In hindsight, I was probably hideously wrong. I was certain it would get an audience in time because of the quality of new music we would be presenting. With Boiler Room TV kicking off, maybe that was the right way to go, but I just felt that terrestrial TV was where this needed to be seen. The viewing figures are awful and none of the broadcasters would touch it, no sponsors seemed interested, and that I should go ‘online’ with it. I sat down with some lovely folks at the Beeb, who told me in no uncertain terms that live music on television just doesn’t pay. No further communiques.īut the penny was dropping. I replied that the idea was that it was all about new stuff. I got a couple of polite emails, mostly asking why the show had no well-known bands. Friends in the film world gave me a few other names to try. I tried another mailout a few weeks later. Excited and very proud, I sent it to all the right execs at Sky Arts, BBC, Channel 4, etc, and waited impatiently for the phone to ring. We spent a few weeks making a dynamite trailer, deciding on one-minute, fast cuts of all the bands, with a song by Bella Union’s own PINS (the only Bella Union band among the 12, in case you were wondering!) and it looked magical. I believed this would be the next stage in bringing some great new music to a wider audience. The show was called Live At Village Underground. Most of the bands were new, but we had some fairly well-known names in there, too, all hand-picked. Despite none of us having any experience, everyone had a superb time. A top-notch lighting designer was on board and there was an invited live audience. We filmed three songs by each band, with five cameras. We were filming with acclaimed director Alex Southam and a ton of gifted people, my sound engineer Iggy, the VU sound team and an awesome crew. With the help of my brilliant wife Abbey, some great friends such as Glenn Max at Village Underground and Amber Millington at Agile Films, presenters like Jon Hillcock, Shell Zenner, Ruth Kilpatrick and 12 superb bands, we spent three days and nights at Glenn’s Village Underground in Shoreditch, London in 2013. Fanciful, perhaps, but I am not one to shirk a self-set challenge. There’s still an awful lot of dross, but we’ve become more adept at finding decent music and learning to filter.Īnyhow, super-conscious not to be one of those folks who just bemoans his lot, romanticising past glories, I set about making a ‘new music’ TV show myself. So, at a time when there is no music TV to speak of in the UK, there’s actually more wonderful music being made than ever before. For most new bands, there’s generally no access to radio and TV, so it’s not something they worry about. If you have to make music because you cannot live without it if you have to find music you love because you cannot live without it, you will. Some of the greatest art ever made was created without access to an audience, or any support of it by mass media. This certainly doesn’t stop innovative and groundbreaking new music being created – indeed, I could argue it accelerates the birth of it. Some basic research I did a year or so ago revealed that in just one month in the US, there were 86 live performances by bands on network TV that you and I would consider independent and relevant, and on British TV there were only six – four by bands on major labels and two from bands on indie labels. In the US, where there’s hardly any national music press outside of Rolling Stone, the surprising amount of new music to be found on the major television networks like NBC and CBS makes our output in the UK look simply embarrassing. It’s sad and mysterious that in this era of Netflix, Amazon Prime and cable channels, there’s just one, not-all-that regular live-music TV show – the BBC’s long-running Later… With Jools Holland. Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde talks television – the drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation…
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