A Conversation With Barry Hogan, All Tomorrow’s Parties founder

In late 2009, my girlfriend and I went to England for three weeks. All Tomorrow’s Parties was the main reason. It’s an independently-operated festival that celebrated its 10th anniversary with a weekend-long concert series held at Butlins holiday camp, in the town of Minehead near England’s west coast. We stayed on-site for 10 days all up - including the Nightmare Before Christmas weekend curated by My Bloody Valentine, the ‘in between days‘ series of weeknight shows, and the 10 Years Of ATP weekend - and saw a ridiculous amount of good music. Which was the intended outcome.

While on-site, I interviewed ATP founder Barry Hogan [pictured right] for a Rolling Stone story. [I also reviewed Dirty Three playing 'Horse Stories' to around 100 people, for Mess+Noise.] Late on the Sunday night of the 10 Years event - after sacrificing my barrier spot for The Mars Volta - we sat down in the production office to discuss the festival’s history and his motivations for creating what has become an internationally successful event.

Andrew: Barry, broadly speaking, what do you think has contributed to ATP’s success as a festival?

Barry: When ATP started 10 years ago, there weren’t any alternative festivals. It was only big corporate festivals and I think a lot of people who are into bands like Low, Will Oldham, and so on, the only place you could see them was at Reading Festival and that sort of thing, and they’d be kind of sandwiched in with piles of shit like Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and fuckin’ Chumbawumba. It just felt like you paid whatever it was at the time, £80-90 to go for the day, but you’d have to wait all day to see something [worthwhile].

I just thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could design something where you could have constant bands, all day long, you’re wanting to go and see things, like killing yourself that you’re missing something because something else is on that the same time,” and just do it in a more intimate environment. Glastonbury, for example, was one of the reasons why we wanted to hold it here in the [Butlins] holiday camp, because of the conditions there. I think the toilets in Guantanamo Bay are probably healthier than there. Glastonbury is an abomination. It’s like the way it’s designed is for too many people in too small a space, and I thought, “this isn’t fun”. But here, people have got their own apartments, their own space. Going back to your question; what’s contributed to it, is we’ve designed it so we want to treat people like we want to be treated, and we want people to be into really good music, have a good time, enjoy themselves, and feel like they got value for money.

I feel that because we’ve been true to the concept of keeping it sponsorship-free, and also keeping the idea of the curator and being sort of focused on that, I think that’s definitely one of the reasons why it’s remained as strong as it has over the years. We’ve just got a loyal fan base that continually comes back. It’s good.

Is it difficult to stay true to the concept, to keep focused?

It is if the curator doesn’t go mental with trying to suggest stupid bands. The thing is; it’s hard; it gets harder as you go on, to kind of get curators to make you kind of fresh each time. I think because it’s a different curator each time, in a way, it’s a different person’s interpretation of a mixtape. If you get similar artists doing it, then you’re going to get the same sort of bands. We’re always striving to look for new and different ways to present it, to get different curators. It does get harder as you go on, but we’ve been pretty fortunate to be able to present some great things over the last 10 years.

Did you expect to reach your 10th birthday?

No. I’ve been waiting for the call to get a real job for quite a while now. When we did Bowlie Weekender with Belle & Sebastian [in 1999], they called it the first annual Bowlie Weekender and the idea was to do it year in, and year out. I don’t know why but they felt they wanted to keep the event unique and I said with their blessing, could I continue it and rename it, All Tomorrow’s Parties. I never thought it would go this long.

I think we’ve been fortunate that it is still strong and people still want to go to it, but I think we spend so much time laboring over things like artwork design, the programs to present, and the lineup and where bands play. We’re conscious of what the fans want, as well. We’re trying to make people happy so that they keep coming back. So far, I think we’re doing a good job.

I saw in an interview you said, “The way forward for festivals is to keep it boutique.”

Yeah, totally. You get some festivals like Bestival and they have the audacity to call themselves boutique when they started at 10,000 [capacity]. That’s not boutique for starters, and also I don’t understand why Rob Da Bank puts “Curated by” on each event. If it’s the same person doing it, surely, isn’t he the festival booker and that’s his job? You don’t need to wear a badge and put it on the top of the poster.

You’re talking about British festivals here, which I’m not too familiar with…

Oh, sorry – okay. Talking about boutique festivals, there’s one here called Bestival. It’s run by a [BBC] Radio 1 DJ called Rob Da Bank. The thing is, a lot of these festivals start at 3,000-4,000 capacity and then they start expanding. Because it’s only one event, they get bigger and bigger. Most of them have gone from 5,000 up to 45,000 or 50,000. It loses its intimacy and it loses track of where it started and why it started.

I think with us, it’s that we are keeping it sort of personal to people. It’s not overcrowded and you can walk around between stages and see lots of really great bands. I’d rather do more ATPs and keep it small, than do one big one and do it once a year because I just feel like it will lose its charm.

So the events here at Butlins are capped?

Yeah, the place only holds just over 6,000 so we sell 5,500 and the rest is made up of guests and production. It’s capped because that’s the legal capacity.

I see. As I mentioned earlier, I also went to the Mount Buller event [the first Australian ATP event, curated by Nick Cave (pictured left) & The Bad Seeds].

Barry: That was really great. There was some view up there, wasn’t it?

Yeah. And I went to the Riverstage one in Brisbane, which is where I live, as well as one of the Brisbane Powerhouse shows.

Okay. Those were good events, Buller especially. In hindsight I think I would love to have just done Buller. Those other events that we did… They were All Tomorrow’s Parties in the mindset but they weren’t like the All Tomorrow’s Parties because it wasn’t like a residential thing where people stayed, hanging out like they did at Buller. They were good, but I think it was a bit misrepresented in a way.

Now that you mention it, it’s quite odd that you did those Sydney and Brisbane events because like you mentioned, there was no accommodation. Do you put on many of those here in Britain?

No, to be honest; we’ve talked about doing a sister event called ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, which is the b-side to The Velvet Undergrounds single ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’. The idea is that it’s like a sister event to ATP. It has the concept of the curator and stuff, but it doesn’t have the holiday camp. The idea of it is that it’s not trying to compete with ATP, it’s kind of designed for people to see great music but at a lower price because they don’t have to pay for their accommodation. There are a lot of people that would love to come to this but can’t necessarily afford it. It’s not that we’re too expensive; we’re providing value for money, but it’s a rising cost because Butlins is not a cheap place to hire.

I can imagine. As well as the festival aspect of ATP, it’s also a label. Again, what factors do you think have contributed to the success of ATP as a brand?

Someone said to me the other day, “oh, Fuck Buttons must be doing really well because the festival is doing well”. It’s not like that. There are a lot of records that we put out, and they’re releases that don’t necessarily sell a great deal. They’re great records, but the festival helps in the way that we can showcase the bands as another outlet for people to discover them. But bands like Fuck Buttons have done really well because they’ve made great records. Whether it’s on ATP or another label, I don’t think it makes any difference.

We’ve got a brand, not in the sense of Coca Cola or McDonalds, but I think a kind of brand of quality. I wanted it to be where you used to buy Sub Pop singles and you didn’t know some of the bands but you bought them because – I’m not saying you, here - but when Sub Pop was in its Nirvana and Mudhoney heyday - not that it doesn’t put great records out now - but there was a period when Sub Pop was releasing something you’d buy it because it’s like “Fuck, it’s on Sub Pop.”

Or Def Jam [Recordings] There were all those great early hip hop records like LL Cool J and Public Enemy, and Beastie Boys, and Run DMC. You knew that Def Jam and Sub Pop put out great things so you kind of bought into that. I feel like ATP is getting a bit like that in a way that people are sort of willing to take a chance because they know we’re not going to put out Coldplay or Miley Cyrus records.

You like ripping on Coldplay.

There are worse bands than Coldplay. [laughs] They’ve got a couple of good songs. I don’t think they’re for me.

Neither me. An aspect of the festival that I really liked, and I’m sure you do too, is the discovery aspect. As you say, it’s associated with quality. You walk into a room and at least respect a band, if not find it really damn good and want to go and buy all their shit.

Yeah. The reason we say it’s like a mix tape is you know, if you’ve got a friend and - I don’t know if you’ve ever had friends who give you mixtapes - but you put it on and you’re like, “Jesus, what’s this? This is great.” You have to look up the track list and you go, “This is amazing” but because you’re here at the festival and you’ve bought your ticket for the weekend, you can go in and out of rooms; there’s going to be something on you’ve never heard of, or you’ve been curious to know what it’s about.

It forces you to go and check stuff out, and it opens you up to loads of stuff. I think bands like Deerhoof, their success in Europe has benefited from playing at ATP. They said this themselves; they’ve been playing at an event and people have never heard of them before just a few years ago, and then they’ll see them and go, “My God, they’re great.” They’ll want to keep going back and seeing them. They’ve discovered it in that mixtape fashion, where it’s like a pleasant surprise.

I saw in an interview that you mentioned Kevin Shields [of My Bloody Valentine, pictured right] is fond of ATP because you kind of sidestep the whole music industry game.

Kevin’s been very supportive of us, and I think it would be fair to say we’ve done things in a different way. It’s good having a curator because it means we have to pick the bands the curator wants instead of agents, magazines, and labels all going, “You must put this band on because they’re the hot new thing”. It bypasses all that and we’ve just done things on our own terms.

To have a festival with no sponsorship, there is another promoter who asked me about doing an event in a holiday camp, and he said, “How the fuck do you do it without sponsorship?” We know how to do it because we’ve fine-tuned it over the years. We know how much it costs, how much we spend on bands, and it does make money but probably not the sort of money that some of the people out there think it does. Anything we have done goes back into the business.

I just feel like I want to keep doing this sort of thing until we lose interest in it. When we do lose interest, I think that’s the time to stop and end it on a high rather than fizzle out. The music industry is changing constantly, and I think it would be fair to say we never really played the games that a lot of people do. I’m not into that, so we just do our own thing, really. I guess we have sidestepped a lot of it, which is good.

You began as a promoter at Dingwalls [in Camden], and you got tired of having to play the game. Did you find it difficult to step outside of that and say, “Fuck it, I’ll do my own thing”?

Yeah, it was really hard because in those days, if a band like Tortoise came along, it was once every 6 months or something and it was a real big deal. Nowadays, if you open up Time Out in London or anything else, it’s like there are 100 bands on par with Tortoise that are playing constantly. There wasn’t really an outlet for that type of music I wanted to work with.

I found it was really hard because you would take punts on shows and the attendance would be down. You’d lose money and then it would be ages before another band that was worth doing comes through. It was difficult and also, it was tempting to try and go outside of that and start playing the game, but we rode out the rough times and kept it true to the original thing.

I’m supposing a big part of that is having the connections you made through ATP, such as Sonic Youth and the credibility that having guys like that playing in your festival lends you as a promoter.

