Record of the Week

Mongrel has noted a few interesting lines from Thursday morning’s The BBC Across the UK presentation from the corporation’s Director General Tim Davie. As of 2027/8, BBC Music and Radio will see 50% of its output being made outside of London (even including Salford and Birmingham, that figure today is just 18%, so a huge step change is about to be set in motion), with the Asian Network and Radio 1’s Newsbeat to be fully based at a new creative hub in Birmingham within the next 18 months. 6 Music will be rooted in the North with 50% of its schedule being made in Salford. That figure is currently 39%. Some key daytime strands for Radio 1, 1Xtra and Radio 2 will start to be made across the UK and outside London, and just as Radio 1’s Big Weekend is an annual touring event, BBC Radio 2 Live will become so too from 2022, a big showcase which traditionally has been located every September in London’s Hyde Park. Davie is insistent that the corporation’s “mission must be to deliver for the whole of the UK and ensure every household gets value from the BBC”. With the pandemic already making people rethink how and where they work, expect the creative exodus from London to continue, with many others following the BBC’s lead over the next five years. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

It’s been both fascinating and troubling scrolling through Rebecca Ferguson’s Twitter feed during the past week or so. The former X Factor star has recently been incredibly vocal about exploitation and abuse that she experienced herself or was made privy to within the music industry, and she lobbed this grenade into the mix over the weekend: “A boyband member told me that they were being picked up and thrown against walls when they challenged decisions! I spoke with the accused and his words were ‘When you make as much money as you guys do, you don’t get a say in what you do in your life, you do as we say’”. Speculation has already begun on who the two parties were, and we admire her bravery in finally speaking up about such horrific incidents like this, almost all of which have never been called out, as they were often normalised as acceptable behaviour at the time.

Mongrel has heard a rumour that Jamie Spinks, highly rated A&R Director at Polydor whose signings include Jax Jones, Raye and Mura Masa, is leaving for pastures new, namely his own label at Columbia.

Upon launch, YM&U Management seemed like rather a random amalgamation of other management companies including Machine, Hall Or Nothing and Deckstar, but they must be doing something right as they’ve recently added 5 Seconds of Summer, MNEK and Jesy Nelson - three former Modest clients - to the roster, as well as Navos who is currently enjoying his first UK top 40 hit (people are talking about him as a debut artist, but actually Believe Me is his 17th track to be released on Spotify, all since 2020 - he’s been busy!). Meanwhile, YM&U US’s DJ client 3LAU was one of the first to successfully surf the wave of NFTs.

UK artist Big Zuu and US rapper Taylor Bennett are selling ownership stakes in the copyright of new songs as NFTs, advertised as the first ever split music copyright NFT sale. $100 for a 1% share of Zuu’s future earnings feels like a bargain - but we haven’t studied the small print. It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out.

NFTs seem to have moved from nascent musical phenomenon to banana skin to surreal meme in the space of days. Will the first retro long read, looking back on the era of NFTs in music, appear some time next month?

Björk - always ahead of the curve - “breathed life into a dying industry” by releasing an album that came with cryptocurrency back in 2017. And if fans held on to the 100 AudioCoins that came with each album, they would now be worth... over 4p.

We’re looking at a new no.1 this week as drivers license is about to end its nine-week run, something we flagged in this column last time around. Had ACR not kicked in, Olivia Rodrigo would still be holding down a place in the Top 5. As it is, she’ll tumble down into the mid-teens now that her streaming values have been artificially halved. The big surprise is that the sea shanty phenomenon is not as dead as we thought, because Wellerman by Nathan Evans has burst back to life thanks to some neat marketing tricks - both versions of the download have been reduced to 59p on iTunes. That alone seems to have been enough to push it ahead of its nearest rivals. Over on the album chart, early congrats to all at Insanity working on the Tom Grennan project. He’s still comfortably out in front right now.

One of the things we like about voting for the BRITs is finding out about some of the music that passed us by. Who knew that Kelly Jones and Jim Bob had released solo albums? Or that Phil Campbell, who made one of our all-time favourite lost tracks way back in 1996, has a new rock incarnation Phil Campbell & The Bastard Sons? The team behind the BRITs may also have learnt something - namely that The Streets is a solo artist. Voting academy members have been invited to recast their votes now Mike Skinner’s act has been reclassified as a Male Solo Artist and been taken out of the British Group category.

Four artists on the International Male longlist have now passed away - Pop Smoke, Lil Peep, Mac Miller and Juice WRLD.

“Hearing Merck’s plans to keep these songs alive and bring them to a new generation of listeners, excited me and convinced me now was the right time to allow a new custodian to take charge of their future” said Carole Bayer Sager upon selling her remarkable catalogue to Hipgnosis. We’re really looking forward to the day when someone says “I don’t care who they are, I don’t care what they do with my catalogue, I just wanted the massive cheque!”

When Daft Punk’s Discovery was released, it seemed to us like the whole world was wowed by the pop genius of One More Time and Digital Love. But this Billboard piece points out that many critics, including luminaries such as the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis and Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber, missed the brilliance of the album. File it next to ( What’s The Story) Morning Glory? in that respect.

