out of Spotify but Spotify had to raise lots of money in order to get the thing started…

DE: …and give stock away.

TC: …and give a load of shareholdings away. If there’s ever a sale that gives the record companies a decent flow of revenue, I doubt very much that the artist will get a share.

LGT: The analysis is that the artist sees negligible revenue from Spotify and things of that nature at this point. Its value is promotional.

TC: You have to ask, promotional for what? If there are no sales in any case, what are we promoting?

LGT: Yes, at a certain point. That relates to this next question: after being a bright spot in the music industry, the live music sector is facing its own doldrums. What are the reasons for that downturn in your opinion?

TC: Live has always been cyclical, and it does depend to a large part on what is happening out there. David mentioned before this thing about movements – we remember punk was a reaction to the pomp rock and the rich rock stars and so on that had made it in the 60’s and 70’s and were going around in Rolls Royces and all the rest of it. Punk was a reaction to all of that, and all of a sudden people were going to gigs and seeing these outrageous artists like the Sex Pistols and the Damned. It really just generated a whole bunch of interest. So I think there are things like that that regenerate live music. It’s like when the Artic Monkeys came on the scene – they were out there playing, they generated a whole bunch of interest. In the old days, when you had a really great album released, people were going into record shops, they rarely walked out with just the one record that they’d gone in for, they walked out with a couple or three, and all of a sudden it had a great effect on the industry generally. I think it’s the same with live, and live will never go away. People will always want to see great live acts. I see we are facing a bit of competition from comedians. There are an awful lot of comedians out there playing lots of gigs, lots and lots of them too.

LGT: But you still think it’s really important for an artist or group that you work with to put on a compelling live show.

TC: If they can’t play live…

DE: We won’t manage them.  If they can’t tread the boards…

TC: …it’s what makes us excited. It’s like David said, this experience of standing on the stage at Glastonbury and watching Rob perform, it’s one of the great experiences of our lives. Standing on the stage at Knebworth, same thing, seeing him perform to…

DE: My jollies don’t get floated by hearing something on the radio – you want to see the whites of their eyes really, don’t you? Then you really do know that someone is getting excited. The period we grew up in, you could see a whole gamut of different bands, and you knew who was being successful, could have been folk – if they were cutting it on stage. Christ alive, Ian Anderson standing on one leg and playing the flute was exciting to watch, it was fantastic.

TC: All of that, particularly when you are of an age, we were out all the time, and we were going to see all these great bands like Free, and Jethro Tull and Roxy Music and T Rex. You know, Bob Marley and the Wailers – these are great live experiences, and we all remember the key moments, the ones that really stand out. They are there, they are part of that memory bank. Most of our memory banks and those cells are shot.

LGT: But certain ones still remain. But you read that there’s so much competition for the entertainment dollar, and kids today play video games and are on Facebook and they don’t care about music in the same way they used to. My thought is, is music even going to be a popular form of artistic expression in 20 or 30 years?

DE: Absolutely.

TC: Music goes with love, sex and drugs.

DE: You can’t have a good drug experience without a bit of music. A lot of the games have cottoned on to the fact that if there’s the right music going, it makes the game more exciting then. It’s a driver, music is a driver, always has been.

TC: It’s one of the most potent forces, it is one of the most potent forces going. It’s certainly more potent than painting or sculpture, it defines our memories of events. I think when we look back to love affairs and so on, there’s nearly always music involved in it and you know, or a piece of music will play and you’ll immediately remember that. Music is the most potent thing.

DE: People don’t make love to a video game.

TC: There are certain people who have recognized the potency of music, and have used it extraordinarily well, and Steve Jobs is the master of it all.

LGT: Or he’s ruined it, according to Jon Bon Jovi.

TC: He’s been very smart, and he’s used music to turn his company into one of the biggest companies in the world. The people that have ruined it are the people that are supposedly looking after music, and looking after the rights of artists and musicians and so on – they are the ones that actually blew it.

DE: The so-called gatekeepers.

LGT: I’d like to know who the next Robbie Williams might be, and does the infrastructure in the industry even exist right now to support the emergence of such a talent as his or others such as U2, Coldplay etc.?

TC: I think the answer to that has to be yes…and is it a new Robbie Williams or is it Adele? Look at how she’s done, and what a fantastic record, and so I’m told, in America, this has been done without the support of traditional radio. It actually really has been – she’s done a bit of telly – but it’s really been blogs and the internet, this is what we’ve been told. But apparently, she’s not had a great deal of support.

DE: They are probably jumping all over it now, America playing catchup. Most of the time it was college radio and alternative rock I think, and it went straight to number 1.

TC: But a lot of coverage on the internet, and on the blogosphere and so on…she’s had an amazing amount.

DE: Huge…and a fucking good album.

TC: Great album, great single.

LGT: Radio is still significant here though, in the UK.

TC: Yes, it is.

LGT: In the States? It’s a different market because it’s such a large country.

TC: They’d have you believe that you can’t have a hit without radio. That’s why we are so excited about Adele. I think it is breaking down here too, there are a lot more people who are turned into the internet, who are listening to Spotify, it’s been pretty successful.