That’s definitely helped, but the thing with us is that the roster of bands that we do outside of the festival are all bands that we actually like. I’ve been offered some bands that are huge and I’m like “I can’t do that.” I got begged to do Snow Patrol in 2003, and I remember their agent at the time was like, “I really want you to do it. They’re going to be great. They’re going to be massive.” I was like, “There is no way they’re going to be massive,” but the thing is; I didn’t know they changed their sound from sounding like Sebadoh to Coldplay. I think it’s good that we haven’t sold out in that way.

How do you go about goal setting for ATP? When you began, did you imagine 5 years down the track, 10 years down the track?

No, I have to be honest with you; every time I do the next one, I’m thinking about how it has to be better than the last one. We have to finally think of a curator that no one else is going for, and I want each one to be better than the last one. Some of them are fantastic and some aren’t as good as the others and it can be a bit disappointing, but I think we’re always striving.

Someone said to me today, “Do you think you’ll get to 20 years?” I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe.” I don’t know if I can think that far ahead, but as I said to you; I want to keep doing this as long as it’s still fresh and exciting, and the minute it stops being that, that’s the time to pull the plug.

When’s the next Australian ATP event planned?

That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that. To be honest with you; I really loved the Mt. Buller event [pictured left]. It was really special, really great. The lineup that was up there and that setting, especially that second stage where you could see all the mountains behind it, through the stage. That was amazing, but it was just the spirit of people that were up there because I think a lot of people have gone to things like Big Day Out and Homebake and that. Those things are good for what they’re designed for. They seem like a breath of fresh air for a lot of people. That’s how ATP was when it started in England 10 years ago. People were like, “Fuck, great, we can go see 20 bands all at one weekend instead of having to wait all day for someone to come on at Reading, or something like that.”

ATP Australia – would it happen again? Yeah, we’d like to think so. We’re taking a step back because we’ve just got some venue issues and stuff. Once we resolve them we’d definitely like to pursue Buller again if we could.

Everyone I spoke to at Buller was just having a great time. Everything I read about it afterwards was extremely positive. Do you ever receive bad reports about ATP?

Yeah, for example I know some people came last weekend. We had My Bloody Valentine curating. Some people thought it was great but some felt the people there, the atmosphere wasn’t like it was at this one. I think each one changes by the crowd. There seemed to be quite a lot of middle-aged men last weekend, but there are lots of young girls at this one, which is always definitely more encouraging.

We do get some people who don’t think it’s – they’re not into it, but I think ATP – it’s what you make of it as well. You can be into the media but you’ve got to go there with a right mindset. You have to go there and want to enjoy yourself and let go and jump away from your job for 3 days and just embrace all the music and film, and the art, and hanging out with friends. It can be a really great thing to go to. Someone said to me, “Would you go to it yourself if you weren’t putting it on?” I’m like, “Yeah, I probably would.”

Probably?

Yeah, well I would, of course I would. I would. Sorry!

You mentioned events like Glastonbury and Reading and so forth, when comparing ATP. When was the last time you went to Reading and Glastonbury? Do you ever go to those events just to remind yourself?

I don’t compare ourselves. I use that as a reason why I started this. I went to Glastonbury in 2002. I will never go back to that thing. I just don’t understand how people could enjoy being there with too many people, too short of a space of time, and I’ve seen people – we were talking to Keith Cameron just now from Mojo. He was saying he saw someone get their head kicked in, in broad daylight there. There is a horrible vibe there, really.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to those; too busy running this. That was the only thing you could go to if you wanted to go see some of the bands. If the Pixies were over [playing shows], if you couldn’t see them in shows you went and saw them in Reading or Glastonbury and it was kind of like that was where you could see some of the rare bands you wanted to check out. It was more a case of using that as an example of where you would see that music and why we started this.

You mentioned that self control is important when booking bands, or when the curator asks to book bands. I’m taking it since the capacity is capped here, so is the budget for booking bands?

Yeah.

Is it difficult to manage?

If you gave me a wish list and you put AC/DC, Leonard Cohen, and Motorhead on there, then if you took one of those bands, it would just wipe out the budget. You need to kind of tailor the lineup to the size of the event. It’s always good to have a couple of big names and stuff, but I think the real beauty of ATP is having all those kind of midrange bands, the sort of ones that would fill up Center Stage and have – it’s better to have more of those midrange than all big hitters.

There have been a couple of events where we’ve had some really big names, and then it’s all been small bands, and it hasn’t felt balanced. You get lots of people at one show and then it’s kind of half empty at other ones. With the curators, I have to kind of say as much as we’d love to have Neil Young, as much as we’d love to have Bob Dylan, it’s probably unrealistic that we could afford it. We just kind of need to guide them, really. I try to give everyone as much freedom as possible. I’m just hoping no one puts Blur on their list. [laughs]

Is your favourite ATP still the Dirty Three-curated one?

Yes, definitely.

Do you thank [Dirty Three frontman, pictured right] Warren Ellis often for that?

All the time. He’s just been so amazing to work with over the years, so supportive. There are other curators as well. There are so many of them I think of that was as well, but their whole take on it and the way they approached it and the actual weekend itself was just magical; it really was. I just was walking around and everyone was having the time of their life. I also thought that ATP that Nick Cave did in Mt. Buller was one of my favorite ones as well. Definitely, that was a highlight.

This one might be difficult to answer, but when you think of the average ATP fan or concertgoer, what image do you have in mind?

Someone who is into music, who probably is the sort of person that when they buy records, they want to know where the band recorded it, what studio, and stuff like that. Someone said to me, “record nerd” but I think it’s people who actually give a shit about music. They don’t buy their CDs or vinyl in supermarkets, which seems to be one of the few places you can buy music these days like that. Most of the record shops are closing.

So you’d say it’s for the more discerning music enthusiast?

Definitely. It’s for people who went to see bands that blew their mind and wanted to even start a band or get into music, where music is really special to them and they listen to it all the time, checking out new stuff and they’ve got memories of old things. I think ATP appeals to them because it crosses a lot of those things, really.

Do you try to avoid associating ATP with indie rock, in particular?

I guess I’m an indie kid at heart. I guess we’ve been described as an indie festival, but indie is a bit of a weird term these days. You get some people who are on indie labels but they have the mindset of a corporate sort of thing. We have had a lot of indie guitar stuff over the course of time, but the curators we pick, it’s the music they’re into. Each one is different.

For example, that Mike Patton one we did with The Melvins, that was pretty eclectic because it had Taraf de Haidouks and then you had White Noise and Stockhausen and those sort of things, but you also had Mastodon and The Melvins. It was very different. I guess most of the best music around is coming from indie labels. That’s why we focus on it really, but we get criticized for having too many American bands. Someone said that but I just think a lot of the bands that come right out of England aren’t very good. There are some good ones, but on the whole, I think a lot of the best stuff around has been coming out of the States for a while.

What’s your favorite ATP festival moment, ever, stepping outside of the office and just walking around, watching the bands?

There are way too many to remember…

I know you’re a big fan of Lightning Bolt [pictured left].

I remember the first time that Lightning Bolt came and played ATP. There were a lot of people that didn’t know who they were and then when they played on the floor and the actual great thing was seeing the reaction on peoples’ faces. They were like, “What the fuck is this?” That was really good. There are so many.

I think some of the best things I’ve seen, music wise, is Sleep performed ‘Holy Mountain’ earlier this year. The Boredoms did ‘Boardrum’ in New York. That’s some of the best things I’ve ever seen at the festival but I think highlights for me are things like Slint, because ‘Spiderland’ is probably one of my favorite records of all time. Getting to see them perform that live was… I had to move a few mountains to get those guys back together.

I was saying to David Pajo today that when I met them, Slint had never been in a room together, the 4 of them, for 13 years. I’m a huge Slint fan and I said to them – we went to Britt [Walford]’s house for this meeting. I was so excited I was there and I said to them, “Can I go to the toilet?” They were like, “Yeah” and I was in there – I didn’t actually need to go to the toilet. I was in behind the toilet door going like this, “Yes!!!” just freaking out. I told David today and he’s like, “Really?” and I’m like “Yeah!” [laughs]

It meant the world to me. As I’ve said to some people, it’s like – the way [music magazine] Mojo think about The Beatles, I think about Slint. It was really special to see that and to see them perform because they were someone I always wanted to see and never thought I would because they weren’t together. That always sticks in my mind as a real special thing. I feel proud that we’ve done them, really.

The same kind of thing with My Bloody Valentine, too. You were kind of one of the forces behind them getting back together.

Yeah, they hadn’t been together for 16 years and the thing is; a lot of people have made them offers over the years, but it’s like trying to lift an old truck from a swamp, trying to get it back into motion. It was possible but it needed help. I think we were able to present them the setup they needed to do it. Kevin was really kind to trust us to do that. We did it. The shows were fantastic and it worked really well.

I just think we look at things in a different way. Some people promote like, “You’ll make this much money,” but you need to sort of show the artist what they’re going to get from it, not just the money. It’s got to be the actual performance and what benefit they get from it too. I think that’s important and that gets overlooked by some people. That’s probably why we’ve got to work with so many great artists over the years because of our attention to detail. We put care into it.

I saw them all three nights, last weekend. I’m so glad I did. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen.

Had you seen them before?

No. It was cool to see ‘You Made Me Realise‘ three times. [Notably, because the band end the song with a 15ish minute noise jam known as the 'holocaust section'. It's fucking intense.]

Did you have ear plugs in?

Of course.

I was going to say when the first show they did for us was a warm-up show at the ICA. I don’t know how they felt about the show. I don’t think they were too into it, but the first time seeing those tracks being played live for a long time was like, “Whoa, this is going to be a joke.” When they went into a bigger room like the Round House and had the full PA, it was like a jet plane taking off.

Last question - what’s next for ATP? How do you go about planning for the next couple of years?

I’m in the process, I’m still booking Pavement, which is next year, and [The Simpsons creator] Matt Groening in May. Then I’m pursuing two curators for Christmas next year. I can’t say who they are just yet, but once I get them in place I’ve kind of got an idea of – we’ve had at least talks and I’ve got an idea of who they would want. I think it will surprise people because if both of them come off it will be things that people won’t be expecting. Again, we want to make is special because it’s the 10th year and we want to do the year-long celebrations and stuff.

I just thought of another question. You had the ATP film for the 10th anniversary, which I saw in my chalet the other day. Any plans for a book?

There has been talk of it. We were talking about maybe doing a kind of book, incorporating the artwork and stuff. Yeah, we’ve been approached by people to do it, so you never know… “You bought the t-shirt, you watched the film, now read the book!”

I’m sure there’s a market for it. ATP fans are pretty hardcore.

They are, but the thing is they’re not stupid. I couldn’t just put on a crap lineup because then people won’t come. It needs to be quality and people actually sit on the fence saying, “I’m thinking of going to this one but if they announce a couple of more bands” and then they do, but my favorite thing is watching kids on message boards, and I’ll be looking at various things because it’s always good to see what people are up to or saying. They’re always like, “Why the fuck did they get them to curate? They’re going to pick a load of shit!” and I remember when they did that with Mars Volta and Explosions In The Sky and then the same people 6 months later were going, “This is the best lineup ever. I’m totally going.” During all this time it was like, have patience. You need to see it unravel itself and I think it’s kind of good doing that because we know what’s coming and seeing the reaction from people is good.

