Where are you off to?” asks my visiting father-in-law. “I’m off to see this
singer called Duffy. She’s going to be huge in 2008,” I say. He seems
momentarily disappointed that I know this already – as though I’m party to
some huge music-business fix.
“How do you know?” he asks. Beyond her being a great singer, I itemise the
industry buzz for him. Key to it all is the fact that Radios 1 and 2 love
her – a surefire indicator. Indeed, pending her availability for Woman’s
Hour and her form in those vital preseason friendlies, it would be
unwise to rule out Radios 3, 4 and 5Live.
Predicting the next big thing isn’t quite the gamble it once was. While
working for Melody Maker and Time Out in the mid1990s, I was
perpetually encouraged to unearth new artists ahead of everyone else. There
were some bad years. The year I tipped Northern Uproar – 1996, I think – was
not an auspicious one. At Melody Maker in 1992 I “got” Radiohead
early, which just about made up for the review of Oasis’s first single in
which I said that they sounded like a thick Blur (I know – they sound
nothing like Blur).
Probably my most prescient year, though, was 1995. Having been told by the
American Dust Brothers to desist from calling themselves the same thing, the
Chemical Brothers had to hastily think of a new name in time for their
appearance in our feature. I was the first person to hear their new name. I
also picked Supergrass and Catatonia – all of whom went on to justify my
faith, more so, at any rate, than Delicatessen and ROC did.
Ten years ago there was more scope for genuine surprises. John Peel existed,
which meant that John Peel sessions also existed for bands who didn’t have
to rely on the whims of a London-based industry. Admittedly, you can always
attempt to become a MySpace phenomenon, but even MySpace phenomena have to
look the part for an industry that will sign a band only if they can be
marketed in, and beyond, this country. For that to happen, certain factors
all need to be in place: radio, TV, the music press and, increasingly, the
tabloids.
This time last year, I told you that the baggy Birmingham Britpop of the Twang
would do pretty well. Years ago I used to flatter myself into thinking that
I was part of the weather that was making the weather vane go about its
business. Where a band like the Twang were concerned, I knew my job was
essentially that of the rusty old cock atop a spire, merely drawing your
attention to what the vane was saying.
The head of music at Radio 1, George Ergatoudis, had told me that he was a
fan, so signing them presented a minimal risk to their label, B Unique. Even
if the Twang didn’t go supernova this year, the support of Radio 1 ensured
that they had any sort of a year at all. Rumours about a memo circulated to
record companies by Ergatoudis – basically saying: “You might want to talk
to me before investing money in what you believe to be the next big thing” –
were never substantiated. But there’s a certain amount of sense in the idea.
The industry trend predictors Entertainment Media Research recently conducted
research to discover a song by a new band that could be proved to activate a
positive response among the most lucrative section of music fans, women
between 25 and 30. After listening to music by 250 emerging groups, their
research led them to Hope and Pray, the debut single by Van Tramp, a
shuffling lost-love lament with an undeniably strong tune. Hope and Pray
scored a colossal 40 per cent “love” rating among this key demograph – twice
the bench-mark required for a hit and well in excess of ratings achieved by
other female faves such as Paolo Nutini and James Blunt.
The founder of Entertainment Media Research, Peter Ruppert, is clearly
exasperated by the lack of interest in the song by radio stations. “Surely,
it’s their job to serve the tastes of the public? I really don’t know why
they haven’t played it. All the evidence is there.”
Ruppert has science on his side, but only when you see a picture of Van Tramp
do you realise why his research may have yielded poor results up to this
point. Van Tramp appear to have been so named because they look like tramps
who live in a van. Whatever the Twang lacked musically, their appearance
suggested a faint awareness that the new century had begun.
But doesn’t it all come down to the music? Well, no, it never just comes down
to the music. Corinne Bailey Rae’s passage from obscurity has given her
music an air of life-style accessory that might ultimately prove
problematic. But it’s not in the music.
