It was on a bleak morning in south London that the angels first spoke to Gay Dad. In a dank, windowless rehearsal room scarred by fag burns and gum, the band began to play. At first we produced a limp noise with little useful progression. Then came a burst of intensity. Everyone felt it coming, the reward of regular rehearsals, a movement repeated over and over, refined until, almost inaudibly, voices came streaming in between guitars, like celestial bodies sweeping across a sonic ionosphere. These may have been just the clashing of harmonics but to us, in our quest for musical identity, it was as if a heavenly door had opened. Through it sang the angels. That day in south London we came away with the determination to make a stab at musical success.
Having left the industry, I can contemplate the almighty mess we made of it. Life in a band is life in a bubble. You drift along a mile high, growing ever more introspective. The bubble bobs on the winds of success, cushioning you from turbulence, until one day you hit the earth with a big pop. There is no one else around. So you blame yourself, or your keyboard player. A squabble starts. You fight, then disband.
Gay Dad's story is hardly unique. Like us, hundreds of bands end up on the scrapheap every year. It's in the nature of the game. Some succeed; most lose. And ever since the first commercial recordings were made in the 1900s, musicians have complained of getting a rough deal. The maximum share of royalties anyone would expect in a contract with a major label is about 20 per cent, and most contracts are signed for much less. For years, record labels, with their distribution and marketing networks, have held the balance of power over the artist who, a rebel at heart, locked in his motel room writing protest songs, wasn't interested in business anyway. But, for a generation or two, that business was gigantic. If you did succeed, the size of the margin didn't matter much.
The times, however, have changed. The current music scene is a shadow of the 25-year golden age of pop music-roughly from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Musicians today are less artistically ambitious. The public, too, has changed. Young people are as likely to put on a video or Nintendo game as a CD. And the musician, between watching television or playing Nintendo himself, is just as interested in wealth as his boss at the label. It's not only the romance that has gone out of the business. It's the business. Music pundits believe the industry is heading for crisis. Despite global turnover of $33 billion last year, sales are down 5 per cent. The five industry giants-AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, Bertelsmann BMG, Sony and EMI-blame it on worldwide economic downturn and internet piracy. There is another possibility: that the clich? has finally come true; that this time it's not just the complaint of old timers and 1970s nostalgics; that, 20 years since its decline began, the age of rock'n'roll really is dead.
Some predict the demise of the big corporations. Many staff have been laid off-1,800 at EMI in March, 1,300 at BMG last year-and share prices at AOL and Vivendi have plummeted. New technology has added to the mess, the digital revolution enabling anyone in a suburban bedroom to make a studio quality recording in days. In fact, for musicians, this downturn could provide an opportunity to wrest back control. New business models could emerge which will help put artists in command; at least, those with a brand name.
Gay dad's first contact with the industry was through the traditional entry porthole, the A&R, or Artist and Repertoire, department. As the interface between artist and record label, A&R people can make or break an act. Their job is to second guess the public. The industry relies on the musical taste of these speculators to make it money. But from the point of view of most musicians, their finest quality is an ability to spend that money.
In the spring of 1997, Gay Dad found itself at the centre of an A&R frenzy. A three song demo tape we had recorded got into the hands of scouts, and suddenly we were being propositioned by five labels. During our courtship, the four of us-guitarist and frontman Cliff Jones, bassist Nigel Hoyle, keyboard player James Risebero and myself, the drummer-dined at a lavish banquet of flattery, bribery and waste set in fashionable 1990s London: the Groucho Club, the Oxo Tower, the Atlantic Bar and Grill. Between sips of ?200-a-bottle red wine and free cigarettes Gay Dad smirked at the joke, just as the Sex Pistols had two decades earlier. As a group of nearly professionals (a journalist, a publisher, a medical student and a barely qualified architect) we were only too happy to gorge on a free lunch.