Do you also monitor the feedback and attendee reviews afterwards?

We do, we take things on board. If someone says I had a really shit time in this venue because of something like the lights might be wrong or the PA was in the wrong place, we don’t ignore that sort of thing. We take it on board and try and make each one better than the last one, like a new and improved formula each time we do it.

There are a few people here that haven’t been here since 2007 and the Pavilion Stage, which is the big room, we didn’t have those drapes down the side, and we didn’t have the star cloth. They make a massive difference to that room. We also changed the PA in the Center Stage where you were for My Bloody Valentine. Just lighting configurations and things like that but it’s all – we use feedback and we exploit it and make put it to use in a beneficial sense so that each time someone comes back they go, “Oh, this is fixed up.”

Better and better.

Yeah, if you rest on your laurels and go, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this great thing now and got the curator in, that’s it. You’ll fucking like it or lump it” then it won’t last another 10 years. Whether I’m still doing it in 10 years is another thing but I only want to keep doing it until I lose the fire inside me that started it. There are times when it goes out, but this weekend has definitely been a great one for us, just so many bands – they’re all old curators and people who have recorded for us, but also friends. Every time you walk around it’s like, “Hey, how are you doing?” The spirit here has been really good.

You went to last weekend. I didn’t feel that same atmosphere last weekend as I did at this one. Again, it’s like a different mix tape and a different interpretation. It was quite abrasive last weekend, the music and stuff. It was all that heavy guitar stuff. It was good, and it worked really well, but I think this one seemed to be a bit more eclectic.

Thanks for your time, Barry.

This interview was conducted for a story on behalf of Rolling Stone Australia, pictured left. Read that story here.

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A Conversation With Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon, Creative Directors of Sony Music London

This is the full transcript of the December 2009 conversation I had with Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon, Creative Directors of Sony Music London, in their Kensington office. I interviewed them on behalf of The Music Network; you can read the published story here. [Note: if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, the video embeds might not work. I don't know why. Click through and view it on my blog.]

Andrew: The main reason I’m aware of your work is because of the few campaigns you’ve been behind in the last year, like AC/DC, Kasabian, Editors, and Calvin Harris. Those are the ones I’m aware of, but before we go into those, I thought I’d ask you how you got into the music industry, and why.

Steve [pictured right]: The reason I got into the music industry is because I’ve always loved music. From my early twenties, what I wanted was to get into the business side of it. Then I kind of got into the whole creative thing. I went to work at an indie label after graduating from uni, called Kitchenware Records, which is based up in Newcastle. They’re sort of big old indie from the ‘80s. I had lots of success in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, and then they sort of reformed the label. It was a new entity in 2003.

I went to work for them in 2004 at the exact same time they signed a band called Editors, which you know of. I got interested in their situation of not having any money to do anything with, so it was like I was given a band to work with and then I’d have to do the artwork, make a music video, do stuff online, make websites, and all that sorts of stuff with zero pounds to work with, which is quite good. I might have spent a few years just sort of honing all these skills that crossed a wide range of areas, from web programming to production and film, so it all kind of came in handy when I came to Sony about two and a half years ago, and then Phil came in. They brought us in separately but then we got put together as a creative team and that’s it.

Phil [pictured below left]: I’ve basically spent the last ten years doing half my work in the music industry and half in advertising, in sort of digital agencies. I started off doing digital work around TV and then interactive TV. Then the dot-com crash happened and there weren’t any jobs, so I came to London. I got heavily into the club scene at the time, and met some people that were running nights and things like that. I ended up getting an office in an online radio station, which is in the Truman Brewery, and basically electronic artists were coming in to do shows and DJ on the station. I just ended up getting freelance work through that and I worked for years for an outfit called Sancho Panza, who are most famous for Notting Hill Carnival, for doing a big stage at Notting Hill Carnival. They also did warehouse parties and things like that.

From there I got offered a job at a record label, Sanctuary Records, which is now part of Universal. I started doing web stuff for them and after about three years there I got kind of fed up with the record industry as it was then and went back to advertising stuff. I worked at a digital ad agency and then a larger advertising group after that.

About two years ago I decided it was a good time to go back to music. Sony came knocking so I came and met Steve and decided I could probably work with him, and that’s that. We kind of kicked it off from there, essentially.

Is Creative Director a very common role within labels? I’ve not really heard of it before.

Steve: Not particularly. We’re quite unique in what we do, with regard to the type of work that we do in the music industry, I guess. Essentially we run almost a boutique agency in-house and our clients are with various labels within the Sony umbrella. I don’t think the other labels do that.

What it means is we essentially take on various groups from the big labels in here, which are Epic, Columbia, RCA, Syco, which is Simon Cowell’s label, and then some smaller labels, as well – Jive, and Deconstruction. What we do is get a brief of a band that Sony Music want to promote this band or this artist, then we come up with the creative and sort of service them as our clients.

Phil: We sort of created the advertising creative time type model inside of the record label, which is kind of unique. There really isn’t anyone else doing that. The reason we can do it is because we’ve spent years gaining these skills of design, programming, video production, music skills in Steve’s case as well. We don’t do tons and tons of that stuff, hands on, but if we have to we can. When we’re commissioning the work we know what to go and get. It makes it easier for us to run a complex project because we’ve done it all in the past and we know how to do it, essentially.

Steve: A lot of that stuff gets really complex at times. It’s quite weird; the sort of stuff we do is often experimental. You’re kind of always sitting on the edge; “is this going to work or not? Am I going to waste loads of money?”

Phil: We’re always sticking our necks out, I guess, and one of the reasons we can do that is because what we do is very cost effective. It’s not as expensive as traditional advertising so it means we can do things that reach more people without spending as much money. That gives us a little bit of freedom to experiment and do more exciting things. To be honest, it generally goes fairly well, but if you do make mistakes it’s not the end of the world because you’re only talking about relatively small amounts of money.

Steve: Yeah, we haven’t had any that haven’t worked out, yet.

Phil: We presented all our work at a creative review conference, last week. A lot of questions we had from the audience were all about “This seems very risky. How could I sell this to the client if I was at an agency?” On the one hand our answer was you need the experience to be able to pull stuff like this off. If you don’t have the experience it will go wrong. The other thing is a lot of the stuff we do is designed to be shared. We don’t buy media. We don’t pay for advertising space, and in a way, as long as you’re doing something with good intentions, the worst thing that’s going to happen is it’s going to languish in the corner of the Internet somewhere and no one is going to see it. It’s not like putting a really inappropriate advertising campaign across London on billboards or whatever. It’s a totally different proposition. That allows us to take a few more risks, I guess.

Steve: Going back to your question about our job title; I guess it depends on what you term as Creative Director. I think that’s slightly misleading. That’s what our titles are, and it’s in the context of what we do. I guess other labels have got creative directors, but probably do different things to us. I think what other labels – I’m not aware of any other labels who’ve got a creative team, in-house, who do this sort of work that Phil and I do. There are other creative directors in this building who look after different things, like artwork, or styling, and stuff like that. That’s just a title. It’s more about what we do, really.

I mentioned the four campaigns of yours that I’m aware of: Kasabian, AC/DC, Editors, and Calvin Harris. I’m interested in how you run these as online marketing campaigns. Say, for example Kasabian ['Football Hero' video embedded below]; could you talk me through how that idea started and how it came across through the production?

Steve: We work closely with a consumer insight team here. I guess part of what is loosely termed “briefing process” is that the consumer insight team, every time there is an artist with an album coming out, they do a lot of market research on that artist, on the audiences for that artist, and we have this thing called the ‘Segment Bible’, which is the UK music market split into 28 segments of consumer, based on age, interests, everything from what brands they buy, where they hang out, how much money they spend. It’s very in depth actually, so when we take on an act to do the online campaign for, we get told who the applicable segments are, and we get the opportunity to speak to people within that segment. They come in and we can talk to them. With Kasabian it was kind of – we already sort of know about Kasabian quite well because it’s their third album and –

Phil: But there were some pretty obvious things coming out. With Kasabian, we were looking at – we have this thing called an artist DNA, which is a document that sums up everything to do with the audiences for that audience, what matters to them about the band, and so there were really strong themes coming out of that to deal with football, gaming, and the way they hung out with them, what they actually did, what they’re into.

Steve: It’s interesting, that audience actually cares more about football and gaming than they do about music. Music is sort of a secondary thing in their lives.

Phil: It was kind of sensible to try and reach them through those channels so we basically said let’s come up with a piece of content that –

Steve: Kind of seems really obvious but I guess it wasn’t like a eureka moment but it was like – Kasabian is sort of synonymous with football, especially here in the UK.

Phil: If their music is used on the titles of the iTV football program and stuff like that and they’ve been on the Sony Bravia ad with Kaka, the Brazilian and AC Milan footballer. And also, the band are fans of football. They’re fans of Leicester City.

Steve: They are big football fans. We kind of started off on this idea of doing something with football and then I guess that kind of progressed. We were thinking about loads of different ideas and kind of progressed into gaming.

Phil: I guess quite a lot of that stuff involves music as well, so that kind of came around to trying to build a giant game of essentially a Guitar Hero type game that people could play with footballs. That was the pipe dream, and from then on it was trying to make it a reality. It was quite a lengthy process in the end!

Steve: I think that we were sitting downstairs there, when we finally got exactly what we wanted to do. Especially, we knew we wanted to get some really cool, freestyle footballers to do it as well. We don’t know any, so then we had the whole process of finding out how we could build it, who we could get to play it, where we could build it, and all that sort of stuff.

Phil: Again, we always work with fairly tight budgets and that was the case with this, as well. It had to be doable for a reasonably modest sum of money so that was a challenge as well. We used the hardware, and the software was all open source and it was pretty low cost, all that stuff. There was a very big production on the day but it was only for a day. The R&D process was relatively inexpensive. Then it was a case of building it and seeing how it would go, essentially, and spending a whole day building, and filming it.

Throughout the whole process is there the risk that the thing wouldn’t work or the footballers weren’t good enough to make it work?

Phil: Absolutely, yeah.

Steve: I think so, but –

Phil: We kind of knew that it would be okay.

Steve: Just the experience, you minimize all the risks, so –

Phil: The hardware, the actual game we built wasn’t technically complicated.

Steve: No, it was one of the least technical things that we’ve done, really.

Phil: That was okay. We knew that was going to be alright so it really came down to would the footballers have enough time to practice, because it was something that wasn’t going to be easy to play.

Steve: And, just the logistics of them playing it, balls bouncing everywhere, and all that sort of stuff.

Phil: And the camera gear, as well, to be honest; there was a lot of expensive gear on the shoot and the balls were just flying everywhere. I was sure we were just going to smash everything.

