Sector spotlight: Music

Image credit – BoomTown

Fact…

• A petition to save The Fleece amassed 30,000 signatures in 48 hours

• Bristol’s music scene and major festivals locally add nearly £300m a year to the regional economy

• 772,000 visitors came to the South West last year to attend live music events, sustaining nearly 2,750 full-time local jobs. (Source: UK Music)

BRISTOL WOMEN IN MUSIC

In a world where women are under-represented in the world of politics, work and music, Bristol is increasingly becoming a haven of equality. Laura Williams investigates. 

‘Behind every great man is a great woman’, so the saying goes. A phrase still bandied about but one which kind of misses the point. Especially here, a city with four female MPs and a wealth of women behind all the amazing things happening here – from festivals and grass roots organisations to community projects and excellent businesses. Women aren’t living in the shadows of great men, women are out there doing great things.

The Bristol Women in Music initiative is recognising, celebrating and progressing that fact. An inspired event took place at Trinity Centre recently (sep 27) called Female is Not a Genre – a discussion of the current state of the music industry and what needs to change it followed a gig at the Louisiana put on by BWiM along with The Flux. 

Emily Ralston, from Access to Music which is behind the Bristol Women in Music initiative, said: “The journey so far has been incredible. We have had an amazing amount of support and we are all very grateful that many people are getting behind our plans. We still have a lot of planning to do, but it is going very well and we can’t wait to make our mark on the Bristol music scene and the industry in general.

She said it’s about raising awareness of gender inequality in the industry and empowering and educating people to get involved. The ever-growing group currently consists of 15 members covering a range of music industry areas – from musicians to promoters, managers and teachers to journalists and broadcasters.

“Bristol is a great city for recognising equality and different movements,” said Emily. “I think Bristol is the perfect place to speak out as people actually listen and get involved.” But she added: “I think the main challenges that women face, are that from a young age there is almost a conditioning element that young females shouldn’t learn an instrument or learn about production or DJing as it is still largely dominated by men; from a musician/performer point of view there is the pressure to be sexy and slim versus being a credible and talented artist, women sometimes have to work harder to get that accreditation.” 

Saffron Records recently launched under Creative Director Laura Lewis-Paul with the specific aim of nurturing female talent and teaching young girls the skills they need to succeed in music.

Emily believes the tide is turning with initiatives such as these and all women, clubnights (Lipstick on Your Collar) and festivals (Ladyfest) celebrating female music and more representation in the media – thanks largely to a wave of prominent local female music writers, including Tiffany Daniels who runs Drunken Werewolf magazine, Sammy Maine, Drowned in Sound’s Bristol correspondent and Harriet Robinson who works for BCFM. Some of the key promoters are women too – Poppy Stephenson who heads up Brisfest, Abi Ward who helps with booking for Colston Hall and Abbe Rogers from Futureboogie who first came up with the idea for BWiM. 

The times are changing and the first ever Bristol Women in Music industry conference will take place in 2016. Emily said: “We hope to encourage women to attend and be empowered. We hope men and women can walk away feeling inspired and confident. We also hope to raise some questions and discussions and make a lasting impression.”

FESTIVALS 

Music festivals have been growing at a phenomenal pace around the world, reaching near saturation during summer. Gateway to the southwest with an established and vibrant music scene, and with Glasto on our doorstep, Bristol is a logical base for many booking agents, festival organisers and ancillary suppliers. Boomtown are one of several to have offices here.

Team Love was formed in 2008 at Glastonbury when the team ran a stage in the Dance Village and a great oak has sprung from that tiny acorn. After booking acts for big names like Secret Garden Party, The Big Chill, Glade and Red Bull Music Academy, they started both Love Saves the Day (capacity 10,000) and See No Evil in 2012, attracting 50,000 people, and this year staged the Arcadia spectacular in Queen Square.

“Team Love is quite unique in that we programme, promote and produce our own events,” says founder Tom Paine. “Most companies tend to specialise in just one. We’ve started to produce and manage the infrastructure of shows for more and more other people – and this is one of the aspects of our work we enjoy the most.

“As we have grown and taken on more full-time staff, we have to keep expanding [our shows] to balance the books. One of our plans is to develop the individual arms of the business so that they can work independently of each other on separate projects, whilst still coming together to work on our own projects.”

He believes we’re sophisticated when it comes to the music scene as a whole: “I think that undoubtedly Bristol has always punched well above it’s weight musically, not just in creative output but also in the festival and event industry.  Certainly the demand here for musical entertainment means that the music industry really strong in terms of the number of people employed here and the independent music businesses operating out of the city.   Alongside the number of musicians, DJs, record labels etc from the city, there is a huge industry of festival promoters and production companies all working from the city and employing large numbers of people.”

Venues are too many to mention individually, ranging from the tiny (Coronation Tap) to the cult (Fleece), backwater (Thunderbolt), quirky (Thelka), classical (St George’s), grimy (Black Swan) and vast (O2 Academy). Whatever you’re looking for you’re likely to find it wafting out the doors of a pub one even; the Golden Guinea even specialises in sea shanties.