It’s actually very difficult to listen to music in isolation. The subsonic hum
of a good or bad back-story also plays its part. Eva Cassidy wouldn’t have
been gazing down from the apex of this year’s Christmas charts if every
single note you heard by her was not somehow enhanced by the tragedy of her
story. In the Swinging London music-biz film Smashing Time, Rita
Tushingham’s Svengali boss can be seen telling her: “And broaden up your
northern accent. Remember, you worked in a mill!”
My favourite album of the past year is the one that the modal folk-rock
Glaswegians Lucky Luke haven’t found anyone to release. Given that they look
much better than Van Tramp, this turn of events is frankly mystifying. It
might be that there just isn’t enough of a story around them to prompt a
label to make the gamble.
Some new bands, on the other hand, offer little more than novelty taped to a
couple of hastily written songs before the entire music industry whips
itself into a frenzy over their very existence. In the summer of 1995
Menswear seemed like a good idea. They could have been the Britpop Monkees,
but they insisted on writing their own songs and that was pretty much the
end of that.
There are lessons to be learnt here – hello, the Horrors – but some bands (or
just as frequently, the people around them) won’t listen to them until it’s
too late. The older you get, the more you feel like a sad-eyed Cassandra
attempting to alert naive young bands to the idea that the battle has only
just begun once they have signed a record or publishing deal. One of the
sadder artefacts in my record collection is an album by the Montrose Avenue.
I met their frontman by chance in the bar at ULU and asked him what his
favourite chord was. He said E minor, which was mine too. He sent me a demo
of songs that suggested he was channelling the spirit of the genius Byrd
Gene Clark. One of them had a harpsichord solo (and can be downloaded free
on the band’s posthumous MySpace site). They signed to Sony and toured.
I pointed out that, come the debut album, an American producer such as Mitch
Easter might be best able to bring out their lovely jingle-jangle mourning.
But Sony made them work with Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, chiefly known
for having made such a pig’s ear of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey.
It sounded ten times more expensive and a hundred times worse than their
demos.
Some bands never get over that initial collapse of expectations. For a group
such as the Twang, 2008 is actually far more important than the year they’ve
just had. This is where the fight really begins. For those who keep going
though, such adversity at least provides life experience that can be
channelled into the music.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in 15 years of trying to identify the next
big thing, it is never to give up on a band. Who, in 1993, knew what
Radiohead would go on to do? Who, after Blur’s debut, could have foreseen
what Damon Albarn might achieve? Even if your hot tip doesn’t come up with
the goods in the next year, it’s worth remembering that this is a marathon,
not a sprint. And besides, Northern Uproar have just reformed. I may yet be
vindicated.
POP
GABRIELLA CILMI
After five years spent writing songs for Girls Aloud, it’s about time that the
Xenomania hit factory found another muse to lavish their talents upon. Are
Gabriella Cilmi’s 16-year-old shoulders big enough to carry that burden?
“You don’t feel any great weight of responsibility when you work with them,”
assures the teenager, born to second-generation Italian parents in
Melbourne. “They just call you in and make it clear that they want you to be
just as involved in the writing process as they are. The first day we worked
together, we seemed to hit it off. We got through a lot of Green &
Blacks chocolate on that first day.”
For the record, Cilmi’s favourite Green & Blacks flavour is “dark
with cherries” – a point worth dwelling on if only for the fact that it
shows you that her tastes are mature for her years. Like her emerging peers
Adele and Duffy, her deep soul timbre also belies her years. “We had a lot
of Janis Joplin and Blondie playing in the house when we grew up,” she says.
“So I just sang along.
“Then later I got up on stage at a fundraising event within the Italian
community in Melbourne. I think I did Jumping Jack Flash. It just so
happens that someone who works for [the Australian label] Mushroom was
present. And it all snowballed from there.”
She may be a fan of Janis Joplin but it’s a relief to report that her
pop-savvy collaboration with Xenomania leaves little room for cathartic
patchouli-scented blueswailing. Neither does she sound like Girls Aloud. Sanctuary
is a nice little yearner that sounds like a summer hit in the making.