Steve: Yeah, it was like – you can see in the film, there are the five footballers and each one of them has got a ball boy who is feeding them balls. Then, behind them are literally about 20 people shielding all of the cameras –

Phil: And jumping in front of the balls, saving something.

Steve: The cameras, and the monitors, and all that sort of stuff.

Phil: Yeah, the directors and monitors did get hit in the screen at one point, and it didn’t break. Luckily!

Steve: The thing is, and this is kind of what all our work is about; it’s an experiment and we’re not aiming to do things that are going to be perfect. What we want to do is to tell a story about how we did it, what we’re trying to do, and gear that towards an audience that is interested in that. No one is ever going to believe it if we made this –

Phil: It would be easy to fake –

Steve: … came in and faked it, and all the footballers play and get 100% and everyone is really happy. That’s not believable. To us, what we try and do is to create stories that people want to talk about. I think one of the main things that came out of the Kasabian one was most people said, “I’d love to have a go on that. It looks really difficult. It’s obviously difficult but how much fun is that.”

Phil: It’s like during the shoot, every time we’d stop the take and the footballers went off to have a drink or whatever, the whole crew was playing the game and we were creating just as much carnage ourselves as they were.

Steve: Most people we’ve spoke to since are like, “Where is it?” [laughs] We had to take it down, which was a shame.

Phil: As Steve says, it’s all about telling the story of what we’re doing. It’s not – we’re all about taking on ambitious experiments, trying to make them work, and documenting the process, and telling people about it. The way that works is it becomes an interesting story for people. They pass it on to their friends and it travels around naturally like that.

Steve: More importantly it becomes an interesting story for the type of people who we have an insight that they sort of might like that particular artist. Then it’s targeted marketing, essentially.

Phil: But it’s not that we’re pushing a message at people. We’re letting them spread it. It’s up to them. We’re not even expecting people to do it. It’s just if we create a piece of content that is good enough and interesting enough to those people, then they’ll naturally spread it around. That’s how your message gets out.

The way you describe it to me now, you knew that Kasabian fans were into football and gaming. It seems obvious that it was going to be a winner. I looked at it this morning. It was up to 800,000 views.

Phil: That’s been out for about a month now, so I think it’s still growing quicker than the AC/DC one did. [The Excel-based 'Rock N Roll Train' AC/DC video embedded below.]

Steve: That’s because it’s not the same segment as AC/DC. We sort of have an idea of population numbers of people in those segments.

Phil: There’s about 5 million, isn’t there?

Steve: 1.5 million in the UK. Then obviously our stuff sort of spreads around the world, as well. You can kind of get a good idea of whether you’re hitting the right people or not, and the amount of people in each territory that are hitting, and you get a good percentage on that from what you’ve spent to do it against how effective it’s been.

Beyond the view count, what are the metrics you use to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns?

Steve: We look at – I guess you could say a lot of people write stuff about what we do, and blog about it, and that’s one of the aims – to get people to share.

Phil: It’s less about the view count, to be honest – actually, those view counts, on average 70% of those views come from embedded videos and articles, and blogs and things. It’s much more about securing coverage in the right channels, that we know that the targeted audience reads. If ‘Football Hero’ pops up in the tech channels, the gaming channels, and sports channels, it could be newspapers, blogs, or whatever, then we know that we’ve done the job.

Steve: That one – most of the stuff that we’ve done often spreads out into traditional press, TV, and stuff like that as well.

Which is the ultimate, in many ways, wouldn’t it be? Obviously, your work is online based, but making that leap across is quite the achievement.

Steve: It’s quite interesting the way that you see it. It all transcends through various audience groups. When you read a newspaper, you’re kind of always reading yesterday’s news online. It’s like you pick up today’s newspaper and apart from the breaking stories, you could have read about all this stuff yesterday on Twitter, or blogs or stuff like that. It is interesting when you see – we don’t really press release what we do so it’s nice when you see a journalist has obviously seen it, and picked it up, and then written about it in the newspaper. It’s kind of cool.

Phil: Yeah, that’s kind of that natural spread. That’s what we kind of aim for. What we try and do is to earn our own media so that’s really the magic – getting in the right media and in the right place. If we did, then fine, that’s the job done sort of thing.

Steve: We believe that you shouldn’t have to pay for media, especially not online, because banner ads are really ineffective, and companies still spend a lot of money putting these banner ads on various sites.

Phil: Yeah, they’re utterly ineffective. I think it’s fair enough; if you want to advertise outdoors, for whatever reason, then you’re going to have to pay to get billboards. It’s as simple as that. But, if you want to advertise online, then it makes much more sense to me to try and earn your own media, in the editorial of sites, and stuff, rather than trying to buy ad space where no-one’s looking. And in order to do that, there’s no shortcut to it. You have to create content that people care about, essentially.

And as well as the content, the relationships with those people who write the content, I assume.

Phil: Oh, not necessarily. You’d be surprised.

Steve: I don’t think that’s as important because even the way that we sort of go about launching a campaign, we kind of experiment with a lot. Pretty much, our launch plan is to send it to a couple of blogs and –

Phil: Yeah, so in a particular area there might be a fanatical blog about something to do with electronics, or football, or something like that. Then we’ll send it to one of them and say, “We’ve made this thing. Do you like it? Do you want to cover it?”

Steve: One thing that we’ve sort of found is that generally bloggers and journalists want to kind of write their own content. They want to write their opinion on things and I think when you press release stuff, and you sort of bombard them with the copy, you tend to get a fairly uniform story but there’s not going to be much passion in it.

Phil: There is not much variety, so you get the same story everywhere. What we try and do is don’t even press release.

Steve: We just let people pick up on it because I guess if it’s good, people will do that. If it’s compelling, people want to share it. That just happens.

Phil: They’ll come to you with questions if they have questions, and you can answer them.

Steve: But you get people who write in about it for real, and you get people saying, “I’ve just seen this in Wired and here’s my opinion on it.” I guess people will talk.

I saw AC/DC on Wired last year. I saw Editors on Creative Review ['Editors Hack Google Street View' video embedded below], and I’m not sure where I found the other two.

So you guys didn’t really coordinate those placements?

Phil: Well, Creative Review, we’ll tell them what we’re up to. They don’t have to cover it, but we’ll tell them.

Steve: We’ve got a bit of a relationship with Creative Review, just in terms of we speak at some of their conferences and stuff like that.

Have you given any presentations lately?

Steve: We did Click two weeks ago.

Phil: Which is like a London digital industry, digital advertising conference run by Creative Review. Inevitably, you end up making some contacts, so next time we go back to – do you know Make Magazine, which is like a – we’ve got a great contact at Make, a real nice guy who’s interested in the technical side of what we do. We’ll tell him about what projects we’re doing and he’ll go, “Oh, I like this one, and I’ll write about this one,” or whatever. He’ll ask us some questions.

Steve: Yeah, but it’s not a formal thing. It’s more like conversation, only it’s the work that we’re up to at the minute. I think that it also depends on the type of project that you do because Creative Review, I guess will cover our stuff; it’s more of an industry thing. It sort of – because the projects vary quite a bit, you’re looking at different target audiences for it. We might not always have stuff that Make are going to cover, or Wired or people like that. It’s more about allowing self discovery in the channels of that audience.

Phil: When it came to Kasabian, we didn’t really know anyone in the gaming channels at all, but we didn’t have to worry about it – or football, but we didn’t need to worry about that. It just came up in all the major gaming sites, major football sites. It’s much more about making good content. You need to get it out there, at the same time. Once it’s out there, small waves –

Steve: I guess our theory is that if it’s good, and it’s compelling for people to share, it will do it anyway. If it doesn’t, then your content’s not good.

It’s interesting to hear you say that, because it’s such a different way of thinking from the old way of spending on billboards, like you said earlier.

Steve: It’s like Phil said; instead of being a push model, it’s a pull model. Yeah, you’re exactly right; it’s completely different from just putting things in front of everyone’s faces. It’s allowing –

…the right faces, ones who will be interested in it, because it appears in those channels.

Phil: Yeah, so instead of pushing a message out and paying for media for it to be there, you are putting a piece of content out and hoping it will pull people to it, and that people will share it around. It’s totally about making the content compelling and tailoring it to the right audience. It would be difficult to be doing that without the targeting information.

Steve: We sort of talk about this a lot and talk about this with other people; I guess a lot of it is sort of digital creative agencies or creative agencies doing this type of content – I know a lot of people who do some really great work, and it’s really cool ideas, but I guess what we do which a lot of people don’t do is really think about who we’re targeting, rather than just having a cool idea. It’s having a cool idea for the right audience because it might be, sometimes, that we have to sell something to a bunch of 35-year old women, and it’s really easy to make assumptions and make mistakes when you’re making something that you think’s going to appeal to them. So having all this insight and artist DNA and stuff like that helps find something that you’ve got a good idea that they will be interested. They won’t feel like they’re being advertised to.

Phil: You’ve got to get out there and put yourself into their head essentially, and think, “Alright, if I was this type of person, what would I…” The actual people in the insight department will go as far to do this. They’ll spend a week in the life of a particular segment; they’ll consume the right media, go to the right things, so they’ll try to experience that person’s world so they understand it better.

A lot of people say, “That’s not very cool, targeting stuff, and consumer insight,” but what you’re doing is instead of filling the world with advertising which is generic, not aimed at anyone, and annoying for vast quantities of people, instead you’re trying to make something a certain type of person will be interested in. It will reach them naturally, through their friends, and the rest of them through channels they’ve been seeing, and the rest of the people just might see it. In a way, I would argue that type of advertising is more sensitive to end users than the current model of push advertising.

Steve: Yeah, and it’s interesting that it’s not really about numbers, either. It’s about quality of engagement and the people that you’re engaging.

Phil: Some of the segments have a very small active population so what we call the fanatical segments, which are really enthusiastic about music, and there’s not many of them. There might be 50,000 in the country.

Steve: If that’s who you’re aiming for, if that’s who you’re aiming a particular creative ad, in order to get something back out of it, then it’s not really about numbers; it’s about engaging those particular people.

Phil: So on the fanatics, we’ll look for smaller numbers, but engaging them for a longer period of time. The Editors project, that’s aimed at a fanatical segment, and that’s looking at smaller numbers. Something like 100,000.

Steve: But you’re looking at stupidly high engagement rates.

Phil: Yeah, like over 3 minutes per person, and an average of 4 tracks each across the application. That’s the opposite way of doing it. Some of the segments are, “Right, let’s go for a big audience, with low engagement.”

Steve: I guess it depends on the objectives of what you’re trying to do, and it really has to support the wider market and campaign for the ad, as well.

Phil: There will be other activity going on, posters and things like that, and events. Ideally, our activity will create a sort of buzz in the news at the same time as all that auxillary stuff is going around. Next time somebody’s buying some music, they’ll have it in their head that they’ve enjoyed this bit of content with that music in it.

