This Just In: People Working In The Music Business May Have Done Copious Amounts Of Drugs

noah | February 15, 2008 9:30 am

And those drugs may have been the reason that things like the Mike Flowers Pops’ cover of “Wonderwall” were foisted upon an unsuspecting world! I know, I know, you’re all shocked. John Niven, a former A & R man who feels lucky that he got out of the biz and went for a career as a novelist when he did–which should tell you how bad things really are these days–hangs his cocaine-fueled memories of the ’90s, “a glorious last hurrah for the music industry, a spangled fall-of-Rome era,” out to dry for the Times of London today, and boy, are there doozies within. Also, fire-eaters!

I quickly learnt a key fundamental for survival in meetings – say everything with absolute certainty and as though your life depended upon it. I saw a very senior industry figure (someone who, in all likelihood, has signed and developed music which you own) throw the first White Stripes record out of a fourth floor window with the words: “No one will ever – ever – be having this f***ing nonsense!”

I went one further. As the last chords of a mildy hot demo hung in the air I punctured the silence in the conference room with: “Is anyone really going to be having another bunch of sub-Radiohead drivel?” Thus did I terminate our company’s interest in the emerging Coldplay.

Hey, this guy sounds like he could have a career in music writing if he wants it!

As you’ve probably gathered, there was a problem with my A&R career. I was absolutely terrible at it. But then again, so was everyone else. You were a success if you could produce a profitable act every two or three years. Which meant picking the right act just once biennially out of thousands of demos and hundreds of gigs. Of course virtually no one manages this. In a neat twist on “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”, the Wildean epithet about the foxhunting English upper classes, here was the unbelievable in pursuit of the unlistenable.

And pursue we did, jetting off every other month to some exotic location for a “convention”; a scarcely credible four-day holocaust of drugs and expense-account abuse. Miami for the Winter Music Conference, Cannes for MIDEM, Cologne for Pop Komm, New York for CMJ, Texas for South by South West: hundreds of A&R men spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on flights and entertainment. In a good year these conventions might produce one signing of note.

Niven blames the insane profitability of the CD–which supplied record labels with “a profit margin to make Third World sweatshop owners wince”–for the industry’s excesses, but something tells me that these sorts of shenanigans predated the first shiny disc rolling off shelves. Call it a hunch!

‘Til death did we party: the music business in the heady Nineties [Times Online]