Meanwhile, the naggingly memorable loop that orbits the chorus of the new
single Sweet About Me should make light work of haring up the Alist
and both Radios 1 and 2. Why can’t it always be this easy?
“It feels like a wonderful adventure at the moment. The only problem is that
I’ve taken the chocolate as a good omen, so I haven’t stopped eating it. I
must have eaten a ton since arriving here.”
PP
WILD BEASTS
“We come from Kendal. We should be used to the cold,” says Wild Beasts’
curly-haired guitarist Ben Little. But there’s no avoiding the fact that the
quartet – huddled around four cups of coffee beside the Festival Hall – seem
faintly startled by the December conditions.
Though the band formed “about three years ago”, their friendship dates back
over ten years. “We all went to school together,” says the singer, Hayden
Thorpe, “which might explain why we probably sound like we inhabit our own
little world.”
At the epicentre of that world lies Thorpe’s poperatic vocal manner, which,
encouragingly, is already beginning to elicit Marmite-style reactions in
those who hear it. In time, you suspect that he will be regarded with the
sort of esteem people now reserve for stylists such as Russell Mael, of
Sparks, and the Associates’ Billy Mackenzie. Around him, his band are apt to
oscillate between a falling-apart funk clatter and cascadingly catchy
art-pop.
After two excellent singles, they attracted the attention of Domino Records,
which seized the chance to lavish some of its Arctic Monkeys thousands on
the Wild Beasts. The first result of the liaison is a single entitled Assembly,
whose warped yet catchy melody line calls to mind Julian Cope’s famous quote
about his old band the Teardrop Explodes: “I listen back to our music and I
hear four disturbed individuals attempting to disguise themselves as a pop
group.”
Wild Beasts put it down to musical differences. Most bands split up as a
result of them, but they claim to have formed because of them. “I don’t
think there’s a single record that we all individually own,” says the
drummer Chris Talbot.
“Are you sure about that?” says Thorpe.
“Have you got What’s Going On?” asks Little with brisk
alacrity.
“No,” says Thorpe. “Well, there you go,” concludes the guitarist, his point
apparently proved.
PP
YEASAYER
A 7.30pm slot opening for Arcade Fire isn’t the easiest show to pull off.
Alert Yeasayer, from Brooklyn, New York, to the fact and it seems not to
occur to them that the set they have just played might have sent electric
currents of apprehension coursing through the veins of more nervous new
bands. “Once the music begins, you tend to lose any sense of people watching
you,” says the band’s co-vocalist and electronics wiz, Chris Keating, the
one member of the band who demurs from calling himself a proper musician.
Critics have been won over by the group’s four-part harmonies and intangibly
exotic reconfiguration of influences that run the gamut from prog rock to
electronica. A bizarre common history in barber-shop quartets unites them
all, as does a love of Brian Eno.
There’s an anti-parochialism to them that, among other things, helps to
explain their utter bafflement when the subject of Arctic Monkeys comes up.
“What the hell is that about?” enquires the band’s bassist, Ira Wolf Tuton.
“They sound like an average high-school band. I was reading a well-respected
British rock magazine that said their debut album was the best debut of all
time. I don’t understand where this news comes from.”
Such talk may seem a little hubristic were it not for the fact that Yeasayer’s
album All Hours Cymbals is a startlingly assured debut – in
particular, the otherworldly harmonic pull of tunes such as 2080 and
the magnificently heavy Wintertime.
Having got this far without paying much heed to fashion, they don’t intend to
start now. The singer and guitarist Anand Wilder has written a musical about
coal mining that will probably comprise their next album. The immediate
intention is to give up the day jobs. Wilder and Keating still occasionally
supplement their work in the band by driving trucks for Saturday Night
Live, while Tuton’s carpentry for the Manhattan apartments of clients
such as Kanye West has made him a much sought-after artisan. “It was kind of
odd working on that project,” he recalls. “We’d put a lot of work into it,
then he would decide he wanted something completely different. You develop a
kind of zen fatalism after a while.”