You’ve had a few successes with these kinds of campaigns now. How do you think the label management view these kinds of campaigns? Are they starting to see more value, giving you guys a bigger budget to work with for these kinds of projects?

Steve: Kind of, I think it’s like anything; the music industry is very similar to the advertising industry as well. It sort of takes a long time to turn things around to new models, and to change the behaviors of old, in terms of something huge like advertising. Really, it’s about the way that people consume media, which is changing. Any big company that starts looking at new areas like that, it’s a bit like turning a super tanker. I guess it’s slowly but surely – we’ve kind of started rolling these campaigns out. We don’t spend enormous amounts of money, at all. In fact, anything but – it’s really modest sums, especially for the advertising world. It would be like pocket change.

I guess the labels and the company in general sort of do attach value to what we do because we’re kind of proving we don’t need to do media spend, that we get really good engagement rates, and that we’re making interesting content that people are interested in, that isn’t just a Kasabian album out now. I guess budgets are going up a bit, but then –

Phil: I think we may be seeing that over the last two years, they’ve gradually given us more freedom and more autonomy to do what we do. It isn’t directly giving us more money for our projects but they’ve made it gradually easier for us to do.

Steve: I think that’s like a trust. I think sometimes an artist or artist manager might kind of see on paper what we’ve proposed to do and kind of go, “Ew, that’s different,” and they’re very sensitive to how artists are perceived by the public and things like that. I guess when we do stuff they feel like they’re taking a bit of risk, as well, but I guess the more we do this stuff, the more people see that it actually works and we sort of do the artist good. I guess more freedom comes from having that trust.

Phil: I’d say that’s been the major change to the artists. It’s not like we’ve suddenly got tons of money to spend, but we do definitely have more freedom now and definitely have more trust from the managers and artists and people like that. That kind of comes back into the work, so that we can do better work next time around.

Steve: The other thing about budgets is sometimes having endless budgets stifles your creativity. I think it’s nice to be able to execute stuff within the budgets that we do, and execute it well. Often, it means that we are very hands on, but I guess that being hands on means we also sort of keep an element of control and ownership over what we do so we get it the way we want it. We don’t just have an idea, then pass it to someone else and say, “Go and make that.”

Phil: Under some extreme circumstances, we’ve actually been cleaning the floor after the shoot. If it has to be done, we’ll do it.

Steve: Exactly, and I think that’s good too, because you think, “What’s the best that I can achieve for this amount of money that I’ve got to spend, when I can’t actually just go in and pay for lots of people to go do it?”

Phil: It’s a bit like you’ll spend what you’re given, generally, so someone gives you fifty grand, you’ll spend fifty grand, but that doesn’t mean the work is going to be any better than if they’d given you twenty.

Steve: I guess one of the things, as well, is that because we’re kind like an internal agency, we’re not trying to make money out of anyone. We’re actually just spending what we need to spend to do the project. It might be sometimes that actually what we need to spend is half of the budget that we’ve been given, and in that case – brilliant. Often, it’s not. Often, we’re sort of sitting on the very edge of what we’ve got to spend because it’s often not very much, but –

Phil: Yeah, in theory, if we didn’t need the whole thing, we wouldn’t spend it, but in practice you’re talking about such small budgets that we do spend it all.

Steve: We’re working on a new project at the minute. It’s quite difficult. One of the guys that helped on the Calvin Harris project. ['Humanthesizer' video embedded below.]

Which other labels or teams in the industry are you aware of who do similar stuff to you guys? Do you think you’re unique?

Phil: There isn’t anybody doing what we do.

Steve: In the advertising industry, for sure.

Phil: There are some campaigns, like you might have seen the Oasis campaign –

The buskers?

Phil: Yeah, and that’s BBH in New York, an ad agency.

Steve: There are a lot of ad agencies that we really like the work of, and that we see doing really good work.

Phil: That’s who we see our peers as other people in the advertising industry, rather than –

Steve: Rather than the music industry. What we do is advertising for the music industry. That’s why we’ve got interesting projects to work with. We’re not trying to sell dog food. It kind of makes your job quite fun.

Phil: Less soul-destroying.

It does sound like a pretty awesome job, to get to be creative with artists’ work.

Steve: It is really cool, actually. We have a lot of fun.

Phil: Can’t complain.

Steve: We have loads of fun doing what we do. It sort of is cool to be able to have really creative ideas and then be able to execute them for products that you’re actually quite passionate about or even if not passionate about, just sort of is more interesting than something which people generally find mundane. I’m not hugely into commercial pop music, but when you’re doing something for a really commercial pop act, and you see the people that you’re engaging, they’re really passionate about it so it kind of makes what you do feel worthwhile, rather than sort of –

Phil: Trying to sell people something they don’t need.

Steve: Yeah, try to sell a product that people don’t have – don’t care about at all. It’s completely different and it does make the job sort of really worthwhile and really good fun to do.

Phil:  I guess the other side of it is we’re always seeing R&D on new ideas, new technologies, and new things that we might develop and we have the freedom to be able to do that alongside our normal work, so that’s really good fun. We’re always tinkering with something, making something new, or trying to investigate how to do something.

That’s what I really enjoy, just getting my teeth into something that looks impossible and trying to make it happen. We’ll be trolling through the Internet, looking at writing programs, and drawing things, and trying to work out if we can make something work. It’s another fun side of it, what’s coming next, what are we going to do next.

I’ll leave it there. I’m out of questions. Could I grab a photo of you two as you are now?

Steve: Sure.

View Phil Clandillon’s portfolio at: work.clandillon.com

Steve Milbourne on Twitter: twitter.com/stevemilbourne
Phil Clandillon on Twitter: twitter.com/philclandillon

This interview was conducted for a story that appeared in The Music Network issue 770, January 18 2010. Read it here.

Filed under Conversations | Tags: ac/dc, Advertising, andrew-mcmillen, calvin-harris, click-london, conversation, creative-directors, creative-review, editors, england, football-hero, industry, Interview, kasabian, kensington, london, Marketing, Music, music video, phil-clandillon, promotion, Published Writing, sony-music, steve-milbourne, the-music-network, video, Writing | Comment (1)

The Music Network: Sony Music London’s Creative Directors

A story for The Music Network that I arranged while in England last month.

Trendsetters: Sony Music London’s Creative Directors

They’re each experienced within the music and advertising industries, but it’s largely the time spent in the latter that colours their development of a major label’s creative sector as both industry award-winner and music fan-favourite.

What sets them apart is that you won’t find their work on billboards or posters, which is unorthodox for a pair of music marketers. No, you’re more likely to come across the work of Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon - Creative Directors at Sony Music London - when a friend posts one of their video projects on your Facebook wall with an approving comment.

Top four in their recent portfolio, which can be easily found on YouTube:

1. The world’s first Microsoft Excel music video, which was created to let cubicle-confined hard rock fans watch the latest AC/DC clip from behind corporate firewalls.
2. A web short featuring the ‘humanthesizer‘, wherein body-painted, bikini-clad models debuted the first human synth to the Calvin Harris track ‘Ready For The Weekend’.
3. A Google Street View ‘hack’ promoting rock band Editors, where fans could use the software application to visit the British landmarks that inspired the creation of their latest album, while it played in the background.
4. And most recently, a giant game of Guitar Hero set to a Kasabian song, which is played by kicking soccer balls against a warehouse wall.

I met with Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon in Sony’s Kensington office to discuss their unique approach to web-based music marketing, and to understand how they took the Kasabian project from concept to execution, to nearly 850,000 YouTube views in a month.

In their own words

As Milbourne describes it, he and Clandillon essentially run a boutique advertising agency in-house. Their clients are signed to various labels under the Sony umbrella. And to their knowledge, there’s not really anyone else who operates within the music industry who operate as they do.

Milbourne continues: “The reason we can do what we do is because we’ve spent years gaining skills in design, programming, and video production. The sort of stuff we do is often experimental; we’re usually sitting on-edge; ‘Is this going to work or not? Am I going to waste loads of money?’”

Though they’re often sticking their necks out, the pair are able to operate cost-effectively. Their method isn’t as expensive as traditional advertising, so they’re able to work on projects that reach more people without spending as much money.

Clandillon [pictured left] explains: “We’re awarded the freedom to experiment and do more exciting things. It generally goes fairly well, but if you do make mistakes it’s not the end of the world because you’re only talking about relatively small amounts of money. But we haven’t had any that haven’t worked out, yet.”

When they presented their music industry work at Creative Review’s Click London conference in November, the audience asked questions like: “This seems very risky. How could I sell this to the client if I was at an ad agency?”

Their response was simple: a strong reputation built upon experience and dedication. As Milbourne says, “If you don’t have the experience, it can easily go wrong.”

Their approach mostly significantly differs from traditional music marketing because they don’t buy media. Instead, their innovative videos tend to become social objects, which are shared rapidly between individuals en masse, thus demonstrating the nature of viral internet content.

Clandillon elaborates: “Our work is designed to be shared. We don’t pay for advertising space, and in a way, as long as you’re doing something with good intentions, the worst thing that’s going to happen is it’s going to languish in the corner of the internet and no one is going to see it. It’s not like putting a really inappropriate advertising campaign across London on billboards. It’s a totally different proposition, which allows us to take a few more risks.”

Case study: ‘Football Hero’

Risk-taking, indeed: on paper, their ‘Football Hero’ short film was Clandillon and Milbourne’s most outlandish yet. Uploaded in October 2009, it was devised as an experiment to create a Guitar Hero-type game played by footballs. The game was constructed in a West London warehouse, before a talented team of young freestyle footballers were drafted in to play it. The project was created to promote the Kasabian single ‘Underdog’, and was carried out in collaboration with UK sports brand Umbro. [The video is embedded below.]

Clandillon explains: “The game was powered by the open-source Guitar Hero clone, Frets On Fire, and we used two projectors to create a three story-high image on the side of the warehouse wall. The coloured buttons on the typical guitar controller were replaced by five huge pressure sensitive pads, which were carefully positioned on the wall in order to line up with the game’s descending notes.”

Why Kasabian, though? He continues: “Whenever we’re about to promote a band, we refer to in-depth artist insight that sums up everything to do with the fanbase for that artist; essentially, what matters to the band’s fans. With Kasabian, there were really strong football and gaming themes coming out.”

According to Milbourne [pictured right], Kasabian’s fanbase audience seemed to care more about football and gaming than they do about music. Music is a secondary thing in their lives. As a result, in the video’s final cut, the story of the footballers and their quest to finish ‘playing’ the song is given prominence over the song itself.

“We knew we wanted to get some really cool freestyle footballers to do it as well,” he continues. “We didn’t know any, so as well as the whole process of finding out how we could build it and who we could use, we had to find out who we could get to play it…”

When asked about working on tight budgets, Clandillon elucidates: “The hardware didn’t cost much, and the software was all open source. There was a big production for the video, but it was only for a day. The R&D process was relatively inexpensive. Then it was a case of building it and seeing how it would go. We spent a whole day building the game, and filming it being played. We’re all about taking on ambitious experiments, trying to make them work, documenting the process, and telling people about it.”

