Hype é tudo
A revista Q pregou uma bela peça em Alan McGee. É gigante, eu sei, mas é interessante.
Para facilitar sua vida, um resumo: a revista Q inventou uma banda indie chamada Hope Against Hope, botou um moleque e duas meninas com um visual bacana nas fotos de divulgação e criou um perfil no MySpace. Adicionou "amigos" como Editors, CBGB e Dirty Pretty Things e atraiu a atenção do idealizador do selo Creation, distribuidor das bandas shoegazers mais queridas dos indies (My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive) e, posteriormente, descobridor do Oasis, Alan McGee - que chamou a banda para tocar. Só que as músicas foram, na verdade, compostas e tocadas por um bigodudo feio e sem nenhuma cara de mid-20's. O resto você lê ai, que eu não vou entregar tudo assim, de mão beijada.
The Creation myth
The cyber band that fooled Alan McGee is part of a wider worry
Pete Paphides
A mere telephone receiver simply can’t do justice to Alan McGee when the former Creation supremo has the wind in his sails. “They call that ascam? Do me a favour. Let me tell you what a f***ing scam is. A scam is selling your record label for £30 million to Sony (as McGee did when he sold Creation). When I pull off a scam, I walk away millions of pounds richer.”
Of course, the sequence of events that led to McGee being “scammed” by a fake band on MySpace is now a matter of public record. Matt Allen, a writer for Q magazine, set up a page on the online community site (owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times) for a London-based trio called Hope Against Hope. What purported to be the band, though ,was in fact a picture of the magazine’s photogenic work-experience boy and his two mates. And the music playing on the site was actually written and performed by a bearded thirty something songwriter named Howl Griff.
Nevertheless, by contacting bands such as Editors and Dirty Pretty Things (when McGee manages) and accepting them as their “friends”, Hope Against Hope built a profile of fashionable allies. Within weeks, an impressed McGee offered them a gig at his Death Disco club night. Some result for a band that didn’t exist.
This week, then, we have mostly learnt that contriving a grass-roots buzz through MySpace is actually a cinch.
But how naive has McGee really been? He was, after all, just doing his job. When I tell Allen that McGee thinks the magazine has tried to stitch him up, he seems deflated. “That was not the objective. We just wanted to see if the technology harnessed by MySpace was as effective a marketing tool for unsigned bands as it’s supposed to be.”
That being the case, you wonder why Q left it so late to test the hypothesis. When the article finally hits the newsstands Sandi Thom’s I Wish I was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in my Hair) will have already spent a month in the top five — the eventual result of the increasingly popular “virtual concerts” she played earlier this year. The “mature” Los Angeles combo Orson were an American MySpace phenomenon months before No Tomorrow propelled them to the top of the UK charts in March. Artists who, because of their age, looks or sensibility, would normally struggle to wrest a contract out of an A&R man are now amassing fan bases that the industry can’t ignore.
I put it to McGee that if he liked Hope Against Hope’s songs he should have held his nerve and let Griff play at his club. After all, the scam set out to prove that if a band pass as likely-looking contenders, then doors start to open for them. He dismisses the idea out of hand.
“I hope he isn’t upset,” says Griff later. “It’s not like I wrote those songs as a joke.”
Though Griff says the experience has been “broadly positive”, a nagging doubt remains — one that the Hope Against Hope episode has magnified. If you don’t look the part, can any amount of talent get you into the musicindustry? Griff’s real MySpace site has more “friends” than that of Hope Against Hope, but he has yet to generate the kind of buzz that Q’sfictional band achieved merely by briefly playing the game.
“What it shows,” says Allen, “is the amount of trust that exists on sites like MySpace, MyNME and bebo. You can reinvent yourself, reinvent your own story and people take you at your word. I don’t know that that’s such a bad thing if the music stands up.”
Subtract cyberspace from the equation and it’s not such a new thing either. Made-up bands have, in fact, been part of pop mythology for decades. Milli Vanilli famously had to return a Grammy when they confessed that they hadn’t sung on their records. The Archies were invented by the Monkees’ executive producer Don Kirshner in a fit of pique after his group deemed Sugar Sugar too awful to record.
One presumably quiet week in 1970, Simon Napier-Bell, the manager of the Yardbirds and Marc Bolan, hatched a ruse to see how much money he could extract from a major label for a band that didn’t exist. Falling into line with the suedehead/hooligan chic of the day, Napier-Bell and his business partner Ray Singer roped in three likely-looking young men to front Borstal and landed a deal with RCA.
