John Niven
To accompany his great new book - 'Kill Your Friends' - John Niven exclusively tells Rocklouder about the top 5 songs he A&R'd in his career!
John Niven played guitar for 1980s indie hopefuls The Wishing Stones before reading English Literature at Glasgow University and going on to work as an A&R man in London. During his time he worked as A&R man for a range of bands, the most notable being Mogwai. He did however escape while he still could, and went on to write full time. Just last week he released his first novel 'Kill Your Friends'.
Now, we don't normally write about books here on Rocklouder but this one is a VERY good read! It's all about being an A&R man in London, and is an 'expose' of the dark sides of the music industry. The PR blurb we were sent with it describes it as "a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where talent means nothing, ambition means everything."
Basically, it's a book about a fictional A&R man, but all the people he deals with and meets are real people, and because it's set a few years ago you're gonna be reading about people who now run the music industry in the UK!
We were so intruiged that earlier in the week we sat down with John Niven, and he told us about the 5 most memorable songs that he's worked on as an A&R man in his time in the biz...
1 - 'Hard Sun' by Sunhouse (From the LP 'Crazy On The Weekend', Independiente 1998)
Ah, the ones that get away. Sunhouse were an incredible band - from Burton, near Nottingham - centered around the songwriting talent of Gavin Clarke, who, these days, is singing in Clayhill, with the guys from Red Snapper. Gavin was a childhood friend of Shane Meadows, the film director, and the band contributed a few songs to Shane's ultra-low budget debut feature Smalltime. We signed them on the back of that when Independiente was first starting. I think Travis were the only other act on the label at the time.
This was probably the record I was most fully involved with in a hands-on A&R capacity: choosing songs and mixes and working on arrangements and the whole sound of the record. I worked very closely with John Reynolds the producer and he and the band made a wonderful LP which I still enjoy listening to today. This is probably the stand out track on an incredibly strong record – such a powerful lyric about desperation, despair and hope. Sinead O'Connor sings backing vocals on this - just a little breathy thing towards the end – as she did on a few other tracks and her contribution was really the icing on the cake.
When the album came out the first bit of press we had was a full-page-album-of-the-year type review in Uncut that compared it to Gram Parsons and Elvis Costello. For a second I thought 'we're going to have this away'. Always fatal – we sold about six copies. It was just too out of step with everything going on at the time. I'm sure the record is long deleted, but if you can track down a copy you'll be well rewarded.
2 - 'Take Me Somewhere Nice' Mogwai (from the LP 'Rock Action', Southpaw/PIAS 2001)
At the other end of the scale the A&R involvement with this was literally nil, beyond signing cheques. If you'd offered Mogwai an A&R suggestion you'd have got your cock in your hands to play with. They were the kind of guys who'd have done the opposite of what you'd suggested just out of badness.
And quite right too. One of the great presumptions in A&R is that you somehow understand the music better than the people who are making it. This might be true with a certain kind of pop music, where there is definitely an art to structuring and producing those kind of records, but, if you're signing a band because you want to buy into their own unique world view, then you'd better just get out the way and let them get on with it.
I have very fond memories of making this LP. We recorded with Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev) in New York City and I first heard this track played back in an apartment in Gramercy Park, where the band were staying, at about 7.00 in the morning, completely off my tits as we'd all been up all night. I was forced to listen to it on a Walkman in the kitchen with the rest of the band all staring at me and whispering to each other: probably the most uncomfortable playback experience you could possibly devise. Very, very Mogwai of course, God bless 'em.
3 - 'Working Girls' The Pernice Brothers (From 'The World Won't End', Southpaw/PIAS 2001)
Out of all the artists I worked with over the course of my decade or so in the music business, Joe Pernice is the closest thing to a songwriting genius I came into contact with. I love his voice, he writes wonderful pop hooks, and the sonofabitch is undoubtedly one of the finest lyricists of his generation: 'tanned by cold fluorescent light', that's pretty high cotton, as they say.
This LP was just a straight licensing deal – I bought it finished for the UK, so again there was no A&R apart from choosing the singles. We brought them over to tour and spent some money so they could have a string section at Dingwalls; which was just a wonderful show. This was forever a problem with my A&R outlook – I was always spending money on bands without a thought of what the record might actually sell. But who gives a shit, really? No one says 'I'll go out and get that record this weekend, I hear it was brought in on budget.' Joe and I remain good friends to this day. We're both now novelists, so our relationship makes a lot more sense than it did when I was head of his UK label.
4 - 'Wonderwall' Mike Flowers Pops (single, London Records 1995)
What a strange experience this was. I'd been working in the marketing department at London Records for about six months and was itching to get into A&R. I went along to a private party at the Hanover Grand in Mayfair one night, where the Mike Flowers Pops were the musical entertainment for the evening. It was pretty good fun - a Ronnie Hazlehurst style orchestra playing covers of things like 'Light My Fire' – and afterwards, drunk, I was briefly introduced to Mike by a mutual friend. The next morning – or, more likely, afternoon – in the office I remember telling Nick Raphael (London Records A&R at the time, now MD of Epic UK) that I'd seen this easy-listening orchestra the night before. 'Any hits?' he asked me. 'Nah,' I said, 'just cover versions.' 'Fuck them then,' came the reply. (Such is the tenderness in A&R circles.)
A few mornings later I woke up to Chris Evans on the Radio One breakfast show, he was playing a version of 'Wonderwall' - Oasis's current hit at the time - that sounded like it had been recorded in 1967. 'Fantastic,' Evans said, 'we'll be playing that every morning.' In those days the breakfast show got something like 15 million listeners and could make or break a record all on its own. Needless to say, we were no longer thinking 'fuck them.'
I got a number for Mike from the guy who'd introduced us and, after some wrangling, we signed the single for about 40 grand and went on to come within a whisker of having the Christmas number one – which was an exciting few weeks. The dust settled and – bosh! – I was suddenly an A&R man. 'This is fucking easy,' I thought. Needless to say I never again came within spitting distance of a number one single...
5 - 'My Beatbox' Deejay Punk Rock (single Independiente 1998)
The Great Hip Hop Swindle. Deejay Punk Rock was this black, six-foot-slab of ex-marine muscle from Brookyln who was making these amazing breakbeat records. Except he wasn't of course. A few months after I signed the guy we found out we'd been scammed – two white guys from Liverpool were actually making the music and they'd got this black, American guy to front it. We were just staring to get a really good buzz building when the story broke in the dance press. Finito. All credibility gone. This single stalled at 41 – the most painful chart position in the world. As did the next one. Game over, as Steven Stelfox would have it...
'Kill Your Friends' is out now! Click here to enter our competition to win signed copies of the book!
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