X Factor’s karaoke acts are destroying REAL music, says Chrysalis Music boss who gave the world Blondie

You don’t normally pay transfer fees to sign acts from other labels. But that’s what we did at Chrysalis Music with Blondie – and it was one of the best business decisions we’ve ever made.

Back in the Seventies, Debbie Harry and her band had been signed to a pop label called Private Stock. It was the wrong label for them. My former business partner Terry Ellis was in New York when he called me to say he wanted to buy Blondie out of their contract. I think we paid £370,000.

It took a while for them to break into America. First came Holland and Australia, then they flew over to Britain and played at the Hammersmith Palais. The music was great, the songs were fantastic and the record sales enormous.

Last month, I sold Chrysalis Music, the independent music company I founded more than four decades ago. Chrysalis, a music publishing business these days, has been bought by BMG Rights, a joint venture between German publisher Bertelsmann and American buyout group KKR.

It is not the end of Chrysalis – I am staying as nonexecutive chairman, the staff are still here and there is continuity – but it is the end of an era.

I have been reflecting how very different the music industry is now from the business I first got involved in as a politics and modern history student in Manchester.

I had no background in rock or pop. I was the son of a Lincolnshire farmer who simply got caught up in the heady excitement of a burgeoning music scene.

After getting my degree, I turned down the opportunity to study at the university of Chicago under Milton Friedman, the economist whose theories underpinned Thatcherism. I was enjoying Manchester too much.

As an undergraduate I had been the university’s social secretary, a prestigious role that involved booking the entertainment for Saturday nights. one of my early acts was newsreader Anna Ford, then an attractive Joan Baezstyle folk singer. We used to pay her £5 a gig. 

By 1965, I’d booked the likes of The Moody Blues, The Who, Jimi Hendrix – acts who later became massive and whose names still resonate today.

I gradually drifted into working for a booking agent and then managing acts. I joined forces with Terry Ellis, who had been ploughing a similar furrow in the South and we formed the Ellis Wright Agency, working out of his flat in West London. I moved down and we sent out fliers to all the universities offering our services.

Soon after my arrival, Terry took off on a threeweek holiday to Morocco. When he returned home he was greeted by the two secretaries I had had to hire, sitting at the two desks I’d had to buy.

‘Chris, what the hell have you done to my flat?’

‘Terry,’ I said, ‘y ou have no idea. Business has gone berserk.’

And that was the start of it. In the early years we built the company on the back of two bands: Ten Years After, a rockblues outfit, and Jethro Tull, an unusual group in that the frontman, Ian Anderson, played the flute standing on one leg. They were both great acts but we often had to do some fairly creative accounting to keep things ticking over.

Starlet: A young Anna Ford – who sang folk music for £5 a gig – in the 1970s

In 1968, I took Ten Years After to America. We raised the money for our air fares by making a deal with a music publisher. But when the travel company provided our flight tickets before they actually billed us, Terry used that cash to put Jethro Tull in a studio to record an album. So then we had the travel company on our backs.

Fortunately, I collapsed in America with appendicitis and needed surgery. The health insurance company paid out before the hospital billed me. So we used that money to pay the travel agent. Then the hospital was on our case. And so on.

However, a Jethro Tull performance at the Windsor Jazz Festival went down a storm, everyone wanted to sign them and we were able to make serious money. We changed our name to Chrysalis (Chris and Ellis), using a butterfly as our symbol. over the years we had some terrific acts. I loved Procol Harum, the band best known for A Whiter Shade of Pale. I once saw them play in Detroit when the power failed during the encore, inevitably A Whiter Shade. The crowd chanted the lyrics, word for word all the way through, for 20 minutes until the juice was restored.

Everyone who is famous is at least slightly hard work. That’s just a fact of life. But some are harder work than others.

Billy Idol was basically a nice lad from Kent who believed his own publicity and ended up assuming a larger-than-life rock ‘n’ roll personality.

After-show interviews would have to wait for half an hour while Billy availed himself of whatever female company was queuing outside his door. We got an apartment in Mayfair for him to live in and he completely trashed it.

On one occasion he was meant to be doing a popular Radio 1 show called Round Table, in which celebrities reviewed new releases. The show went out at 6.30pm and I got a call from one of my employees at 6.45pm.

‘Sorry boss, we’ve got a huge problem. Billy’s been thrown off Round Table.’

‘What for?’ ‘Well, five “f****s”, two “b******s” and a “s***”.’

Sinead O’Connor, another of our artists, needed careful management. She was supposed to be playing a big outdoor gig in America in 1990 but said she wasn’t going to go on if the national anthem was played before her act. 

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They always play the national anthem at those sorts of venues in America so she didn’t go on. But dealing with problems was part of what made the job fun. When I started in this game, the business was run by people who loved music…and gangsters.

If you didn’t pay your bills, you would have to deal with a visit from a very large gentleman with a broken nose and a knuckleduster. Now the business is run by accountants and lawyers and marketing men. I am not entirely certain that that is an improvement.

It means that a singersongwriter like Bob Dylan probably wouldn’t make it today. The marketing men aren’t looking for a great artist, they are looking for a ‘package’: team up a particular boy band with a certain producer and a certain writer and you will come up with something that will ‘really connect with the kids’. It’s the difference between letting an act grow organically and naturally, and manufacturing one. At one time, you were willing to give a band two or three albums to find their feet. Now, that’s too expensive to even consider. There need to be instant returns.

And there is another factor to consider – The X Factor.

I am one of the 17million people who watch the show, though few in the music industry do. Most people I know in the business dislike it because it has created an incredible logjam in terms of breaking other artists. The charts are dominated by acts from previous seasons of The X Factor.

The acts on the show are basically karaoke singers. Good karaoke singers, some of them. I picked out Rebecca Ferguson, Matt Cardle and Mary Byrne during the auditions. They all have reasonable voices and if they wrote their own songs they would have a shot at a career. Unfortunately, they don’t write their own songs.

All the great groups from recent years – think U2, Oasis, Coldplay  –  honed their craft by performing live in pubs and clubs, and they wrote their own material. The difference between them and X Factor acts is like the difference between Van Gogh and someone who can do a passable vase of sunflowers using a paintingby-numbers kit.

However, these days, it is safer to invest in a passable act than a Van Gogh. I doubt anyone now could follow the career path I trod. It simply no longer exists.

And although I’m still looking forward to the next chapter in my life, I doubt I will ever again feel as excited as I used to when I booked a new blues act, or when the phone used to ring at all hours and someone on the end of the line would say: ‘Boss, we’ve got a problem.’

Source: Daily Mail