Napier-Bell and Singer then set about getting some songs written and performed by a variety of established musicians. The resulting album, Straight out of Borstal, has become a prized artefact among DJs, thanks to its sought-after drum breaks.
Often, bands that are a mere idea set off a feeding frenzy, and hurriedly have to satisfy it by making up a few songs. The Britpop coat hangers Menswear formed in a Camden pub before intense media interest forced them to write some songs. On reflection, they would have been better off getting someone uglier but more talented to do the tricky bit for them.
It’s an ineluctable reality of pop that some perfectly good, possibly ugly, singer-songwriters don’t have enough of what the A&R manager of one major label calls “a story” — some defining feature that makes record buyers want to associate with them — to justify a label’s investment.
There’s no point in blaming A&R men for this state of affairs. It has probably always been like this. But at the same time, good music is surely good music. Are punters really so unforgiving if your face doesn’t fit? I ask my A&R man if he might spare some time to listen to some rather Zeitgeistig suburban new wave tunes I recently discovered on a band’s MySpace site. I’ve already played them to a few people: three teenage relatives, as well as Sounds’ work-experience indie kids – Jamie and Tom, both aged 14. The response has been positive. But what does the man from the record label think? He’s impressed too. “It’s right up my street,” he avers. Then, he breaks into a smile. He’s already been on the band’s MySpace site and noticed it doesn’t have a picture. “So what’s the catch?” As he suspected, there is kind of a catch. The songs uploaded by Dog Remover (not their real name) on to their MySpace site are newly recorded 1978 compositions by a 52-year-old Glaswegian who fears that revealing his real identity might diminish the buzz surrounding them.
He might have a point, too. When I tell the A&R man the story, his response is nothing if not frank. “At the moment, that makes it a hard thing to get behind, obviously.”
Not enough of a “story”? Tom and Jamie aren’t so sure about that: “He’s 52? Wow! That’s so cool. I’d check his band out.”
“Is that what they said?” ponders the A&R man. “Well, that’s encouraging. MySpace has obviously served him well, but the virtual world can only help you so much. At some point this guy is going to have to declare himself. If he does that and then starts to pack out venues, that might become the story.”
Links:
www.myspace.com/howlgriff
www.myspace.com/hopeagainsthoperock
Matéria Times: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14932-2238042,00.html
Matéria The Independent: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/news/article1090387.ece
Para facilitar sua vida, um resumo: a revista Q inventou uma banda indie chamada Hope Against Hope, botou um moleque e duas meninas com um visual bacana nas fotos de divulgação e criou um perfil no MySpace. Adicionou "amigos" como Editors, CBGB e Dirty Pretty Things e atraiu a atenção do idealizador do selo Creation, distribuidor das bandas shoegazers mais queridas dos indies (My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive) e, posteriormente, descobridor do Oasis, Alan McGee - que chamou a banda para tocar. Só que as músicas foram, na verdade, compostas e tocadas por um bigodudo feio e sem nenhuma cara de mid-20's. O resto você lê ai, que eu não vou entregar tudo assim, de mão beijada.
The Creation myth
The cyber band that fooled Alan McGee is part of a wider worry
Pete Paphides
A mere telephone receiver simply can’t do justice to Alan McGee when the former Creation supremo has the wind in his sails. “They call that ascam? Do me a favour. Let me tell you what a f***ing scam is. A scam is selling your record label for £30 million to Sony (as McGee did when he sold Creation). When I pull off a scam, I walk away millions of pounds richer.”
Of course, the sequence of events that led to McGee being “scammed” by a fake band on MySpace is now a matter of public record. Matt Allen, a writer for Q magazine, set up a page on the online community site (owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times) for a London-based trio called Hope Against Hope. What purported to be the band, though ,was in fact a picture of the magazine’s photogenic work-experience boy and his two mates. And the music playing on the site was actually written and performed by a bearded thirty something songwriter named Howl Griff.
Nevertheless, by contacting bands such as Editors and Dirty Pretty Things (when McGee manages) and accepting them as their “friends”, Hope Against Hope built a profile of fashionable allies. Within weeks, an impressed McGee offered them a gig at his Death Disco club night. Some result for a band that didn’t exist.
This week, then, we have mostly learnt that contriving a grass-roots buzz through MySpace is actually a cinch.
But how naive has McGee really been? He was, after all, just doing his job. When I tell Allen that McGee thinks the magazine has tried to stitch him up, he seems deflated. “That was not the objective. We just wanted to see if the technology harnessed by MySpace was as effective a marketing tool for unsigned bands as it’s supposed to be.”