We had to choose one of our pursuers, if only for the fun of it. Then the chase took a strange turn. Suddenly, labels began to pull out. Unbeknown to us, word had got out that the "Gay Dad" concept was a media prank. The first lot, believing we were an undercover documentary team out to expose the record industry, fled-literally. We were having a drink with them outside a pub in Soho when a helicopter began hovering overhead. Thinking it was a film crew, they bolted. The most laughable withdrawal came after a label learned that our singer, Cliff, had a prosthetic leg, fitted after a shark attack. It now seems emblematic, this bathos-a rock band with an elevated sense of itself playing kiss-chase with the arbiters of public taste. In the end we were lucky. A late bid came in from London Records and their A&R man, Mark Lewis, was someone who could take a meeting in a Pizza Express without blushing. He didn't need a ?5,000 stereo to listen to our demos; the back of my old Golf would do. We could do business with this man. In late August 1997, we signed a two album record deal worth nearly half a million pounds-probably the last big deal of the Britrock era.
When emi announced it was cutting staff, the A&R scouts suffered first. No longer able to justify their costs, new boss Alain Levy called for "changes in practice." Profits at the company fell by 40 per cent last year, from ?259.5m to ?153.3m, and overall recorded music sales were down by 11 per cent. Every major label is suffering the same effects of internet piracy and CD burning. Indeed, there is a widely accepted "CD theory" in the industry, which holds that the music business actually began to die 20 years ago and was artificially resuscitated when everyone had to replace vinyl with CD technology. But with the arrival of MP3 and other types of digital audio files, technology broke free of the music business, which still hasn't learned how to cope. Why should people pay to renew their collections a second time, when they can do it at home for free?
Meanwhile, the once brisk musical exchange between Britain and America has ground to a halt. This year, British acts failed to appear on the US singles chart for the first time since 1963. Many blame the short-termism of record labels, their unwillingness to invest in artists over a two or three album period. Moreover, some have made special blunders of their own. EMI notoriously signed Mariah Carey for a reported ?50m five-album deal, only to pay her off with ?19m after her album Glitter flopped. Company debts are now over ?1 billion.
EMI still owns the family silver of Britain's pop heritage (including the Rolling Stones, Queen, Radiohead, the Spice Girls) as well as Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys and others-a back catalogue which generates more revenue than its top 20 new albums of the year. In his drive to turn things around, Levy has jettisoned 400 underperforming artists, floated its high-street wing HMV on the stock market and purchased the fashionable independent label Mute Records for ?23m, home to multi-platinum artist Moby and an orchestra of ultra-hip but barely known hopefuls. EMI itself has missed out on the wave of international mergers that has seen labels like Island, Virgin, MCA, Atlantic and Epic wind up in the pocket of one corporation or another, while the really big players merged with global giants from other sectors (Time Warner with AOL, BMG with Bertelsmann, Universal with Vivendi), leaving just five companies responsible for 90 per cent of global music sales. The true sign of Levy's success would be if he could transform EMI into an attractive takeover prospect for, say, an internet service provider still looking for content. There are rumours that Microsoft could snap it up-back catalogue, British greats and all.
While independent labels have to be driven by a passion for music, the major labels have their strings pulled by smart-casual executives, half of them brought in from the financial sector where music means Sade and Van Morrison while screwing in front of a log fire in Zermatt. There was a time when the independent and major labels could both nurture musicians. But the majors have lost the knack and their A&R departments are closing down, which means that more than ever they have to rely on the independent sector to provide them with talent. In effect, independents have become out-of-house A&R departments for the majors. Indeed, current darlings of the music industry are the Sanctuary Group, whose profits have doubled over the past year. They deal in intellectual property rights (IPR). Through buying up back catalogues, they skip the financial risks associated with A&R and sign acts which have already attained "international appeal over a considerable amount of time"-in other words, old timers.
Any producer knows how much luck it takes to create a hit record. Trying to second guess public taste is a risky business, but it can be done, and the number of manufactured bands vying for airplay and rack space is testament to the industrial ingenuity or, depending on your taste, the musical cynicism at large in the production houses. Simon Cowell, an A&R man famous for his hugely successful television series Pop Idol, is currently working on a US version called American Idol. His sponsors, Fox TV, have invested heavily in his formula and, like the rest of the music industry, do not see how it can fail. We shall see.
