What Do Music Producers Actually Do?
‘in Session with’ Tom Gray & Jonathan Quarmby
‘In session with’ is a new vodcast series with world class music creators discussing how to thrive in the music industry today. This podcast features our host Tom Gray (Gomez, Ivors Academy Chairman, founder of the Broken Record campaign) and Grammy award winning producer Jonathan Quarmby (Muse, Sugababes, Finley Quaye, Plan B).
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Transcript
Tom Gray: Welcome, we are with the brilliant Jonathan Quarmby. Writer, producer, extraordinaire…
Jonathan Quarmby: I've had moments of being quite good, and a lot of moments being very mediocre.
TG: You played a very small role in the beginning of my career!
JQ: Actually, I was talking to a friend of mine last night about that and saying how Gomez emerged from Sheffield, your original stomping ground. I was sort of in the peripherals, because we'd taken over a studio called Axis, with Kevin from ‘Comstat Angels’, who were legendary in their own time. So we were just saying how well you’ve done, and how it all flowered from there.
TG: We had a good run, just like yourself! But at that point, you were half of the formidable duo, Bacon and Quarmby, producing and writing for an extensive list of artists.
JQ: Well, oddly, mainly producing… because the writing thing was actually quite problematic, because I did start off writing but getting paid as a writer even then was quite hard. Whereas getting paid as a producer is easier - somebody says, “do you wanna make a record?”, you say “yeah, 50 grand” and they agree, you do it and you get paid 50 grand! Whereas when you write, you get paid somewhere down the line - of course, you do get paid, but it's a longer process.
TG: But you very much come from that programmer, arranger brain. Because I always remember you sat at the keyboard in the studio, that's how I see you-
JQ: Probably on Cubase… or Atari even? Yeah, it's definitely a range. It’s interesting you mentioned ‘arranger’, because I suppose the thing is when a lot of people talk about production, they're not really talking about production, they’re talking about arrangement. And everybody wants to be a producer, and everybody, to an extent, is a producer, just in the same way that everybody's a photographer because they have a camera phone, everybody's a producer because they have a laptop. But actually what most people think of when they say producing is actually arranging and it's quite distinct, because the producer is simply the person who is responsible for delivering the record to the label - and some people do a lot in that process, and some people don't do very much. But the people who say “I thought of adding that guitar part” or “I thought of putting strings on the track” - that’s not production, that's arrangement. It's a completely separate thing. But I think it's great when people want to be arrangers because it's exciting to be part of the creative process.
TG: Well, with Kevin you saw all kinds of action! Working with Muse, Sugababes, The Long Pigs, Finley Quaye, Plan B - and won Brit Awards and Grammys along the way!
JQ: No one was more surprised with my grammy! I actually got the Grammy through the post, I had no idea! Best reggae album with Ziggy Marley.
TG: But then, you founded an online music distribution company, AWAL, but following selling that off, you then returned to focus fully on songwriting, based at RAK Studios…
JQ: Coming back to doing music again from running AWAL, I was asked to do Benjamin Clementine’s record and I was involved in it quite early… I suppose my mental process was, if you write a song and it gets used, you benefit… and that can work in multifarious ways - I've had times where I've written a song, and they actually haven't liked the song but they've liked the way it sounded, so they've asked if I want to get involved in the production/arrangement side of things - but by writing, it meant that I could get involved with artists and form relationships and see where it goes.
TG: I'm gonna take you back to the beginning, when you were studying architecture… When and how did you go down this music production road?
JQ: Well, I’d been moonlighting in bands all the way through the architectural course… But actually, there's quite a lot of correlation with music and architecture anyway, and you often find that people in music have flirted with architecture - actually, the guy in the year above me was Mark Brydan, who was half of Moloko - so I think there’s quite a lot of cross-pollination, like the way your brain works in architecture is not dissimilar to the way your brain works as a musician. To put it succinctly, I went into a building with a guy who was an architect and we walked around the building, and I could almost see him crying because he loved architecture, and this building had such a massive effect on him that it was a like a visceral, emotional impact for him. Whereas with music, I would have been the person crying, and I think at that point I thought he obviously is somebody who loves architecture so much, they should be doing it… and maybe I'm not. So I went off and did music instead.