Above all, the aim is for the ‘Football Hero’ project was to create an interesting story for people, who’re then compelled to pass it on to their friends. The pair explain that the goal is always to attract the attention of the type of people who might like that particular artist. Essentially, it’s targeted marketing, but under the guise of an entertaining video.

Highly engaged

Having had a few popular successes with these kinds of web video campaigns, how do the two feel Sony’s management view these kinds of campaigns?

Milbourne [pictured right] is philosophical. “The music and advertising industries are similar in that it takes a long time to turn things around to new models, and to change the behaviors of old. The biggest shift right now is in the way that people consume media. Any big company that starts looking at new areas like that, it’s a bit like turning a super tanker. In our case, it’s slowly but surely. The labels we work with, and Sony Music in general do attach value to what we do, because we’re continually proving we don’t need to do media spend, that we get really good engagement rates, and that we’re making content that people are interested in, as opposed to the standard album release.”

Clandillon concludes: “Over last two years, they’ve gradually given us more freedom and more autonomy to do what we do. We’ve got more trust from the managers and artists; that all comes back into the projects, so that we can do better work, next time around.”

View Phil Clandillon’s portfolio at: work.clandillon.com

Steve Milbourne on Twitter: twitter.com/stevemilbourne
Phil Clandillon on Twitter: twitter.com/philclandillon

This story originally appeared in The Music Network issue 770, January 18 2010. For a full-length transcript of our conversation, click here.

Filed under Published Writing | Tags: analysis, andrew-mcmillen, conversation, creative-directors, england, football-hero, industry, Interview, kasabian, london, Music, phil-clandillon, Published Writing, sony-music, steve-milbourne, the-music-network, Writing | Comment (1)

A Conversation Between Robert Forster and John Willsteed

This is a conversation between Robert Forster, co-founder of Australian pop band The Go-Betweens, and John Willsteed, formerly of The Go-Betweens. It took place in Brisbane’s Avid Reader bookstore on November 9, 2009 to promote Forster’s first book, The 10 Rules Of Rock And Roll, which is a collection of his music writing for The Monthly magazine between 2005 and 2009.

John: Hello there, I’m John Willsteed. Robert would like to do a song. [Forster plays 'Pandanus' from his 2008 album 'The Evangelist'; audio embedded below]

I met Robert a little over 30 years ago. This is the first time we’ve been on the stage, I think, in 22 years. It’s not a stage. It’s a book shop. It’s very interesting. I think it’s intriguing that there is music; I like music in a book shop like this; it’s fantastic. It’s the meeting of these two things, music and writing, that we’re here for, because we’re talking about the release of Robert’s book. Why don’t you tell us what these 10 rules are?

Robert: Alright, the 10 rules of rock and roll, which is the first section of the book and what the book is obviously named after, I’ll tell you them now.

1. Never follow an artist who describes his or her work as dark.
2. The second to last song on every album is the weakest.
3. Great bands tend to look alike.
4. Being a rock star is a 24-hour a day job.
5. The band with the most tattoos has the worst songs.
6. No band does anything new on stage after the first 20 minutes.
7. The guitarist who changes guitars on stage after every third number is showing you his guitar collection.
8. Every great artist hides behind their manager.
9. Great bands do not have members making solo albums.
10. The three-piece band is the purest form of rock and roll expression.

That’s the ten rules.

I think they’re contentious rules.

You can take umbrage with any you wish to do.

Rock and roll needs rules, and I’m glad that you’ve finally laid them down.

I like the idea of the two things coming together because rock and roll, theoretically, it’s supposed to have no rules. That’s what it is founded on, to an extent, or the myth is that it has no rules. Obviously, the point of the rules and the point of the book being named that is to bring these two things that normally don’t go together, rules and rock and roll, together.

Is it true that in writing about music, which is what you now do, that’s not saying you don’t continue to make music; you obviously do, but in writing about music, do you apply rules? Are they similar?

Yeah, one of them is I try not to put myself too much in each piece, or go to ‘I’, which is a great, great temptation. I pull myself out, because sometimes I have connections. In one of the pieces in the book, which is on Delta Goodrem, I review her last album Delta, and it’s her third album. I reviewed the album. I did that about two years.

What I don’t put in the article is that when The Go-Betweens were doing their second to last album, Bright Yellow, Bright Orange in 2004 in Melbourne in studio, she was in the studio. I didn’t know who she was because I’d lived over in Germany for a number of years.

You didn’t know who she was?

No. I’d lived over in Germany for a number of years, and she’d sort of come through Neighbours and things like that. I think she’d had one or two hits at this stage. It was a studio complex and we were in the main studio and she was in a room mixing a single with an engineer. When we were taking breaks from recording, we’d been out playing ping pong and she was sitting over on the piano. There was an old upright, a bit out of tune, and she’d sit and sing; not in any sort of flashy way, but a really nice way. She could play piano. She had a really good voice. It sounded really good.

I only found out who she was later, but she would sit there and play, not try and impress, just because she felt like she could do it for hours. I only discovered who she was at that moment and I only heard her records later, but a couple of years later when I came to hear her record and it seemed like an odd choice to review a Delta Goodrem album, I remembered that I’d had that experience. I didn’t put it into the review because I didn’t think it was needed. One rule is when to put myself in and out of the reviews.

I suppose an earlier rule, in a sense, then, is what to choose to review. How do you get to a point of choosing what you want to write about?

Perversely enough, it seems to be the ones that I think I know something about, or that I have personal experience with. A band like Franz Ferdinand, who I really liked, like right from the first album. They’re a Glasgow band. The Go-Betweens, in the very early ‘80s, were on a label called Postcard in Glasgow. We were around Glaswegian musicians like Orange Juice, Josef K, Aztec Camera; we knew these people.

And so when Franz Ferdinand, these sort of four Glaswegian arty, hipsters came along in 2005 with the great first album, I loved the album and I would have loved it if I hadn’t have known that they were from Glasgow, but the fact that they were just brought it a little bit closer. When I was thinking of an album to review, I reviewed their second one. I put that in a review and there is a paragraph about Glasgow. It’s just from personal experience. That is part of the thing; that I have a connection, that I think I know something about the record, or the concert, helps.

It doesn’t explain Delta Goodrem [pictured left] yet, though.

I always end up talking a lot about Delta.

We can let it go.

No, I’ll add to what I was saying. My niece had some of her records in the time between I’d seen her in the studio. She’d become a big star so I was aware of her and I actually quite liked a single of hers called “Born to Fly”, which I think is on her first or second album. If I had to choose ten great Australian songs over the last decade, I’d put Delta Goodrem’s “Born To Fly” in there. It’s a great MOR, big ballad. It’s a fantastic song, which she co-wrote, to her credit.

It seems like there would be a danger in reviewing when there was no connection, and that would be the point where there would be a danger of bringing yourself into what you’re writing, or purely being about the technicalities of what you’re listening to if there is no connection. I would imagine the connections go way back with you into your past. That’s the reason why you choose Nana Mouskouri, to not only to see but to write about, and Glen Campbell, to listen to and write about. Is that a fair thing?

It is, but at the same time, my ear and my eye goes to new things as well. Even something like Vampire Weekend, who I really like and I reviewed their debut album, and Vampire Weekend are 22 years old. I hear Talking Heads. It’s a New York band and I’ve loved New York bands since the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Velvet Underground, or New York Dolls, or Television. Vampire Weekend, although they’re 22 year olds and doing something really fresh, they go back. There is a myth about a New York band so that sort of plays in as well. I do try and have a sense of adventure in what I choose. I do try and not be predictable, which again plays to Delta, I guess.

I came across Robert’s writings by just subscribing to The Monthly when it started, just because it was a great magazine. It not only had good cultural reviews, but it had good political stuff in it. I was really pleased; there are some choices that I was really pleased with the way you wrote. It was very familiar to me, for some reason. Maybe there is a familiarity that comes from you as a lyric writer, and you as a critic. There is something in your language which resonates between those things.

There is a lot of me in what I write. I have a romantic view of rock and roll. I also have a sense of cynicism, perhaps. I know those two things don’t normally go together, but that helps me with my writing.

I think they’re very common bedfellows, romanticism, and cynicism.

I think people are passionate. I think people project fantasies onto bands and fantasies onto songs, and they always have. I think a lot of – and I’m not trying to do a critique of critics - but I think sometimes it can be quite dry. I think my feelings towards music are quite passionate, and I think people have records and songs that are all about a place, a time, and I think people are quite perceptive about music in terms of the structure of songs or choruses, or people just have a great knowledge about music and I think often reviewers don’t acknowledge that. I think also that there is a huge fantasy level. I think people do think about what it would have been like. When they hear a Velvet Underground record, they throw themselves into it in some bizarre way, or they hear a U2 record or whatever. I think people place themselves in those records.

When music arrives, there’s something about context. There is something about what you feel when you hear something. There are historical points that I can follow back in time. This music comes from these places. Do you think it’s your role to point some of that stuff out, as a critic?

I can’t help myself. Without sort of having a tone in what I’m write as though I’m lecturing, but when I hear a record, it does set off a sense of associations. Normally, even if I don’t put them down on paper, I follow those associations to see where they’re going to take me.

The beautiful associations, they kind of put music in a history of songwriting and music-making. I suppose it becomes more like the folk music that it is, rather than the pop music that it seems to be.

Exactly.

I am fantastic.

That was brilliant, John.

I’ve been bullshitting at the university now for a number of years.

It’s being taped by the way. You can try it in your lectures.

I found a typo on page 249, would you like me to –

Tell me later.

I wrote here, “There are things with which I concur.” Nash Chambers did a great job on that album [Rattlin' Bones, by Kasey Chambers and  Shane Nicholson]. I’m really glad that you point things out like that sometimes, that people who were listening to something might not necessarily think in that way, and they might not necessarily look to a producer and think this person is intrinsic to this process. The reason I love listening to this thing is it’s not just about the song or the singer, but it’s about the way things sound, as well.

I think with Nash Chambers, who is Kasey Chambers’ brother and he’s a record producer in Australia, where I think there is a lack of great record producers. When I hear one and I think he does good work, it’s like fairly country/alternative country field, but he makes really good records as a producer. When something like that happens, I like to mention it and he’s just done the new Angie Hart album, the former Frente singer, so he’s sort moving more now into pop, in a way. People are starting to see that can produce records, because his records are so well put together in a country context, that they could work in a pop context.

[More “things with which I concur”] The Monkees are up there with the Velvets and the Beach Boys. Rick Rubin could be that caretaker at the caravan park. I think he probably is the caretaker at the caravan park.

I have an observation. I’m full of observations. I’m really pleased that you wrote specifically about a song and specifically about “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” which I really love. It reminds me that you have a song called “Clouds” that I played guitar on. We both played guitars together. That song was in my mind as always being about the same sort of rhythm as what is in “Have You Seen the Rain”. I just really love the fact that you can pick a little thing like that and say this thing here is embedded, this rhythm can move from song to song, and generation to generation. Would you like to play another song?