Nevertheless, investing in formula is not the same as investing in talent. There is nothing more enjoyable than seeing a musician defy the majors and sell records after being damned to oblivion. Labels used to stick to a three album rule, where if an act hadn't made a sizeable impact after its third release they could be sure it was never going to. Now that figure is one. David Gray was signed by Virgin in 1994, who then promptly dropped him. His album, Flesh, is considered by Gray's diehard fans to be one of his best works, but the label left it to rot in the discount racks. Unperturbed, Gray toured the US extensively, supporting Radiohead and Dave Matthews and, through this exposure, caught the attention of US audiences, not least because his live shows were "awesome." The breakthrough for Gray came when he decided to avoid the majors altogether, recording an album in his London flat. White Ladder was sold first in Ireland on Gray's own label and then, after it went platinum, on Dave Matthews's. Gray's story ends with sales in the millions. The moral is simple. If success with a major does not come quickly, start your own label.
Before filtering through to the centre, history begins on the margins. Movements like punk or drum and bass were born there, unshackled by market constraints, able to freefall into a finished form. The music industry's skill used to lie in providing a corridor from the underground to the mainstream, disseminating art into the public domain. But timing is everything. Force the pace and you will be accused of hype. Go too slow and the artist will be lost. This skill is disappearing, replaced by the short term kill-sign a band, market it to death, clean up, move on.
Gay Dad suffered from this, pushed into the spotlight way before time. We were still in the tender position of recording our first album, Leisure Noise, when Radio 1 DJs Mark and Lard were sent our first single, "To Earth With Love." To our delight, they gave it a record of the week slot, meaning at least one play a day. This had executives at London Records squirming with excitement. They quickly planned a release schedule. Although we had the songs-a 15-track demo CD which in retrospect would have made a fine debut for any new band-we were struggling with the concept of finished product in the studio. Our producer Chris Hughes (of Adam and the Ants and Tears for Fears fame) had a reputation for "getting it right," which meant spending as long as we liked on anything we pleased (we spent a whole day and about ?2,000 putting one word into a verse, only to remove it the next morning). But with pressure building from outside in the form of interview requests and increasing airplay, London felt they had to react to the heat. They went ahead and released "To Earth With Love" in January 1999, supported by one of the biggest poster campaigns in the history of pop music. Our iconic "walking man" logo, appropriated from pedestrian street signs by graphic artist Peter Saville, was blown up with the words, "Gay Dad" stuck beneath it and plastered over every fly-poster site in Britain. As a head-turning exercise it couldn't have been more effective. The result was a top ten hit and an appearance on Top of the Pops.
To cope with this premature success, we developed a rather dubious conceit, from which came the daft but oft-quoted saying: "Gay Dad are the avatars of aheadness" and numerous other remarks which flew around like trapeze artists in the media circus which followed. At one point, according to The Face, Gay Dad were "bigger than Oasis," the "saviours of rock." Such proclamations began to be taken down in evidence against us. Rival theories about the Gay Dad phenomenon began to spread among music journalists.
A well placed follow-up single at this point would have shut them all up, but the band was still bogged down in the control room. Articles about hype started appearing in the Guardian and The Times, with our pictures running alongside them. The effect of this over-exposure was to inflate expectation of our next release. When it didn't arrive, or not until three months later, there was another backlash in the music press. One of the wittier attacks on the band described us as, "a chord played on the tombstone of rock." Gay Dad had failed to deliver, not in musical terms, but by failing to satisfy the public appetite quickly enough after promising too much. When our album was finally released (to critical acclaim) the public had lost interest, bored by the "meta-isation" of the Gay Dad concept. The record was a flop.
For a bunch of neophytes, we generated an inordinate amount of coverage. There was press from 15 different countries to get through. Reading about yourself can be a pleasurable experience, until the nausea sets in-a feeling that not only have these journalists got it wrong about you, but that they are all in cahoots and have spent months phoning and e-mailing each other to reach a unanimous verdict. Joke answers to journalists' questions spread like a virus across the world's music press. Our reply to, "So, where did you get the name from?"-asked in an interview in Amsterdam-was: "Eh, we bought it on an auction site dedicated to band names..." This turned up in local papers in England, France and Sweden. Obviously it was true after all.
