The Blue Settee
clouded
now memories arrive
like static simplicity
t
with thanks, always, to Pheobe, and to my mum, Maureen
Jez riley French
The Blue Settee
(foreword)
Most days I sit on the blue settee that runs through the story of these years. Its age showing in the fabric wearing thinner and the cushion stuffing more easily forming ridges.
I keep returning to this writing, trying to find a balance between the personal and a more objective view of the music industry at the time. It has taken longer than I expected, but there is still so much detail to recall. Some of it stays in a fog;
I can’t remember much about the weeks we, myself and Julia, my then partner, spent preparing to step away from ADA, the specialist music distributor we founded and ran. I remember a few details from the weeks afterwards, and some of the legal processes, but the actual physical packing up of the office and warehouse eludes me. In the main office, at 36 Saturday Market, Beverley, East Yorkshire, there was a large, old wooden double desk. Large enough for myself and Julia to have three or so feet of space at either side. Despite its size and the difficulty it would have involved to move it, I can’t remember what we did with it. It has faded from my memory, along with so much else from those years. Much that could also perhaps contribute to the still to be written comprehensive history of independent, specialist music distribution.
That part of the industry is, inevitably, behind the scenes, yet it has helped shape music culture across all genres. Whilst its role has changed significantly in recent years, especially in terms of digital distribution, it used to be where you could find people who wanted to work hard for the music they were usually obsessed with themselves, but who accepted that even though it meant contributing significantly to the success of labels, artists and outlets, their efforts would go largely unnoticed, unrecognised.
If any of us pick up a favourite album from our collections we will know the history of the artist, any guest musicians, the label, the designers of the cover, the producer perhaps, but we are unlikely to know anything about the people who ran the networks that took it from the master tapes to our hands. Of course that is the same across most industries, where we separate service from product, from craft or creative. However, whilst there were certainly those in the industry that saw distribution as nothing more than a shipping process, specialist music distribution required creativity across multiple parts of the process. Mainstream music distributors were established as not much more than a processing hub, with a disconnect between the decisions of which products to ship when, and to where, and the music itself. It was in their design that a connection to the creative decisions of the labels was weak at best and even less so to the artists. Specialists however were started, almost always, by people actively involved in the music, and who could see ways to further its availability. For most the motivation wasn’t vast profits, and whilst they hoped for enough success to grow and advance their section of the industry, they wanted to do so only be maintaining their links to the scenes themselves. For me, that became complicated when we sold ADA, and in 2020, two decades later, pneumonia fogged my memories of that time further.
I spent a few days in hospital, in the midst of the first wave of covid, eventually diagnosed with ’normal’ viral pneumonia. An odd relief given what was happening in the wards around me. As I recovered I found my memory was sluggish. Often I would stare at books, records or music software knowing that I knew them well, but details wouldn’t fall easily into a coherent order, though an intuitive sense was still there. As a postponed project for an ambisonic installation I had been commissioned to create was given the go-ahead I found myself bewildered by the complexities of first and third order mixing, having to learn again almost from scratch every time I began another session. This fog, and conversations about my time in the music industry with Pheobe, my daughter, and friends over the years led me to decide to try to write this.
By the time we sold ADA, it had become the largest distributor of tradition-based and other specialist music genres in Europe, in terms of number and range of releases we handled. We worked hard, quietly, neither having the time or desire to use the business to promote ourselves as industry figures. We played a part in important shifts in the industry and music culture in general, but we also eventually found ourselves exhausted, drifting and dealing with loss.
The writing is more formal than I would like, or would represent all of the emotions through those years. There are such important personal experiences that I have found difficult to even start writing about, at times wanting to express freely the positive and the complex aspects of working with an art form one cares about, and at others caught in tangled nets of sensitivities. There is also an attempt to express my thanks to Julia.
What was, is important is contained in all of the minute details, far too vast to express here. I could lose myself in describing my mum’s voice, calling up the stairs to ask what music the teenage me was playing as she liked the sound of it, or Pheobe holding a grape in her tiny hand when newborn. A few years later we would sometimes place single grapes on branches, inventing new plants, laughing as she imagined people finding them.
This writing also isn’t complete; memories keep coming back and others are there slightly out of focus but I can’t quite find a way to take hold of them. However, not giving in to that included starting this process, beginning with a brief summery of how my connection to music and sound developed. It can be difficult to explain such connections, based as they always are, on myriad chance experiences and attempts to find expression whilst every aspect of who we are is forming, shifting, settling and sometimes thrown into tender confusion.