That being the case, you wonder why Q left it so late to test the hypothesis. When the article finally hits the newsstands Sandi Thom’s I Wish I was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in my Hair) will have already spent a month in the top five — the eventual result of the increasingly popular “virtual concerts” she played earlier this year. The “mature” Los Angeles combo Orson were an American MySpace phenomenon months before No Tomorrow propelled them to the top of the UK charts in March. Artists who, because of their age, looks or sensibility, would normally struggle to wrest a contract out of an A&R man are now amassing fan bases that the industry can’t ignore.
I put it to McGee that if he liked Hope Against Hope’s songs he should have held his nerve and let Griff play at his club. After all, the scam set out to prove that if a band pass as likely-looking contenders, then doors start to open for them. He dismisses the idea out of hand.
“I hope he isn’t upset,” says Griff later. “It’s not like I wrote those songs as a joke.”
Though Griff says the experience has been “broadly positive”, a nagging doubt remains — one that the Hope Against Hope episode has magnified. If you don’t look the part, can any amount of talent get you into the musicindustry? Griff’s real MySpace site has more “friends” than that of Hope Against Hope, but he has yet to generate the kind of buzz that Q’sfictional band achieved merely by briefly playing the game.
“What it shows,” says Allen, “is the amount of trust that exists on sites like MySpace, MyNME and bebo. You can reinvent yourself, reinvent your own story and people take you at your word. I don’t know that that’s such a bad thing if the music stands up.”
Subtract cyberspace from the equation and it’s not such a new thing either. Made-up bands have, in fact, been part of pop mythology for decades. Milli Vanilli famously had to return a Grammy when they confessed that they hadn’t sung on their records. The Archies were invented by the Monkees’ executive producer Don Kirshner in a fit of pique after his group deemed Sugar Sugar too awful to record.
One presumably quiet week in 1970, Simon Napier-Bell, the manager of the Yardbirds and Marc Bolan, hatched a ruse to see how much money he could extract from a major label for a band that didn’t exist. Falling into line with the suedehead/hooligan chic of the day, Napier-Bell and his business partner Ray Singer roped in three likely-looking young men to front Borstal and landed a deal with RCA.
Napier-Bell and Singer then set about getting some songs written and performed by a variety of established musicians. The resulting album, Straight out of Borstal, has become a prized artefact among DJs, thanks to its sought-after drum breaks.
Often, bands that are a mere idea set off a feeding frenzy, and hurriedly have to satisfy it by making up a few songs. The Britpop coat hangers Menswear formed in a Camden pub before intense media interest forced them to write some songs. On reflection, they would have been better off getting someone uglier but more talented to do the tricky bit for them.
It’s an ineluctable reality of pop that some perfectly good, possibly ugly, singer-songwriters don’t have enough of what the A&R manager of one major label calls “a story” — some defining feature that makes record buyers want to associate with them — to justify a label’s investment.
There’s no point in blaming A&R men for this state of affairs. It has probably always been like this. But at the same time, good music is surely good music. Are punters really so unforgiving if your face doesn’t fit? I ask my A&R man if he might spare some time to listen to some rather Zeitgeistig suburban new wave tunes I recently discovered on a band’s MySpace site. I’ve already played them to a few people: three teenage relatives, as well as Sounds’ work-experience indie kids – Jamie and Tom, both aged 14. The response has been positive. But what does the man from the record label think? He’s impressed too. “It’s right up my street,” he avers. Then, he breaks into a smile. He’s already been on the band’s MySpace site and noticed it doesn’t have a picture. “So what’s the catch?” As he suspected, there is kind of a catch. The songs uploaded by Dog Remover (not their real name) on to their MySpace site are newly recorded 1978 compositions by a 52-year-old Glaswegian who fears that revealing his real identity might diminish the buzz surrounding them.
He might have a point, too. When I tell the A&R man the story, his response is nothing if not frank. “At the moment, that makes it a hard thing to get behind, obviously.”
Not enough of a “story”? Tom and Jamie aren’t so sure about that: “He’s 52? Wow! That’s so cool. I’d check his band out.”
“Is that what they said?” ponders the A&R man. “Well, that’s encouraging. MySpace has obviously served him well, but the virtual world can only help you so much. At some point this guy is going to have to declare himself. If he does that and then starts to pack out venues, that might become the story.”
Links:
www.myspace.com/howlgriff
www.myspace.com/hopeagainsthoperock
Matéria Times: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14932-2238042,00.html
Matéria The Independent: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/news/article1090387.ece
posted by Gabriela R. Almeida at 9:18 PM
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