PP
JAZZ AND WORLD
EMPIRICAL
Britain is not short of clever young jazz musicians. The Portico Quartet have
made an exhilarating album as they move from busking to real gigs under
roofs. There’s the fearsomely virtuosic pianist Gwilym Simcock and the more
pop-minded Neil Cowley. But if I were a jazz promoter who had to back his
hunches with hard cash, the surest bet would be Empirical.
The five-piece London-based band have evolved out of Tomorrow’s Warriors and
their debut album was produced by Courtney Pine, so they have lots of
pedigree. What they play is not strikingly new – you’ll hear echoes of Art
Blakey in their finely tuned postbop sound – but you will also hear Ali
Farka Touré and Steve Coleman. In other words, they respect the tradition
but are not enslaved by it. There is a huge verve and energy to their music,
which travels down some unlikely paths.
As the saxophonist Joshua Redman said: “There are a lot of young groups out
there, but not many with their own sound.”
John Bungey
DENGUE FEVER
If there is any justice in pop music, we’ll all catch Dengue Fever before the
year is out. A Los Angeles-based sextet whose lead singer, Chhom Nimol, left
Cambodia at the start of the decade, Dengue Fever have reinvented the
rock’n’roll recorded in Phnom Penh in the early 1970s (imagine Ethiopian
funk meeting Bollywood soundtracks meeting American garage rock).
“I first went to Cambodia in 1998,” says the keyboard player Ethan Holtzman.
“I was travelling on the road to Phnom Penh. All the way the driver was
playing tapes of these old hits. Some of them were incredible.”
It wasn’t until he got back to LA that Holtzman discovered that he lived 20
minutes from the biggest Cambodian community outside the country itself. He
tracked down original recordings and then put a band together to cover them.
Their third album, Venus on Earth, is released at the end of January
and the band are planning to bring their show to Britain in the spring. “The
highlight for us so far was playing Cambodia. It was incredible to see how
famous Nimol is, and then watching the kids’ reaction when I started singing
in Khmer too.”
David Hutcheon
PETER GRANT
Considering he had released two albums by the time he was 20 (the second, Traditional,
came out in the autumn) Peter Grant isn’t exactly an unknown property. But
of all the British singers and musicians to emerge in the past couple of
years, he looks the most likely to break into the mainstream. A
preternaturally confident vocalist who models himself on Harry Connick Jr,
he has all the makings of a performer who can draw in the kind of audience
that drifted away from jazz generations ago.
Raised in Guiseley, Leeds, as a boy he collected albums by such unfashionable
figures as Matt Monro. He was working in clubs by his early teens – inspired
in part by the example of his father, who was himself a professional singer.
What makes Grant’s performances particularly enjoyable is his refusal to be
constrained by the rules. He seems just as comfortable delving into a funk
tune or giving a Beatles standard an R&B makeover. In short, he appears
to be one of those omnivorous souls whose listening tastes cover everything
from Free Jazz to hip-hop. Michael Bublé has shown that a jazz-oriented
vocalist can conquer Wembley Arena. Grant has the potential to follow him
down that road.
Clive Davis
CLASSICAL
ANDRIS NELSONS
Most music critics had not heard of Andris Nelsons two months ago, before
Simon Rattle’s old orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony, gambled on
youth again and appointed him principal conductor. More to the point,
neither had the CBSO players before their management sneaked in the
28-year-old Latvian to conduct an acoustic test three months ago in
Birmingham Town Hall.
It was reportedly love at first sight, and anyone watching Nelsons at work can
see why. Tall, stocky and utterly free of pretension, he exudes musicality
without angst. There’s passion in his expansive, flowing conducting, but
also a determination to probe beneath the contours over which many young
conductors too easily skate.
Born into a musical family in Riga, he trained as an opera singer, then played
trumpet in the Latvian National Opera Orchestra, which he subsequently
conducted for five years (his wife is a glamorous Latvian soprano, Kristine
Opolais, who has already sung Tosca with Barenboim).
Nelsons has also done a stint conducting a mid-league German orchestra and is
signed up to conduct operas in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna.
His chief inspiration is another Latvian conductor, the great Mariss Jansons.