Chapter One - Soundtracking
There were important reasons we decided to sell ADA, in 1999, which I will detail later, and since then I’ve continued a direct, active involvement in the arts. Here are a few of the paths found that led me through listening and towards the music industry, soundtracked constantly.
I have a colour-wash-like memory of music in the house growing up in the late sixties and seventies. Voices like those of Stevie Wonder, Neil Diamond, ABBA, Glen Campbell, and the weekly dose of pastel fringed pop that was the staple of British TV, on shows such as Top of the Pops. In my early teens I would listen to Radio Luxembourg, late night BBC Radio One, and some of the other TV programmes that were starting to reflect other strands of music culture, those pastels starting to mix into louder, more vivid tones.
Years earlier I spent some time as a young ballroom dancer, at a time when it was definitely not fashionable. Music was obviously involved but I didn’t connect to it. Mostly because this diversion wasn’t part of my life with my mother. That music was stuck very much in the past, both creatively and in the personal situation around it. My mum had left my ‘father’ when I was about five years old, needing to find a less restrictive life for herself. He was much older than my mum, yet seemed to come from an even earlier era in terms of his approach to women and children. I’ve decided not to write too much about this part of our lives, for several reasons. It was my mum who had an influence on my life, and my connections to listening. There perhaps were conversation to have about that time that, simply, weren’t given the time and space they no doubt required.
We lived for a while in my nana’s house, on Mayfield Street, Hull. I can’t remember for how long but I recall some details such as holding jumble sales on the pavement, selling comics and enhancing their appeal by sellotaping bouncy balls or toy water-spraying rings to their covers. Each week the ‘fizzy pop’ van would drive down the street and I’d be given the job of exchanging the empty bottles for full ones. Near the top of the street was a house whose door was always open to us children. This commune of women always seemed to have music drifting into the street, predominantly by female artists whose songs seemed to offer more than the light pop of evening TV. There was Joni Mitchell of course, but also folk and protest songs from others that are harder for me to draw out now.
For a year or so, aged ten, I was a chorister at Holy Trinity, Hull, further developing my early interest in listening to architecture and, by singing in Latin, which I didn’t understand, to language as a more-than-narrative element of music. I didn’t fit in. Back then most church choirs, especially in England, were all male, but I remember on a trip to Scotland, staying near Newton Stewart, we sang with some local, mixed choirs. Back at our camp I didn’t fit in again, the older boys discussing which of the girls they ‘fancied’, me thinking about how the female voices changed the ambience of the small churches, and how there were certain lines of harmony that seemed to charge the air as I listened.
Eventually we moved to the suburbs, but at home there was loudness from one source for a while. My mum though always found a way to create space for quietude, allowing me to begin understanding the power of shifting ones listening. Below my bedroom window, the clothes line was connected to the house wall. Sometimes at night, if I laid in bed as still as possible and listened until my ears adjusted, I could hear the slight drone as the wind resonated the line slightly.
For my generation 1977 was the year that music fractured beyond the major cities, and for a brief few months seemed to energise possibilities. At least it did for some of us. The first hints of New Wave had already started to catch my attention, to hint at something more than pop. To collide with my growing sense of not fitting in.
I was young, a little chubby and already uninterested in conventional ideas of male culture at the time. Partly because I’d already seen, close up, some of the negative effects, but I think it’s fair to say I just always found questions more interesting than conformity. This marked me out to the school bullies, who give me the nickname of Nancy (boy) shorthand at the time for anyone who wasn’t a ‘lad’. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t gay, to them if someone wasn’t blatantly acting out standard behaviours that was enough. I did wear skirts outside of school, never understanding why gender was applied to clothing, and doing the same at school was both an act of defiance and of solidarity with a growing number of protests around aspects of the school uniform code. At the time female students in the UK weren’t allowed to wear trousers in most schools, but ad-hoc protests were starting to happen. I joined one at the school I attended by wearing a school skirt, to highlight that there was no mention in the rules of any restrictions on what male students could wear. This might seem irrelevant to my connections to music, but for me it was all part of questioning, of not accepting the restrictions of mainstream culture. Of creativity as an act of personal, cultural and political freedom.
I was by this time saving up my pocket money for records rather than comics, first purchasing them from the record department of the store my mum worked in. The idea of making music myself now seemed possible. I could make sound, rather than needing to make songs that were constrained by their dependance on conventional ideas of musical skill.