I will. I just want to say something about Creedence Clearwater Revival. There is a bit in the book, one page, where I wrote I was asked by The Sunday Times in London to write about song. I wrote about “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Creedence, to me, have always been a touchstone for what I’ve done, as you pointed out, because to me they’ve always been a little bit like a Brisbane band.

There is something about their rhythm and hearing Creedence in Brisbane; Creedence sounds different in Brisbane than it does in Sydney or Melbourne. Driving around in the car in Brisbane and hearing Creedence, to me they sound like a local band. I think it’s just that rhythm, the easiness of the music, the realness, the funkiness of it just… they always sound like they come from, like Toombul, or Nundah, to me.

What’s wrong with that?

Nothing, it’s a compliment! I sort of see them down by the canal there.

On the way to the airport, hanging out under the railway line. It’s a good point. Creedence are at home in Brisbane. Are there other bands that are at home in Brisbane, do you think?

Not so much as Creedence. A famous band – my other theory is that Brisbane reminds me a lot, now, of LA in the ‘60s; the climate and the layout of the city. Especially when I’m at The Gap, where we live, I half-expect to go down to the shopping center and see The Byrds.

Not that Hitchcock sort of thing.

No! There’s actually a photo in the latest edition of Mojo that has just come out. There is this big photo, double-page photo of Brian Wilson in 1965 or 1966. I pointed it out to Karin, my wife, last night. He’s got a baseball bat and he’s on a concrete front drive, and behind it is just a really dry hill. There are these funky sort of ‘60s low-set houses and cars on the street, and you would swear it was on the back streets of Brookfield, or The Gap. It’s amazing. I’ve often thought The Gap is like L.A. in 1965, and then I see Topanga Canyon and the whole thing. This is the fantasy we live out there!

You’ve gotta have something!

I know, and I saw this photo and it was like: evidence, there it is. Anyway, I’ll play a song. [Forster plays 'He Lives My Life' from The Go-Betweens' 2000 album, The Friends Of Rachel Worth. It's embedded below, but note this is not his performance from the bookstore.]

I love Fiona’s shop [Avid Reader] and always have. You talked before about how there are connections between writing songs and writing words. My memory of you is that you were always a letter writer, as well. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I just have an abiding memory of you writing letters home at a time when there was no email, and phone calls were expensive when we were traveling. Is there a progression? Do you feel that writing in this way isn’t something you would have done 20 years ago, but at this point in your life this is the right time for this? If so, is there a place with writing where you’re heading? Is this part of your journey now?

Very good question.

Thank you.

I’m happy to do reviewing at my age. I think I’d have been unbearable if I’d have had this power and this access when I was 28. I think I would have been unbearable and I would have shot myself in the foot and I would have been going all over the place. I’m pretty happy that it’s come. I started reviewing when I was 48. It’s actually a good time for me to be doing this.

It was a leap. I keep a diary and I keep books that last about a year and a half, filled with everything, like poems, what I did that day. I don’t write in it every day, but it’s a real mish mash that I keep, that I have these books. There are a lot of starts over the years, like a fantasy, it was a novel – or short story. I’d read it the next day and put it away. There are all those starts, and in a way, when I started to write for The Monthly it was great because it was nonfiction.
I found I could write these paragraphs for these reviews. Right from the first review, when I sat down and wrote the very first review on Antony and the Johnsons album, I found that I could write paragraphs and live with them the next day, and keep on writing, and then live with what I wrote the next day, which is something I could never do with anything else I ever wrote in terms of fiction and short stories.

So there is a real freedom in that, then?

There is, and amazingly enough, I’ve always been – I was blind to it, but I’ve always been a non-fiction reader. Whenever I come to a book shop, it’s biography, history; I’ll read anything. Some of my favorite books are just off-beat; Sammy Davis Jr.’s first autobiography, Gloria Swanson’s autobiography, Swanson on Swanson. This sort of stuff, I’ll read. I lent you a book on Willem de Kooning, which you gave back to me…

I didn’t read it.

You looked at the pictures.

I didn’t even look at the pictures. It was a door stop.

You sat on it maybe as a cushion? [laughs] I’ll read a really thick book on Willem de Kooning, that’s got really good reviews. I’ll read that, and I have a passing interest in his art, but I love the story and things will come out to me that will be a lot like de Kooning, one of the great 20th Century artists; he didn’t have his first solo show until he was 45. I found that amazing. I found that enriching, and a great fact to know. I’ve always been a biography reader so it’s really no surprise that I enjoy dealing in facts with a little bit of imagination as opposed to, you know, “Cecilia Page lived down at Redcliffe Pier and had 15 children…”. I don’t just leap off into a story. It seems beyond me.

The biography thing, one thing I particularly like in the book is the Normie Rowe piece, which is one of two pieces of fiction in the book. The other piece of fiction is quite light, and almost a little folly, or something. I feel like the Normie Rowe thing I really quite substantial in some ways, yet at the same time, it’s almost a mock-autobiography or something. Is that something that you think you would pursue more?

I do, I can imagine writing an ‘I’ - first person biography - that you would think would be my life, but would be entirely someone else’s life. I like playing with that idea. I’ve got another one that is similar to “The Coronation of Normie Rowe”, which is in the book, called “Art World”, which places me as an artist in New York. And I know Robert Hughes, and I’m painting people up on the Upper West Side, and I have nothing to do with the downtown art scene. I started [writing] this, and it has nothing to do with my life, but I do all of this and I’m hanging out with people, and they’re real names, so that it feels real and that it’s historically correct, but the whole thing is a pretense. And I like that.

I like that too. I’d read that, unlike that Willem de Kooning book! That’s great. There was something else I was thinking. It’s a bit like a song, in a way.

It is. With my songwriting, it stays quite close to what I do. I don’t have any songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby‘. There isn’t anything like that in anything other than my back catalogue. There is nothing. I have to be careful with this because I’m scared that I’m just throwing my life at people all the time, so I try and disguise it and play with a little bit so it’s not just one long 30-year confessional. I try to play with it. I don’t really do leaps off into characters.

One of the pieces that was in The Monthly, reasonably recently, was a review of the two David McComb books. Would you like to talk about him, and those for a minute? That was a beautiful piece. I really liked that.

David McComb from The Triffids [pictured right]. Amazingly enough, they were one band that Grant and I, in the late ‘70s, we didn’t feel like there was any other band in Australia that was really close. We read about in Ram Magazine or something – this is 1979 or 1980 - about this band over in Perth who were into The Velvet Underground and Dylan, and also Talking Heads and Television, and Grant and I went “okay!” This is years before we met them. We had a feeling about the band before we starting playing shows with them.

We played a lot of shows in Australia with The Triffids when they lived in Sydney in the early ‘80s. I wasn’t really all that close to David. I played tennis with his brother Robert, and that’s a strange way. I guess it’s history now, but you play tennis with Robert McComb, the brother, and I was a lot closer to him than I was to David, although David was the other songwriter in a band like myself.

Yeah, not particularly easy to know, either. He was a little aloof.

Yeah, he was, but I liked David a great deal. There’s a book about David McComb called Vagabond Holes, and I write a remembrance of it. It’s based on three songs. I once ran into David on the streets of Darlinghurst in 1983, ’84. The Triffids had just put out a record, I think it was an EP, and it had a song called “Red Pony” on it, which I loved. When I ran into David, it was very early in Darlinghurst Streets. I’ll play “Darlinghurst Nights” next.

I ran into David on the street at about 8:00 in the morning and I said to him how much I liked “Red Pony”, if he’d show it to me on guitar. I was at a house about two days later and he knocked on the door and he had a guitar. He played me the song and it was a beautiful moment that he just remembered, and he came around, and he found out where I was, and he played me this song.

There was a drunken party about three years later in London. It was a drunken party and I was drunk, and I went up to David and they’d just put out ‘Born Sandy Devotional‘ and I said, “I really love ‘Wide Open Road’. Would you play it to me sometime? He said, “Now!”. We walked into a bedroom, this crazy ‘Australians in London’ party, and he just sat on the bed and I sort of crouched down and he played me ‘Wide Open Road’ on a guitar. Then it was like, “Okay, we can go back to the party.”

I was just watching his hands. I can’t play it now, but it was these big strummy chords. And the third song is in 1995 or 1996 I was playing down in the Continental Café, which is a venue down in Melbourne. He was DJing that night and I was playing acoustically by myself. I knew David was DJing on that night, and just before I went on he played this song called “Mississippi” which is off an album and he and I both loved. It’s by John Phillips from the Mamas & The Papas, who put out a great solo album called “Wolf King of L.A.”, which he wrote a biography many years later which he devoted half a page to this record. It’s a fantastic solo record. I love the record and so does David. We used to talk about it. He played a song from it just before I went on stage, which was a really lovely “hello”.

That night, after the end of that show, ’95-’96, I was staying at a hotel in town and he and his girlfriend drove me into town because I was going to get a taxi and he and his girlfriend said, “No, we’ll drive you into town.” We went into the city and I got out of the car to say goodbye and said I’d take my bags, thanks for driving me into town. I walked around the back of the car, and I got my guitar – this guitar, actually – and my bag out, and David was standing there. I said, “Thank you for dropping me off, thanks for DJing, thanks for playing ‘Mississippi’” and he got in the car, and that was the last time I ever saw him. He died about three years later, but he was great.

I’ll play ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, dedicated to David McComb. [From the 2005 album'Oceans Apart'. I couldn't find a video of the song, unfortunately.]

John: Maybe I should open it up a bit and invite questions. I’ve talked enough. Would anybody like to ask Robert a question?

Audience: My name is Jenny Watson, and I did the album art for [The Go-Betweens album] ‘Send Me A Lullaby’ [pictured left]. Robert, I want to ask a question about when you walked into my flat and saw those small canvas paintings, and I’d only had five exhibitions and you said, “You’re doing our next album cover”. Are you usually that decisive in your business dealings? Because you were more decisive than any top-notch art dealer, I can tell you!

Thank you, Jenny. I try and follow my instincts. That has got me into trouble at times.

John: Are you impetuous?

Not impetuous, but it’s like the idea of Brisbane is LA 1965, 1966; how far do you take that?

John: All the way, baby!

Oh well, it can get you into trouble and you can find that you’re trying to do something that the rest of the world doesn’t understand, which could be difficult. No, I try and – also the other thing is when I see great work before me, I always hope that I recognise it. I did on that circumstance, and I try and do that whenever I can.

John: It’s a big thing, isn’t it, Jenny, having some of your work put on somebody’s album cover and spread around the world.

Jenny: It was fantastic. It was in a book called ‘The Best 500 Record Covers in Rock and Roll’. Thanks for the publicity!

John: Anybody else have a comment, statement, or a question?