Gay Dad, we learned, had three defining moments. The first was the name; the second was the hype (including the walking man poster); and the third was our admission that we had written a manifesto.
If there was anything that justified the jibe that Gay Dad was a publicity confection, it was the manifesto. An idea borrowed from Danish cinema's Dogme movement, ours suffered from similar hubris. But it was also an attempt to distance ourselves from the stock band beloved of the NME-lager drinking Scousers too pissed to play. We decided that a document laying out our artistic ambitions would go some way to representing what we were: an art-house rock band. Not surprisingly, the ruse was greeted with disdain. Our backgrounds didn't help. We were all middle-class graduates. Our singer's former life as a music journalist was seen as a privileged "way in" and this fuelled even more hype-hype about hype; column inches about column inches. Who was hyping whom? Gay Dad had given the media one of those opportunities to talk about its favourite subject; itself.
We stood accused of being manufactured-not by our record company, as would be the norm, but by ourselves. In 1999, we were nominated for the award of best newcomer by the readers of Q magazine. At the award ceremony, when Johnny Vaughan read out our nomination, laughter clattered out across the tables of the ballroom. There sat the cream of the industry, the managing directors, the heads of A&R, the publicists-the very people who, through persuasion and manipulation, make money by manufacturing boy bands and girl troupes. Here they were, laughing at us for doing the same. As the blood surged to my cheeks, it should have been clear that the game was up.
On 17th september, another ceremony will take place: the prestigious Mercury Music Prize, awarded to the most innovative British or Irish album of the year. Coveted for the publicity it generates, it virtually guarantees platinum status to the winner. Among the jazz, hip hop and classical acts competing for the ?20,000 prize is David Bowie, one of the last big Brits to straddle the Atlantic. Cynics have suggested he is on the list simply to raise the profile of an award whose reputation took a beating last year when Damon Albarn's Gorillaz withdrew, describing the prize as a "dead albatross." It is chaired by Simon Frith, a neo-Marxist film and media professor, whose aim is to revive interest in the British music business-a job which recent events in the US will make especially hard this year.
It was this April, after 38 years of continuous British presence, that the American Billboard Hot 100 chart finally grew tired of British music. Ever since 1963, when the Caravelles shot in with "You Don't Have to Be a Baby To Cry," in the month of Kennedy's assassination, British acts have had a continuous run in the US singles chart. In 1964, the Beatles occupied the top five places. Occupancy peaked in April 1984, with British acts filling 40 of the top 100 places. As recently as 1997, Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" broke all previous records to become the biggest selling single of all time, and over the years performers like Rod Stewart ("Tonight's The Night"), Sting ("Every Breath You Take") and even Vera Lynn ("Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart") have demonstrated that the Limey songwriter was a force to be reckoned with. Sadly, no longer. The Association of Independent Music reports that British album market share in the US fell from 32 per cent in 1986 to 0.2 per cent now.
With the rise of MTV and the internet, many believed that music culture would increasingly homogenise, and every home, be it in Boston, Bordeaux or Bath, would eventually enjoy the same mix of Slipknot, Celine Dion and Robbie Williams. But contrary to expectations, many countries, including Britain, have developed a brand of pop whose appeal is strictly local. Every year, busloads of British artists return bruised from US tours which, though sometimes successful in terms of audience figures, rarely lead to decent record sales. There are exceptions-Radiohead, Dido and Craig David have made inroads. Then there are the annual failures-Robbie Williams, Oasis and Travis-who, despite their British superstar status, cannot get arrested however many cigarettes they smoke in Californian bars. Some say it is a subtler aesthetic that limits us, that Americans prefer fatter sounds, a warmth and beefiness that few British bands supply. Moreover, since the early 1980s, when acts like Grandmaster Flash and the Sugarhill Gang emerged, there has been rap. When, in 1986, Run DMC topped the charts with "Walk This Way," it proved once again that black music, often politically motivated, could attract a big white audience. The US taste for rap and, now, nu-metal has left little room for the rather parochial sounding bands Britain has produced of late. Ninety two per cent of current recorded music sales in the US are of domestic artists.