For my birthday one year, I think when I was twelve, my mum bought me a bass guitar, amplifier and portable cassette recorder. I can’t honestly say I fully understood the effort it would have taken my mum to afford those presents. I thought I did, but if I really had I would have done whatever I could to ensure I got less and my mum got to keep a bit more of her wages for herself.
Within a year, I played my first gig, at a local church hall. The band had formed in the garage at our house, and by the time we were offered the support slot to another local band, we had three songs ready. However, we didn’t know anything about playing live, including writing a set list. We thought deciding the order the day before would work okay. On stage the songs sounded better than I was expecting. They seemed less wooden, though clearly not to the audiences taste. Coming off stage we discovered we’d been playing the songs in a different order to each other. Improvisation became a key aspect of my live performances from then on.
The tape recorder was put to good use recording radio programmes and my early experiments with sound. Listening back in our garden one day, I pressed record instead of play. After a few minutes I realised but, importantly, I listened back to the recording of the garden. The sound was of course transformed not only be the hiss of the tape itself, but because the small built in microphone, like all ambient microphones, didn’t filter the sound in the same ways as we tend to do when listening passively using just our ears. I heard sounds on the recording that I hadn’t noticed at the time. Another step in my understanding of the possibilities of choosing to listen in different ways.
There were plenty of gigs locally, though I was too young to get into most of the venues. The first that I did get to see was Siouxsie and the Banshees, supported by The Cure, and with The Associates making an unannounced appearance. They got through their set without giving in to the jeers of some in the audience not willing to listen.
As the 1980’s began I was working with guitars, cassettes, keyboards / synths, zithers,, reel to reel recorders and various small instruments. My mum had, I have no doubt, again stretched her finances to buy me a Jen SX1000 synthesiser for another birthday, and I also bought a Casio keyboard, paying in weekly instalments, often also with help from my mum.
I released an album of feedback and tape works on cassette in 1980, though this was very DIY, with the handful of copies duplicated on a dual tape deck at home. I’d used some surplus cassettes as the ‘blanks’, recording over the pre-existing classical music. One, for a reason I couldn’t work out, allowed that music to appear in the background, reversed (so I assume from the reverse side). Again, something I hadn’t tried to control led to a result that added to the process in a way that opened up other ideas.
Apart from the hours I spent at home making music, the other aspects of learning were more complicated for me. It took me a long time to understand that formal state education failed me, and many others who had a hunger for knowledge but who didn’t respond to being restrained by expectations of conformity and a curriculum that seemed designed to discourage creative enquiry. Tests for dyslexia, and many other neurodivergencies, weren’t available in schools back then, except for those who fitted into the prescribed idea of having the more extreme traits. Although I have still never taken a test I know that I struggle with the written word. I like reading and I enjoy writing, but it takes me a long time and repeated editing to find the various errors I seem to make with the simplest words or sentences. This leads to a nervousness about publishing texts, an extra bit of effort needed to think a paragraph or page is ready. I am sure this is another link to the pleasure I find in the music of languages I don’t understand, and indeed to sound in general. I did enjoy some lessons; English literature, music and drama, and I wanted to carry on with art classes when I moved from lower to upper school, but the rule was that you had to be able to draw a horse that looked like an actual horse to be allowed to do that, and that wasn’t the sort of art I was either good at or interested in.
I know my mum would have done whatever it took for me to go to university if I’d wanted to, but by the age of sixteen I was done with the conventional education system and it seemed to be done with me. Whilst some found it easy to drift into art school as a counterpoint to not fitting in, for others university in the early 1980’s still seemed distant, inaccessible or too much part of the establishment. Art school, however difficult it is for some in the arts to accept, was still bordered for most. I wanted to get on with doing, though I wasn’t sure what exactly. I also wanted to contribute to the household, but it took me a while to even begin doing that.
The world of work began to open up, though never really with a clear plan of climbing some sort of ladder; After a couple of short YTS (Youth Training Scheme) jobs I started part time at Andy’s Records (Hull) before moving to Our Price Records, Harrogate, eventually becoming specialist buyer and department manager. I then got a job as head of UK sales for a distributor of traditional music in Starbeck (1). For a while I tried to deal with various issues at that company but left to establish, along with Julia and one other person, ADA Distribution, an ethical distributor of traditional and other specialist musics (2). During those years I also worked occasionally as a writer / contributor to articles for Music Week, Rock ’n’ Reel, Folk Roots, Gramophone and other publications.
Running the business meant there wasn’t as much time to spend on my own creative work, but I did continue to play live locally. These were improvised performances using guitar, field recordings, clear inputs, small objects and loops, often when asked to support artists who the local venues considered left-field.