“He’s a teacher who tells you to follow your heart,” Nelsons says. But the
young man’s gestures on the podium suggest that the influence goes far
deeper than that. His conducting technique is a mirror-image of Jansons’s.
So is his way of bringing out the detail in a score without hindering the
flow of energy or inhibiting the players from expressing their own
personalities. Sooner or later, of course, Nelsons will have to shed the
“second Jansons” label.
Meanwhile, with talented young conductors now running orchestras and opera
houses in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, there’s a real sense of
renewed excitement on the classical music scene.
Richard Morrison
SOPHIE CASHELL
The first and only “Classical Star” wears her crown lightly. The 19-year-old
Irish pianist, who scooped the top gong in the BBC’s recent talent show, is
about to go into the recording studio for her first album (due out in March
on Universal). But what’s her long-term game plan?
“You have to prove you’re worthy of people wanting to listen to you; that’s
what building a career is about. I don’t just want to be the winner of a
competition, when in fact the competition was about bringing classical music
to a new audience.”
Cashell sells the (mildly controversial) BBC Two show so well that I almost
don’t have to. While the carpers were maligning the programme’s emphasis on
personality and competitive instincts (aren’t these two essential attributes
for any musician?), Cashell has proved them wrong on nearly all fronts.
For one thing, her credentials – she started playing the piano at 5 years old
and attended the Yehudi Menuhin School from 13 to 18, before starting at
music college – are impeccable. But in the course of the challenges flung at
her during the contest and associated training academy she also learnt how
to build on those bases as well. “It was about being open to everything. It
was a very different kind of academy to a normal music school; it tried to
bring you out of yourself and to involve personality in your music.”
Cashell cracked the formula. Just as she became more outgoing as the series
went on, so did her music-making, culminating in her blistering rendition of
Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 2 at the grand final. We won’t hear that on
the new album, but there will be Chopin, perhaps the Nocturne in C Minor
that she paired with the concerto in that final round.
Her hopes for the album? “It’s a representation of where I am at the moment
and what is going on with me and my piano. I just hope that people will
enjoy it.”
Neil Fisher
AILISH TYNAN
A couple of months ago, Radio 3 set up an impromptu “Innocent Ear” session for
a small group of critics. One of the blind tastings was a disc of Schubert's The
Shepherd on the Rock, for soprano, clarinet and piano. As the delectable
melody rose and fell, we all sat open-mouthed, wondering who on earth the
spun-gold, radiant soprano could be. Not Schwarzkopf – no, not quite.
Janowitz? Perhaps not. Certainly not Kate Royal, Anna Leese or Sally
Matthews.
It turned out to be the young Irish soprano Ailish Tynan, winner of the BBC
Cardiff Singer of the World Rosenblatt Recital Prize in 2003; a delicious
Papagena and Despina while a Vilar Young Artist at the Royal Opera; and
recently Woodbird there in Siegfried.
There’ll be a chance to hear that Shepherd on the Rock live at
the Wigmore Hall on January 31. And 2008 will be a big year for Tynan, as
her international career takes off. In April and May she is cast as Sophie
in Der Rosenkavalier at Stockholm.
“It’s a very big thing for me, because the role is so perfect for me in every
way,” says Tynan. “I understudied it five years ago at Covent Garden. And,
do you know, once you’ve been on the Young Artist programme there, you can
go back any time you like for free coaching? I had seven hours’ worth the
other day! It really keeps you disciplined and motivated.”
The role of Hero in Béatrice et Bénédict by Berlioz is
coming up in October at Houston – in the company of Joyce DiDonato. And next
month Tynan is the chosen soprano for the Judith Weir celebration, Telling
the Tale, at the Barbican in London (January 18-20). She will sing in
two Weir operas: Natural History, which she has just recorded with
the BBC Symphony Orchestra; and The Vanishing Bridegroom, in which
she is Bride, Wife and Mother.
“Every success I’ve had so far has been a complete surprise to me,” laughs
Tynan. “I’d always felt something of an outsider, never a serious contender.
Everything I do really is a great bonus.”
Hilary Finch