Pleasing America has long required reinventing and repackaging its own music. From R&B and the Rolling Stones to disco and the rave generation, American music has always influenced the best British songwriters. But this influence dwindled in the 1990s, with Britpop. Its nostalgia and local songlines failed to touch American sensibilities. The metal, grunge and hip hop streaming over the Atlantic did not inspire Britain's own songwriters and so, naturally, they turned to national models.
Future British success in America requires, among other things, the adoption of universal themes which a US audience might appreciate-a verse, a chorus, a middle eight. Yet British dance music, with roots in American disco and Detroit techno, has been heading in a different direction. Despite producing some of the most innovative musical forms for years, such as drum and bass and UK garage, it does not provide the accompanying lyrics. The repetitive slogans of clubland ("get yourself together," "shine on tonight") are not something American kids get excited by.
Gay Dad's US experience was probably very similar to that of many other British bands-hugely enjoyable and a dismal failure. In Europe, promotion is geared towards interviews, radio sessions and television appearances. In America, much of it is geared towards the industry. The trouble with Gay Dad, as with many other British bands, was our inability to play the promotional game. When the tour bus juddered into town and we were told that we had to attend a dinner with 15 area managers from the retail sector, we would sink into despondency and spend the dinner moodily pushing cold pizza around our plates.
In the US, the sales staff are part of the in-crowd, and if you don't pay your dues your CD ends up being shoved behind thousands of other albums in the darkest corner of the store. The defining moment for Gay Dad in this respect came when 20-odd retailers and other industry people arrived to watch us play a gig in San Francisco. Twenty minutes before showtime, our American representative appeared in the dressing room and sheepishly asked us to re-order our set list. He wanted us to move our last song, which at that time was being added to radio station playlists, to the middle of the set, explaining that many of the retailers in the audience wanted to leave the venue early so they could get an early night. Gay Dad told him that if the retailers wanted an early night they could fuck off to bed now. We did not move the song. The retailers left without hearing us play it. Needless to say, Gay Dad did not crack America.
Music sales in Britain recently hit an all time high, due in part to the success of Pop Idol. But there are few signs that British music is returning to form. At the time of writing, less than half of all acts in the top 75 album charts are British and like football and film, British pop stars are being replaced by foreign ones. Does this represent an erosion of British talent or the expansion of a global market? Probably both. But even in the independent sector a new trend has emerged which is frustrating new British bands. Instead of scouring the pubs of London, Manchester and Glasgow, as they did in the Britpop period, the independent labels have taken to the cleaner sidewalks of New York and Austin in the hunt for signings. With the success of the much vaunted Strokes and White Stripes in Britain, they are keen to capitalise on the fashion for a trashy American sound. Label bosses view American acts as more professional than their British counterparts, as well as musically superior. They have more opportunity to tour extensively-10,000 miles of venues in a vibrant US live scene. Here the longest tour is about three weeks and, with many pubs having replaced their PA systems with widescreen televisions, there are fewer and fewer venues for young bands to use.
For the past two years, the music press has devoted much of its column space not to British hopefuls but to new US bands, even when they're not American. The latest are the Vines, an Australian outfit based in LA and virtually unknown in the US. A scene has emerged, one nostalgic for 1970s New York punk-of black leather, Max's Kansas City, Lou Reed and the Ramones. In effect, it means that the British rock underground is now American, but not one that America knows or particularly cares about.
So much for Britain; what about the world? The day music became digital, a strange transubstantiation occurred in the way we create, perceive and distribute music. Computer generated sound exists outside of time. Manifested as zeros and ones, randomly accessible from any angle and at any point, it represents the Platonic ideal in music. Any blemishes can be removed and restructuring takes just a moment. Though perfect in its form, it often lacks the tension essential to music of feeling. Even records made using real musicians can fall short, as producers take the "best bit" of a performance and repeat it throughout the song. Acts like Moby, Air and the Chemical Brothers know this and spend months trawling through vintage dance, funk and disco records in search of killer rhythms and quirky melodies to sample. Often a lifted piano melody or a capella riff sent through a bank of effects will provide the initial crystal around which a new composition can grow. (Massive Attack were famous for this method.) This salvaging of the past both pays homage to great performers and gives a crank of authenticity to otherwise soulless music.