Audience: I’m really interested in the fact that the writing in this book is so beautiful. Just if you pick it up and read the first essay, you’ll realise that you’re in the hands of a master writer here. Stuart Glover, who is head of creating writing at the University of Queensland, said exactly the same thing. I wonder when you said that you will read any non-fiction; do you have non-fiction work that you won’t read? Do you have a filter where you say the writing has to be of great quality, or is it just the subject for you?

No, there has to be quality with it. A great biography writer is someone like Richard Elman, who wrote a very good book on Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce. He’s one of the masters. John Richardson, at the moment, is writing a great biography. It’s his third volume on the life of Picasso. They’re fantastic books. There has to be a certain standard to keep me there, but I think it can also go – and something that I’ve always been interested in, is going-high brow and low-brow. It’s not indiscriminate taste, but I see value broadly, but there is a limit. I do have an autobiography of Shaun Cassidy, which I bought at an art shop, which I refuse to read. This was published in the mid ‘70s. I don’t touch it.

Knowing you have it is enough.

It is.

No Alain de Botton, any of that sort of stuff?

No, no.

What about the Dylan book? That’s an interesting autobiography, isn’t it?

‘Chronicles‘? Yeah, I leapt on that, and that is a great book. In a rough way, I template if and when I write something that’s biographical about myself; that would be a book that I would always have in mind. I think Dylan’s done an astounding job on that book.

There is something surprising about it, in that style.

It is.

Would you like to be that unpredictable, I suppose, or it’s not impetuous.

No, I think if I did write – I wouldn’t write my autobiography, I don’t think, but if I wrote something biographical I think I would have to, in a way, break the mold or play with the form the same way I have done with The Monthly, the same way I have with that song I just played, “Darlinghurst Nights”, which doesn’t really conform to many rules as a song. It’s melodic and has a sense of poetry and information giving about it, which are all important to me, but if I did write something like that, then I would like to certainly play with the form. It’s not going to start, “It was a blue day in Brisbane in the 29th of June, 1957 when Robert Forster came into the world.” I can’t do that.

I’d buy that. Do you ever feel like you have nothing to say? Sometimes, do you ever feel, “I have nothing to say”?

No, unfortunately I don’t find myself in that position.

John: That was very quick. [laughs] Anybody else out there have a question?

Audience: On ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, I want to thank you, because that’s such an evocative song. Thank you for playing it. As a long-term resident of Darlinghurst in those years, I saw the Go-Betweens play their first show there in 1980, at the Paris Theatre, where Grant played with his back to the audience most of the night.

Really? See, this was the first show that the Go-Betweens ever played in Sydney at the Paris Theatre in 1980. The Paris Theatre has now been demolished. The bill for this night was The Go-Betweens on first, the Laughing Clowns on second, and The Birthday Party on third. It was a great bill. We’d actually headed down by train – Lindy [Morrison], Grant [McLennan], myself - and we went to the back of the Paris Theatre. We didn’t know anyone and we sat in the stalls in the darkness and watched the Birthday Party and the Laughing Clowns [half of the band pictured right] sound check.

We were completely spooked. We just wanted to crawl out of that theatre and get back on the train and come back to Brisbane. We stayed and played, but I did a signing yesterday in Newtown and I met someone else – the first time, in almost 30 years, I met someone that was at that show. That’s the first time in 30 years, and now you’re the second. That’s amazing.

John: I’m surprised you remembered.

Was there a question? I’m sorry, I’ve just taken off.

Audience: I’m glad to hear that. I’ve just wondered if you’d been to Darlinghurst in recent years, and what it evokes today when you go there?

I have been. It’s quite different because in the early ‘80s, the roads coming up on the hill, like Taylor Square, a street going down to Williams Street. Crown Street had one-way traffic that was like a blitz going through all hours of the day. There is a lot more traffic, life, and noise in Darlinghurst. I’ve been there 5 years ago and it was very quiet. Is it better or worse? I don’t know, but it was the early ‘80s when we were there. It was very active, and there were a lot of people that I knew living around that area.

Audience:Two weeks ago I walked from Central up through to Taylor Square, through all these old streets and lanes that I used to walk through. It’s very quiet now. It’s quite dull, really.

It is. There used to be “No-Names”, the restaurant, but it used to be the place outside The Cross in Sydney where you could get a coffee. Reggio…?

Audience:Reggio is still there, I think.

They used to sell very, very strong coffee there that would keep you up for about three days. A lot of people create a lot of work on this; it was high-octane coffee. It was like one or two cups of this stuff and you’d honestly be chain smoking ten cigarettes and you’d be up for about three days.

John: Babbling in Italian.

Ed Kuepper used to drink a lot of those! A lot of Laughing Clowns material was written on this coffee that Ed was drinking down there.

John:I gave up alcohol and drugs at one point, and the thing that I survived on for the next few years was ‘duplos’, like double, short, blacks from Darlinghurst. I didn’t mean to say that thing about the, you know, with the ‘D’… Has anybody else got any questions they might like to ask?

We’ll make this the last question.

Audience:It’s kind of two questions. Is there something you won’t review, and also how did you make the selection for what when into this book?

There are things I won’t review. I was very wary of Australian artists for the first two or three years when I was reviewing for The Monthly. I was almost scared. If you look at the reviews that I did in The Monthly for the first couple of years, a lot of it is overseas. It’s almost like I was careful and as I said before, I didn’t want to come in with this ‘boots ‘n’ all’ attitude.

I feel a lot more comfortable with it now, like this year I wrote a big review on Paul Kelly’s double CD about his career, which I would have never done the first two years. I wouldn’t have had the confidence. It was quite natural. I saw the record in Rockinghorse, on the wall, and I went, “I can do that,” which I wouldn’t have been able to do before. There are certain areas I don’t go within Australian music because I know the people and I don’t really want to go there. What’s the second part of the question?

Audience:How did you make the decision for what when into the book?

Some of the things I left out were the reviews I wrote in the first year. I re-read them and I think I started settling into a rhythm about eight months in, where I thought I was writing well. I started to keep them. There is not much from the first eight months. I dropped quite a few things. I think also, at that stage, when I started writing for The Monthly in April 2005, The Go-Betweens were just putting out ‘Oceans Apart‘ which would be the last album. The Franz Ferdinand piece, I remember I wrote a lot of it in a hotel in Madrid, a day off. I had to send it back to Melbourne.

I dropped the Bill Callahan one, which is all over the place. It’s about a Smog album. Right now, it takes me two weeks to write them. I don’t know how I did this, but I wrote the complete Smog review in a hotel in Canberra, and we were playing that night. I wrote the whole thing; woke up, knew I had to do it, spent the whole day in a motor inn, in Canberra in my pajamas, and just had people delivering coffee. I knew I had to be at the sound check at 4:30pm. I got out of bed around 9am. I listened to the record quite a few times and I just wrote the whole day.

I think William Holden could play you in a movie!

There’d have to be a couple of whiskey bottles then, I think. But no, I left that out [of the book]. To me, when I read it again, it read like it was written in pajamas on a lot of coffee, in a Canberra motor inn, in one day. I just thought “no, that can’t go in”. I think after the first 8 months, I think I’m a lot more consistent. There are a couple of pieces that I left out after, where I just failed.

The other thing that I have to admit is I started this at 48. I wrote a piece on Lucinda Williams’ ‘West’ album about two years ago. I just didn’t get it. It was messy when I handed it in, and I just failed. That happened one other time as well. I’m not a journalist that’s had 15 years experience, done university, worked at The Courier-Mail, worked at Sydney Morning Herald, done stuff overseas. I’m not that journalist. I’m still failing. I’m still messy, and I still miss what I’m trying to get at, every now and again.

You’re getting better.

I am getting better, but it’s still scary. Month by month.

Thank you very much, Robert Forster.

Thank you. Thank you for coming along. I appreciate it. John Wilsteed, everyone!

Fiona: Robert, Avid Reader would really like to thank you because you had a sell-out session last week, and because of the sell-out you agreed to a second session. You’ve had 200 people in Avid Reader listen to you, which has never happened in the history of Avid before. Thank you so much for your generosity.

Thank you for coming along!

More on Avid Reader at their website; more on Robert Forster at his.

Filed under Conversations | Tags: avid-reader, book, Brisbane, conversation, david-mccomb, Interview, john-wilsteed, Journalism, music critic, Music writing, music-criticism, reviews, robert-forster, rock-and-roll, songwriting, ten-rules, the-go-betweens, the-monthly, the-triffids, Writing | Comments (3)

A Conversation With Simon Noynay, illustrator

Melbourne-based Simon Noynay [pictured below right] illustrated my ‘future of the music video‘ story for Rolling Stone, as shown below. His work has also appeared on t-shirts for Threadless [my interview with Art Director Ross Zietz here]. Coincidentally, I wore his ‘drum ‘n bass‘ shirt design last night. Spooky. I asked him some questions about his craft.

Simon, are you a full-time artist and illustrator, or do you work on a freelance basis?

Until recently I was working as a part-time freelance illustrator, but have since joined a commercial illustration agency and heading towards full-time client work.

How did you follow this career path?

I have been drawing since I was five and originally began pursuing a career as a fine artist after high school. Although I’ve been a part of several exhibitions and artist’s residencies, I was searching for other creative avenues where collaboration was more encouraged. I completed a Bachelor of Communication Design last year which helped reinforce my love of illustration and character design. I now enjoy working together with artists of different disciplines, ranging from animation, sculpture, fashion and graphic design.

How did you become an illustrator for Rolling Stone?

I was introduced to the art director of Rolling Stone through my illustration agency. I’ve currently worked on three recent and upcoming issues.

Where else has your work appeared? Who are your regular clients?

My work has appeared in different media and in a variety of styles. From clothing, shoes, magazines, books, installations & tattoos etc. I was also profiled by Art & Australia and NOISE as one of the top 25 artists under 25. While I have had the privilege to create things for clients like Adio, Adobe and Qantas, my regular clients like L.A. clothing label Acrylick and my own character design creation, “The Moops” are my favourite jobs to work on.

Is it difficult to illustrate for briefs? How much do you like to know about a story before you’re comfortable illustrating for it?

On occasion, it can be difficult when there is a lack of clear communication and indecision, nevertheless I enjoy the pressures of deadlines and the overall processes of working with clients and art directors. Sometimes all you have to work with is a short sentence and a few examples; however my illustration thrives under these conditions and the result becomes something surprisingly refreshing compared to my laboured exhibition artwork.

Web or print illustration - do you have a preference?

I love web graphics and animation but my work is usually created for print, so I have to say I prefer that certain thrill of seeing my pieces printed and sometimes wearing them.

What advice would you give to young illustrators looking to work for commercial clients like Rolling Stone?

Show your work to clients you wouldn’t normally approach, talk to art directors and get as much feedback as possible. Also don’t be afraid to experiment with different techniques and points of views.

View more of Simon’s work at huskworks.com. He can be contacted via email.

Filed under Conversations | Tags: conversation, illustration, illustrator, Interview, rolling stone, simon-noynay, the-moops, Threadless | Comment (0)