A former colleague at PolyGram has just forwarded me the following article
from Norman Lebrecht published in the London Daily Telegraph on 29th April.
It is both sad and revealing in what it says about the current managements
of the major record companies and, on that basis, I think it deserves
circulation. I hope Kevin Sutton and others will concede that Lebrecht
doesn't always talk rubbish!
Now even musical prostitutes get their 15 minutes of fame
What is happening to the standards of record companies,
asks Norman Lebrecht
THE first concern of a columnist is for the physical safety of his
readers. So, please, if you have clicked on this page over breakfast,
finish eating before proceeding any further. Maybe open a window.
Those of a delicate disposition should take nil by mouth for 12 hours.
Some of you may have failed to avoid a recent primetime BBC1 docu-soap
called Paddington Green. Like others of its ilk, this voyeuristic
exercise presumed to present a typical slice of modern life while,
in reality, constructing a flimsy storyboard around half a dozen
"characters" selected for their telegenic untypicality.
The overnight stars thus created included a superannuated wig-maker
with a penchant for tea-dancing, a workaholic locksmith with a heart
of gold, and a transsexual prostitute who solicited custom at a major
intersection to pay for the next stage of her surgical transformation.
In daytime, this adenoidal person of indeterminate gender, Jackie
McAuliffe by name, was seen shopping for sheet music and relaxing at
the piano.
She has now - brace yourselves - been signed, on the strength of her
television exposure, as a major-label recording artist. Repertoire
is still under discussion, but I gather we can expect a sampling of
Moonlight Sonata-type easy pieces and that the studio sessions will
feature in the next run of Paddington Green. Apparently, some BBC
executive suggested that McAuliffe's Warholian 15 minutes of fame
might be profitably extended if a classical record label could be
brought on board, and one was only too happy to oblige.
What the BBC is playing at need not concern us here, though how such
docu-soaps fulfil any part of its charter obligations to inform,
educate and entertain will take some explaining in John Birt's ghosted
memoirs. We have come to expect no better of Birt's BBC and are no
longer astonished when it glamorises the lifestyle of a streetwalker
and capitalises on her tele-celebrity.
The heart-stopping, jaw-dropping, truly shocking aspect of this sordid
story is that a classical record company should have embraced a common
tart who tinkles the ivories, an amateur of no artistic credentials.
And when that record company is named as Decca, I fear that many
music lovers might choke on their toast and summon the emergency
services.
For, while rock music lost its capacity to shock once the industry
signed up gangsta rappers with guns in hand and defended superstars
on paedophile raps, the classical sector has conducted itself with
relative restraint. The murder of, or by, a major-label rapper barely
makes the front page of Billboard magazine these days. However,
apart from the odd sex-bomb in a bosomy frock, classical recording
has proceeded on the assumption that most consumers seek spiritual
and cerebral stimulus in a Beethoven sonata rather than cheap thrills.
Seriousness is the key to success and artists are chosen for their
technical rigour and interpretative flair by some of the toughest
purists this side of St Peter's.
At least that's how things were until sales collapsed in the past
three years and some labels forsook their fastidiousness. EMI snapped
a nymphet fiddler in a see-through swimsuit, and Sony went for
angelic-looking pre-teens with pretty unremarkable voices.
Decca, which decried the downward spiral, has now joined the rush
for ephemerality by signing a 13-year-old, Jamie Shaw, who sang on
one of Michael Barrymore's TV shows, and the unsavoury McAuliffe,
who plies her trade in London W2.
Decca's new president, Costa Pilavachi, is anxious to point out that
both signings were made before his arrival and would be kept well
apart from Decca's classical stable - so far apart that McAuliffe
will appear on her own named label. The account is being handled
administratively by the Decca office but not, I am assured,
artistically. Decca is not exclusively a classical firm. "It's an
opportunistic deal," says Pilavachi. "It's just business, not the
beginning of a trend."
Would that he were right. For while Decca, owned by Hollywood-based
Universal, is entitled to put out whatever it likes alongside the
Ashkenazis and Bartolis, it is being subjected to intense forms of
corporate degradation - and it is not alone in its misery.
EMI's most senior classical producer has been obliged to record a
Finnish ex-orchestral player, Linda Brava, whose most remarkable
artistic attributes were revealed in Playboy magazine. The pop-charted
Vanessa-Mae has reportedly pressed EMI to book her with the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra, any of whose rear-desk violinists could
outplay the chirpy popster in a blind audition. Given the sales
potential, Vanessa-Mae will surely get her way - because that is the
price the classical industry is having to pay to be allowed to continue
recording slow-selling symphonies.
It is a slippery slope, with no visible end. From pouting beauties
who play an instrument proficiently we are now confronted with the
amateur tinklings of a professional harlot. These are desperate
times for record labels, but given the choice between high standards
and survival, most will choose survival.
John G. Deacon: http://www.ctv.es/USERS/j.deacon
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