There comes a time in many artists’ lives when they need to compile the blame report. This usually happens when they realise they’re not living high on the hog and look around for someone to take the fall for their misfortune. In most cases, it’s the record label who get it in the neck, the same label they loved to bits a few years earlier.
Case in point: Elly "La Roux" Jackson. La Jackson is miffed that her second album, Trouble in Paradise, has not done as well as her debut. This might be down to the fact that the collaborator who initially worked with her, Ben Langmaid, is not around to co-pen the songs, but Jackson would rather slate her label.
“It’s really frustrating when your label kind of expects certain things to happen, and then they don’t happen, and then they just stop bothering,” Jackson said recently. “It seems to me that maybe they wanted number ones and if they don’t get them, they’re not really bothered.”
After that broadside, you can be sure that Jackson's two- album contract is now receiving plenty of attention in Polydor's business affairs' department. But she's not alone in the having-a-go-at-your-label club. Azealia 212 Banks has split with her label (Polydor, coincidentally), making it the second time she's parted ways with a label so far in her career, after a short period earlier with XL. She blamed "someone with an agenda trying to get me to do what they wanted me to do" for her departure.
Others have also huffed and puffed at the labels they were once happy to sign on the dotted line with in return for a large cheque. Earlier this year, Angel Haze leaked her album online in an effort to get her record company to hurry up with the release. Mercury Music Prize winner Speech Debelle blasted her label, indie imprint Big Dada, when the win didn’t result in blinging sales.
In all of these cases, you’d love to get the full, unvarnished truth from the labels about what happened from their point of view, but that’s never going to happen. Record labels are cautious when it comes to speaking about their acts and don’t want to tell the truth about truculent, troublesome, lazy, unrealistic individuals for fear of scaring away the rest of the artistic horses.
But what we do know is that these artists got into a business relationship with those labels with their eyes wide open. We assume they took the best legal and management advice money could buy.
They were, after all, signing a contract with a business, so expert guidance is essential. They’d also have had a good inkling from talking to other acts and examining the labels’ past performance as to how they operated.
Yet, despite all of these precautions, artists are still left compiling blame reports. Some things will never change.
YOU'VE GOT TO HEAR THIS
Various Soul Jazz Records Presents New Orleans Soul: The Original Sound Of New Orleans Soul 1960-76
If we had to listen to music from just one city from now until eternity, we'd plump for Nola. This new compilation on Soul Jazz mines into the city's soul bona-fides and unleashes a set of tunes recorded between 1966 and 1976 by acts such as Jean Knight, Inell Young, Jimmy Hicks, Eddie Bo and many more that zing with the right stuff.
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Jozef Van Wissem is the Dutch composer and lutist who lit up Jim Jarmusch's recent Only Lovers Left Alive with his smartly observed, hypnotic ream of lute wig-outs and heavyweight drone sensibilities. He will perform the soundtrack at Whelan's, Dublin on October 1st. There's also a pre-show audience Q&A to be hosted by Daniel Gray. It's a bring-your-own-lute gig.