DE: Why don’t you do a piece on Global Radio? What they are asking for, their deal with Geffen Records, rights management, what they are asking artists to sign in order to get played on the radio, though they never say that.

LGT: What are the business opportunities as you see them today? Everyone’s going after synch, advertising etc.? What’s your take on where the opportunities are for an artist coming up?

TC: Everything but the sale of recorded music! Obviously recorded music has fallen away, but will it come back? Well, yes, there are opportunities for it to come back. Will it be different from how it was? Almost certainly. Will it be a share in some way of subscription revenue? Possibly. Will things like Facebook have a real effect if they go into this thing of using their own currency and so on, is that going to provide us with an avenue? Possibly. We do think that the likelihood is that there will be at some point some sort of blanket license available, maybe not statutory (in fact I hope it’s not statutory), but there will be some kind of blanket license available, and the gazillions of people who listen to music without paying for it at all will actually pay something rather small. But the effect could be as healthy financially as ever it was when people were selling a smaller number of albums but at quite a high price. The artists we used to work with in the 60’s and 70’s, the sales that were talking about there, were 250, 300 hundred thousand, half-a-million? There were only a few that sold in the millions.

DE: But the value of what you were paying for is equal to about twenty or thirty pounds, you used to spend a big chunk of your money to buy the album you really wanted, of your wages, didn’t you? And artists earned really rather well from that.

DE: We wouldn’t mind, you know that thing that was put forward by, I’m trying to remember his name – music as water.

TC: Yeah.

DE: What was his name?

TC: Gerd Leonard.

DE: Gerd Leonard. Actually, we don’t mind masses and masses of little incremental amounts, if it’s reaching a wider audience, do we?

TC: No. It is finding ways of making that work, and with legislation that’s absolutely possible, but the record companies are not looking at it that way. The record companies are dead scared that they are going to lose that small amount of people that are paying quite a lot for music, who they see as their main customers, as opposed to the millions who are listening to it and not paying for it.

DE: The sad thing is, we may have to see them actually die before anything changes…I mean they won’t die, because there will be the catalogue and somebody will have to look after the catalogue, but then they may be forced to change. But it may have to get to that, to invite that.

TC: I think they are being forced to change because they have lost their stock in trade. I think that now it is going on, because they can’t keep going the way they are, simply can’t. And they also, they’ve been trying to get government to change for so long, and they realize that those wheels grind exceedingly slowly…they are not going to get government to move…

DE: Why would anybody give away 70% of their voters? They want their vote, don’t they? Government’s not going to go against the wishes of the majority. They are bigger whores than the people who run the record companies, politicians are.

LGT: Comparing and contrasting the system here in the UK with that of the US, do you see any marked differences pro or con between the two ways of selling records and paying for records that are being sold?

TC: Like here, America relies on Steve Jobs…iTunes. Record shops are closing, Borders…

DE: We hear Best Buy is going down the tubes.

TC: There are no physical outlets on the high street for CD’s. So you’ve got Amazon, and you’ve got iTunes, and those are the two major players at the moment.  And then of course you do have, what has happened in America, the collection society SoundExchange…Sound Exchange is collecting money from digital radio stations, digital downloads, Warners is paying lots of money into SoundExchange and artists are starting to make money that way.

LGT: My last question is about the kind of music you listen to nowadays, and if there are any bright spots in particular, things that you are excited about out there in the musical landscape.

TC: I’m absolutely loving the Adele album. I think it’s really is quite special and I’m really enjoying that. I still listen to Neil Young and old stuff like that. I was given a Best of Fleetwood Mac, and my god they did make some really good music, they really did.  David, what are you listening to?

DE: I’m afraid I’m pretty nostalgic too I have to say. I love my Stax collection, when I come in the morning I put on some fairly eclectic stuff.

TC: Oh, we both listen to…

DE: Elizabeth Valletti, she’s wonderful, Craig Armstrong is wonderful, Sacha Puttnam is wonderful, this is all fairly mellow music for the beginning of the day. An American band called Granddaddy, which we love. There’s lots…Fleet Foxes I like, Arcade Fire I like, a bit disappointed by the new Radiohead album, but I’m sure I’ll grow to love it. But we have music on all the time here, don’t we?

TC: Yeah, yeah.

DE: There’s nothing like a bit of nostalgia for two old farts, really. Tom Waits.

TC: Oh yes, Tom Waits. Actually, on Friday night I got home and we had a Van Morrison fest.

LGT: I came across some videos from Peter Frampton back when he played Day on the Green in the San Francisco Bay Area, he recorded the Frampton Comes Alive album and some of those old tapes have been found and are now on the internet, and I tell you it’s one of those moments, you are just taken back in time…

TC: That was about one of the most successful live albums ever, wasn’t it?

DE: Two million? It did two million.

TC: It was a double album too; it was an extraordinary success.

DE: And Dee Anthony made a bloody fortune.

TC: Extraordinary success.

LGT: Alright, thank you.

TC: Is that us?

LGT: That’s it man. Thank you so much.

TC: It’s been a pleasure.

Author

Subscribe

- Never miss a story with notifications

- Gain full access to our premium content

- Browse free from up to 5 devices at once

Latest stories

spot_img

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here