Meanwhile, the industry struggles to keep up with the internet age. The launch of two cross-corporate websites earlier this year, MusicNet and Pressplay, were the major labels' attempt to gain a foothold in the growing market for downloadable songs. At the end of last year, there were an estimated 150,000 subscribers to paid download services, and projections for five years' time put those figures at 10m. But with proliferation of illegal file swapping and CD burning, these ventures will struggle to make an impact. Napster may have been silenced, but more sophisticated names have appeared and trying to close down every illegal MP3 site is like raiding speakeasys in Chicago. Most alarming are the new peer-to-peer networks, like Morpheus and Gnutella, which do not rely on central servers. The system depends on individual PCs to keep the network alive. But prosecuting a 19-year-old Jeff Buckley fan with illegal files on his desktop will not help the industry's image. Issuing copy-protected CDs may help, and most companies will be doing this by next year, but once something exists in the digital domain its tendency to travel is not easily tempered.
And now we have Freenet to look forward to. Freenet, its inventors believe, will kill censorship for good. It will enable users to pass information anonymously and without fear of detection. An arm of Freenet called Espra, dedicated to the transfer of media and MP3 files, is striking terror into the music industry. It will operate what it calls a "gift economy."
I have just come away from from watching the latest edition of Top of the Pops and realise that the only thing which has changed about the programme in the last 20 years is me. As usual, there was something for everyone-a boy band (Blue), a rock band (Travis), a mediocre band with a lucky hit (the Bluetones), an innovative dance act (Shy FX), the all important comedy record (Ali G) and a bunch of jumped up punks from across the Atlantic (Sum 41). Much of what was on offer seemed like pastiche. Yet, somehow, watching it was still exciting, and proved the point that pop will never die, as long as it has a producer like Chris Cowey to apply its make-up.
As one of the privileged many to have appeared on Top of the Pops, my experience was marred by two things. Firstly, the irksome although well meaning question, "is it a dream come true to appear on Top of the Pops?" which those working on the set seem to ask everyone. Secondly, the 12 hour wait between sound check and performance, two of which were spent in the insufferable "green room," where performers twiddle their thumbs before going on the show. This is the BBC's attempt at a living hall of fame, a vast apartment of colour in which stars can mingle, exchange gossip or simply ignore one another, demonstrating that they are far too important to be there at all. Meanwhile, smiling floor managers and assistant producers strut in and out like the heavenly foot soldiers of entertainment that they are. It is the kind of place that only pop could have dreamt up, like Warhol's Factory or one of Elton John's parties.
When so much fame is concentrated in so small an area a certain social dynamic is set in motion. Everyone's status is reduced from the magnified levels in the outside world, where the division between pop star and public is extreme, to more ordinary proportions, similar to those found in a school common room full of attention-seeking adolescents. Such self-important children are still at large in the music business, and their games continue. But then pop without the games, without the vanity, the fashion, the lip service, the slights, the parties, the drugs and the money, wouldn't be pop at all, just a sonic desert of digitised melody endlessly selling product.
Gay Dad's own appearance on Top of the Pops was not without its oddities. A bottle of champagne was stolen from our dressing room (by Jarvis Cocker, we were told) and, unhappy with his performance, our frontman had a fight with himself, demanding a second run-through, which when given, turned out to be worse than the first one. Still, music itself often plays just a walk-on part in a world of pop which, to survive, has to feed off its own scandals. Maybe if Asher D from So Solid Crew hadn't gone to jail for possessing a handgun, if EMI hadn't paid off Mariah Carey for ?19m, if Thom Yorke hadn't got a dodgy eye, if Gay Dad hadn't outed the "walking man" and written a manifesto about it, then maybe fewer stories would have been published and fewer albums would have been sold. Much of pop's appeal comes from its carnivalesque roots. So why, after all, fret about the state of an industry fabricated by freebooters and pirates, gangsters and rappers, money-driven executives and their A&R men, or even egocentric frontmen and their diffident drummers. Long live the scandal, I say, and long live pop. But so long from me.