The new arena set to open in 2018 will bring a much yearned for 12,000 capacity venue and it is hoped some correspondingly big bands and cash inflows.

VENUES

In the meantime, existing venues are doing a sterling job of nurturing and hosting fledgling and established acts of all genres. The Louisiana has long championed emerging music. “There was a fire at The Fleece in 1996, and two local promoters (Conal Dodds from Metropolis Music promotions and David Brailey) asked if they could use the room upstairs at The Louisiana instead,” says Michele – Mig – Schillace who runs the venue with her parents. “We said yes, and in the first week Placebo and Super Furry Animals played here. We didn’t even have a stage. Dad built one a week later, which was lucky because within weeks more promoters were involved and we were staging gigs seven nights a week.”

“We have long standing relationship with all of the bigger promoters (Metropolis, DHP, Live Nation, SJM, MJR, Transmission) who know the venue and who also use The Louisiana as a barometer to see whether a band will go onto to the next level of playing bigger venues. Most of the promoters deem The Louisiana as being the most important and best venue of its size in the UK so we tend to get bands / artists as their national profile begins to grow.”

The Colston Hall is currently one of the city’s largest venues playing host to a range of genres and playing to audiences of 300,000 each year. Management are currently campaigning to raise £45 million to redevelop the historic site into a rounded site around the core values of ‘education, entertainment and enterprise’. That means learning spaces and a technology lab, revitalising the two current halls and opening a third, and establishing a base for commercial arts start-ups to help people turn their music skills into businesses.

Those working in venues are bullish about the future: “For a while things were tough, but now the scene is recovering,” says Mig, adding that they’re even looking to open a diner in Louisiana’s bar area next year.

STUDIOS

There are countless recording and practice studios in and around the city to serve the many local and visiting bands: Helios, Toy Box, Firebird, Attic Attack, Wilder Studios, Artists Studios, Free House, and T-bone Tunes, to name a few.

Not all are here to serve bands. Echoic in Clifton is an award-winning music and sound design studio creating monumental soundtracks for ads, film, and animation, including the likes of Nat Geo Wild. “We started five years ago and recently outgrew our first home in Stokes Croft, moving up the hill to Whiteladies Road last July,” says Creative Director David Johnston. “Interest in our work has really taken off, gaining attention from creative agencies around the globe. We’ll also be releasing some of our own material soon. Bristol is a hotbed of creative talent and it’s a real honour to call it our home.”

RADIO

Radio has long been one of the favourite ways to project new and niche music to the masses. We have a handful of radio stations – Heart, the Breeze, BBC Bristol, and Sam FM.

Ujima is a community based station broadcasting from St Paul’s since 2008. Content is tailored to meet the needs of the Afro-Caribbean population but it has found favour with groups across the city thanks to a strong sense of community which extends to training in radio and media skills for those living in high areas of deprivation.

Meanwhile, Mix radio has found success as a personalised radio app, curating playlists from offices in Wine Street for the masses. Now employing 180 people, the company was started by Peter Gabriel back in 1999 and has evolved through different ownerships, being bought by Nokia in 2007, Microsoft in 2014 and Korean messaging service LINE this year. Though the big bosses now sit in Seoul, Mix Radio is determined to keep its Bristol foothold.

RECORD SHOPS

Many felt the demise of Virgin Record Stores was the nail in the coffin for record shops as we moved to an era of digital downloads, but as the popularity of vinyl has soared again savvy music shops have managed to carve a new niche. Bristol is home to one of the few surviving Fopps alongside Wanted Records, Plastic Wax and Head. But it’s Rise that is arguably the biggest success story, even listed as one of the UK’s coolest record stores. 

The company started eight years ago and has outlets in Bristol, Cheltenham and Worcester. An opportunity for a short-term let in Cheltenham provided the opportunity to begin, but Managing Director Lawrence Montgomery, says the ambition was always to open here. After two years, there was enough cash for a 3-year lease on a Clifton store just as the Pier closed on the Triangle and Cabot Circus shook things up on the Triangle.

“We sold discounted CDs but it was a dying market,” says music aficionado Lawrence who has had a long career in music shops; “we moved to the current model after three years.” That incorporates concessions including Friska and vintage clothing alongside a diversified product range of vinyl, books and gigs, products that they “hope are complementary”. In-store gigs have proved popular, with the likes of the XX, Frank Turner, Laura Marlin and Mumfords & Sons all playing the stage “to get customers closer to the music and artist”.

“It’s difficult to have a high profit margin in music retail – typically it’s half that of fashion or food. In the past, that was made up for by volume,” Lawrence continues. Rise is now online with orders fulfilled in-store, an aspect that has grown a great deal in the last 12 months. Going forward, this is where the focus lies: “no more sites”.