My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): Artists Against Success (continued)

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Having your own record company is BRILLIANT, especially if you like SHOWING OFF. You'd think the best way to do this would be to be the lead singer in a band, but even HE can be TRUMPED if you stroll into the dressing room after a gig and say "Hi! I'm from The Record Company!" Especially if you have a cigar on the go at the time.

Having your own record company is also EASY PEASY. All you have to do is say "I've got a record company!" and that's IT. You never even have to release anything, all you need is a NAME and, if at all possible, a LOGO. You can then stick the logo on posters or, these days, webpages, and everybody will believe you. The first attempt at making Artists Against Success into a record company was just that - me and a couple of friends who also recorded their own tapes simply put the AAS logo on our next releases. Why, if anybody apart from us had ever actually listened to them it might actually have worked!

The next attempt was a bit more THOROUGH. The first of my colleagues, Mr Francis Albert Machine, i had known through the email and also the band Sienna. As he'd been at the gig where I decided to start doing things myself (as discussed previously) I asked him if he'd like to join in. He said YES. We were joined by Mr Whitaker, who I'd met at a gig in London. As ever with my gigs in London back in those heady days of Britpop it involved me getting really quite drunk so that next day I said to my travelling companions on the way back to Leicester "I think I just agreed to start a record company with somebody."

We arranged to get together and discuss tactics and, for a LARK, decided to have a written agenda. OH HOW HILARIOUS we thought we were being by putting things like "Mission Statement" and "Financial Report" on this agenda, and WHAT COMEDY, we thought, would ensue from taking actual minutes - imagine! MINUTES for a bunch of blokes in a pub!

It took all of ONE meeting to realise what a fantastic idea this really was. Organising people in bands is like trying to get rabbits to waltz - against nature, and do-able only with FORCE. However, by setting down an agenda and STICKING to it we were actually able to get things decided and by taking minutes with ACTION points we were all clear on what exactly each of us was meant to be doing from month to month. All right, we did still HILARIOUSLY include "discourage the growing of beards BOTH in men and women" in our Aims And Objectives document (we were in the pub), but we ALSO wrote out a full contract so that people in the bands we released would know from the start who was paying for what and what was expected from us and them.

It was a good way of keeping the trust of the bands, but mostly it was a really really good excuse for another trip to the pub to have photographs taken of bands signing contracts while we stood behind them, wearing suits and smoking cigars. We did this REALLY A LOT. We also held Annual General Meetings which all the bands were invited to, where we'd do PowerPoint Presentations of the financial reports and future projections and finish with a rousing rendition of The Company Song. Here's those lyrics in full:

Chorus:
We're Artists Against Success
Carrying the MESSAGE to THE KIDS, OH YES.
Artists Against Success
We defy THE MAN and all his Machinations

We're not a label, we're more like a franchise
We're revolutionary but we still dress nice
We go to pubs for our regular board meetings
And we pride ourselves upon our tidy minute keeping

(chorus)

We've got a contract which is clear and GRATE
It's validated with a stamp and gentlemanly handshake
It's all very valid (though it's not legally binding)
But it makes good reading and it still needs signing

(chorus)

A band with AAS retains its independence
Our clear financial policy negates any resentment
We know where all the money goes, we know what's in the stock
It's being bloody organised that makes us ROCK

(if you want to hear it in action, you can download it from the downloads section of the AAS Online Compilation Album)

These were REALLY good times. We each set up standing orders to pay for rubber stamps (which said "VALID") and other ESSENTIAL Record Company items, but mostly so that once a year the three of us could go for a Record Company Away Day/Weekend, where we got as drunk as possible and discussed how fantastically brilliant we were. It was LOVELY.

We also released a few records, which in retrospect was where we went wrong. This was all in the days before there was much of an internet, and you relied on distribution companies to get our PRODUCT to people. If you meet anybody who's ever run a record company please, PLEASE, do not mention Distribution to them as you will be stuck there for HOURS as they tell you ALL about it. Here's the short version: distribution companies are supposed to take your records and persuade record shops to stock them. Unfortunately they're not QUITE as excited about your records as you are, nor are they able to FORCE people to go into shops and buy them, so it's very easy to get peed off with them, especially when they're ALSO not quite as keen on answering the phone or paying invoices as you are. We moved around to different companies, ending up with one that rather suddenly went bust, leaving us quite considerably out of pocket. Worse than this, it left our bands out of pocket, as they always paid most of the costs (and got all of any profits) for their records, and we ended up paying them the money they were owed out of our own pockets.

This was all very upsetting, and coincided with a time when all of us were Moving On In Life. A year or so after this Mr Whitaker resigned on the very honourable grounds that he couldn't be bothered any more, and the whole label gently withered after that. It's still going to release our own material, but our days as record company moguls are behind us now.

It's a shame, in a way, as it WAS terribly good fun, but some of it I shall never miss. Smoking cigars is horrible!

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