If you fancy a fascinating longish read, try this superb New York Times editorial analysis by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, from the Switched On Pop podcast, explaining how and why music has changed so much since the Sixties, and why the old ‘verse / chorus / verse / middle eight / chorus to fade’ structure may be gone forever. Comparing Aretha Franklin back then to Billie Eilish now, all via Bad Bunny, Billie Holiday, Travis Scott and Rihanna and Calvin Harris’s landmark record We Found Love (which hits its tenth anniversary in a few months), we’re now living through the era of ‘an instant hook within 30 seconds so you don’t skip / another (generally musical) hook / another hook to end. Having said all that, the chorus certainly isn't dead just yet, as the worldwide success of drivers license proves.

The Capital Radio network have added no new songs to their playlist this week, but they do seem to have quietly dropped Bang Bang by Rita Ora & Imanbek. There’s literally no sign of it whatsoever on the current Top 200 midweek figures, even though she performed it on ITV’s Dancing On Ice last month.

Exactly five years ago this month, we featured Faded by Alan Walker as a Record of the Day and noted “it’s rapidly climbing the UK Spotify Top 30 so now watch it go off like a rocket. We’re unquestionably looking at one of the biggest global hits of 2016 right here”. That remarkable track (which you’d probably forgotten all about) has recently ploughed through the three billion views mark on YouTube. Yet, when was the last time you heard it on the radio?

BBC 2’s most watched show across their entire output last Saturday was a seven-year-old repeat at 8pm of Top Of The Pops: The Story Of 1980. At its peak, it had over 1.8 million viewers. This weekend, they’re re-running The Story Of 1985 in the same slot.

Following on from last week’s Mongrel assessment of the contenders for Eurovision 2021, the final two songs that the fans have been waiting for finally fell into place on Saturday night. Sweden’s consistently excellent run continues here with Voices by Tusse (and they’ve already nailed their epic staging for the performance as you’ll see) and Iceland’s Daði Freyr (Daði og Gagnamagnið, to give them their full credit) is back with the wonderfully funky 10 Years, which isn’t quite a strong as last year’s glorious Think About Things but is still unquestionably one of the ten best songs on the list this year. By the way, there’s a new favourite with the bookies, just creeping ahead of this outstanding Swiss entry by Gjon’s Tears which we pointed out to you last week. Get a load of the Maltese entry from Destiny titled Je Me Casse. It arrives on Spotify on Monday, apparently. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for the video.

This sounds massive, so much so that you might feel it’s safe to book your tickets for 2022’s contest final in the capital Valletta within about a minute of hearing it. Whatever happens though, it already genuinely feels like one of the strongest years that we can remember in a long time, and anyone who still thinks of the show as a bit of a joke (because Terry Wogan treated that way more than a decade ago) certainly needs to recalibrate their opinion. Try this swift 11-minute montage of every song for 2021 if you’re one of the naysayers, and you’ll realise how high the standard is these days.

Here’s Tiffany Haddish finding out she’d won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album while presenting on US TV show Kids Say the Darnedest Things. (Twitter) A joy to watch.

Laura Barton’s Notes on Music has been well received. The half hour programme on BBC Sounds and Radio 4 is an emotional tribute to teenage fandom.

Rolling Stone have tried to do a clever marketing thing and award every person featured on the cover of the Australian edition their own diamond ring with the magazine logo on it to mark the occasion. However, we suspect very few artists will actually willingly wear it (why would you advertise the publication?), and the rings will end up in a draw or gifted to a charity auction. (IO)

We’ve been enjoying watching livestreams and how artists choose to present themselves. Bicep are a fine duo and Apricots is one of the all-time great electronic records, but their set from the blank canvas of the Saatchi Gallery only made us realise how much we miss the real thing. Watching a couple of blokes twiddle isn’t visually stimulating, but we have every faith their Brixton Academy shows in September will be fantastic.

In hindsight, of course HMV’s mascot dog Nipper wasn’t immediately compliant for the first photo shoot. (Twitter)

Hipgnosis have acquired the catalogue of songwriter Carole Bayer Sager.
Holly Humberstone has signed a recording contract with Polydor in the UK and Darkroom/ Interscope in the US.
eastwest Records have signed Westlife and will release new music later this year.
Sentric Music Group have signed London-based singer/songwriter Tom Speight to an exclusive songwriting agreement.
Singer HRVY has signed an exclusive global recordings deal with BMG.
Former Little Mix member Jesy Nelson has signed with YMU for global representation.
Mykki Blanco has signed to Transgressive Records.
Photo Finish Records have signed singer, songwriter, and producer Ross Copperman.

Ones to watch:
SEB, Jacana People, JAK LVR, Orlando, Patrick Paige II, Dead Pony, Kahlla, Social Haul, workfriends, Dora Jar, Yard Act, Eaves Wilder, Brian Mantra, Jordana, CMAT, Wallice, Unusual Demont, Mazie, Sonny, Spill Tab, Faerybabyy, Revenge Wife, HOORSEES, Carris Auburn, Bad Idea, Deb Never, Seraphina Simone, Hearts, Babygirl, Marinelli, Ezi, Ethan Tasch, Closebye.

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