For many years now my creative activities have been as a full time artist, musician / composer, curator, workshop leader, educator, microphone designer / builder, writer, publisher and as a very lucky collaborator with Pheobe riley Law, my daughter. Being her dad is a joy, and she has been a constant source of inspiration and strength.
(1) I knew nothing of the various issues at this company when I started working there. I tried to change things for the better but eventually could not work for them any longer.
(2) The term ethical distributor perhaps needs some explanation. The structure of the industry has changed of course but distribution is still an element, and often where ethics can get pushed further aside. At the time we set up ADA, distributors often made unreasonable demands on labels as they were often the only way to get releases into shops nationally and into other countries. It’s a rather simplified explanation of the complexities, but for those not familiar with this aspect of the music industry here is an example of how the chain of supply was structured before we set up ADA;
. labels would sign artists, record and press the releases. Artists would usually get a very small amount for their involvement, or, if they self-released, would do so to sell at concerts and perhaps through local shops. Labels factored in the cost of distribution when agreeing contracts with artists, often in ways that were opaque. It was hard for small or artist owned labels to get distribution, for reasons including that pressing small quantities of a release meant the artists couldn’t afford to sell to a distributor at the price they usually demanded. Certain genres of Independent music had main distributors such as Rough Trade and The Cartel, but most other forms of specialist music could only access distribution in a rather ad-hoc and fragmented way, if at all.
. a label would deal directly with a distributor or, with one more stage in the chain, a wholesaler who would then deal with various distributors. This meant labels / artists getting an even smaller return, but it was seen as a way to have access to distribution without negotiating with individual companies. This was, in part, because distributors tended to have an often rather unapproachable process. For a small label it often seemed easier to sell for a pound or so less to a wholesaler and, technically, have their titles available to several distributors than to sign restrictive and lengthy exclusive contracts with one company.
. a distributor would handle a labels / artists releases, marketing new releases to the trade and handling regular stock orders from shops. By the time CD’s became the main format the price structure in the industry, in terms of specialist musics, was, generally, that labels would have to sell to a distributor at around £4 per disc or less. Distributors would push for the lowest price, free stock and other deals. The distributor would then sell to independent shops at a full trade price of around £7.29 but lower to chains, often at around £6.40 per disc, as the chains demanded lower prices, even when they sold fewer copies than some of the independent stores that specialised in different genres. Distributors often saw the chains as a way to maximise calls on labels to lower costs to them and supply more free stock. Stores would then sell CD’s for between £9.99 & £12.99, and much more for imports.
What we did at ADA was to set about changing that established system. We didn’t pressure labels to sign exclusive deals or give us bigger discounts, and we raised the price we paid them, whilst also ensuring artist-released albums had national and international distribution. On average we paid between £5-£6 per disc, establishing a way of working that meant our profits were not dictated by lowering the cost at which we could acquire stock, but taking a creative, progressive approach to raising the profile and sales potential of the releases themselves. That sounds obvious, and indeed it should have been how the industry worked, but outside of a few reasonably decent specialist distributors it wasn’t always the norm. In reality marketing was built around a system similar to the ‘old school tie’ approach, and on the ‘sell large early’ system by which success was then, and often still is now, measured. Working with outlets to understand the specifics of their location and customer base, and having a more collaborative connection, was rare.
We stood firm with the chains (Our Price, Virgin Records, HMV, Andy’s Records, Tower etc) and made the argument that they had a duty to support smaller labels, and the music they released, by paying a fair price. In addition we changed the way artists were paid at festivals, and, on occasion, with releases that helped particular artists or causes, we waived our part of any sales. We also tried to source recycled packaging and support projects to tackle biases within genres and the industry more widely. We weren’t alone in doing that of course, but it was rare for a distributor. Such efforts helped change the industry, but it is somewhat telling that the ethical stance that we, and a few others, took has still rarely been replicated in the industry. For example the percentage we paid to labels and musicians in the 1990’s remains higher than specialist distributors pay currently. There are people who call themselves distributors, demanding cd’s at £4 or lower and who actually trade, almost entirely, as a retail business via mail order. That is retail not distribution, and is accepted simply because there are so few examples of a more ethical way of working that artists / labels often don’t feel able to question the system. It is still about power and how some people decide to use it. Likewise, as I write this we are twenty-five years on from when we sold ADA and I still see labels, end of year ‘best of’ lists and various online projects that have a significant, sometimes total, bias towards male artists. I admit that I have no idea how that is still happening, and how it seems to have become normalised again.