TG: You prefer your cathedrals made of sound… It is really fascinating to me that you and Kevin, your old production partner, got ahead of the curve and set up AWAL, one of the first direct digital distribution companies… What led you there?,
JQ: It was a bit of a weird concoction of circumstances because Kevin and I had been pretty successful through the 90s, and then around the turn of the century, there was a lot of excess when the whole X Factor thing started… I sort of felt like we'd been the cool guys, and then we'd been the guys who used to be cool… and by the time you got to 2000 - 2003, we were like the guys who definitely used to be cool. And work started to get a bit thin on the ground, and we were sort of scratching around wondering what to do, and a friend of mine said that Denzyl Feigelson is coming over to run iTunes UK. So we met up with Denzyl, and he’s got his computer setup and he was programming the front page of iTunes UK… And he asked us if we wanted to put anything on there, and we're like “Yeah!”, so we went through our catalogue. I look back and sort of laugh and think we actually populated the front page of iTunes UK with our own stuff because the guy who's doing it was just sitting there in his bedroom doing it. And Denzel happened to have this CD picking and packing business, which was pretty much dormant, called ‘AWAL’. And so we thought why don't we sign up? It sounds crazy now, but our honest ambition was that Kevin and I have done about eight albums that have never come out, and we thought if we can get those albums out into the world, we'll be totally happy. And because we got the deal quite early, we were like a very early conduit onto iTunes. So we got a call from the Arctic Monkeys and their manager, Geoff Barradale asking “can you get the lads’ music on iTunes?”. I think it's a good example of some people become successful just by being in the right place at the right time - we weren't very good at it, we hadn't got a plan, we didn't know about all the stuff we knew about in the end, like exit and scaling - We just wanted to get these items up, and just by being early, we did quite well.
TG: What made you feel more creatively fulfilled, and how do you separate between the things that make you feel creatively fulfilled and the things that fill your bank account?
JQ: I think that's a really good question. Because I think inevitably in life, there is definitely a dichotomy between the stuff that is genuinely brilliant and the stuff that is lauded. So, there’s a tendency for one to go “Well, it's the record that was a big hit”, or “it's the thing that won an award”, and you’re inexorably drawn towards these things which have got more applause around them. And, I don't know if I would necessarily say that the things I've done, which have had the most success, I've been the most proud of… I'd say often the things that have been the hardest have been probably the most brilliant - I think at some point in the process, there has to be pain - And I think sometimes, you have to ask artist’s “what are you? What do you want to say? What is your message?”, and that's where it starts to become complicated, because that's the only thing that's actually important… and a lot of the time that message comes from a place of pain, it comes from heartbreak, or it comes from parental problems, comes from being bullied, it comes from just a psychology where you don't fit in with the world because I think that the the act of creation is people trying to rebalance themselves with the world. It's like all the great artists or people have had something important to talk about. It's not about being good singers, and God knows it's not about being good musicians. I mean, that's the most boring thing in the world!
TG: Sometimes I think about songs more like that, as narrative objects, and that there's no point in telling any story unless it's a good story. Where's the substance that would make me care about a person in the song so that I'm still there at the end? And I don't think we talk enough about that to young creators, because songs are treated like this other thing, like it's just building blocks of sound or something. When in fact, you look at most of the great songs that people love… There's something at work there in terms of how we react to narrative structure, just as human beings.
JQ: I do think there has to be a spark - because most of my song sessions are one day sessions, there has to be a magical moment where something magical happens or you think “Oh, okay, we've got something here that's amazing”. But then what you don't have, for the most part these days - because most writing sessions are one day sessions, and people don't tend to collaborate as sporadically in that time - you don't have that ability to thoroughly dig down into it and let it sit. And there’s the famous story from Paul McCartney, that the lyrics to ‘Yesterday’ was just ‘scrambled eggs’ for months until it eventually became yesterday. But he was in a creative structure, which allowed him the bandwidth to percolate that idea for a long time, and then come up with something that was a bit better.
TG: I suppose this brings us back to the idea of credits and recognition, because if somebody is coming into the industry, and they're young and learning, there's got to be some hope in this conversation, that there is there is a way forward for them, and it's through finding recognition in different ways in the industry.
JQ: I think what could happen is that people who are genuinely creative but have less means are going to end up getting increasingly frozen out of the marketplace, and when that reaches a tipping point, they will find another way of doing it. And that, I think, is the reality of the situation - if in the end, an artist who's not signed to a big label doesn't have a big promotional budget or doesn’t come off a big platform like TikTok, then they will still be making music which is undeniably brilliant, which people feel passionate about, and it will seep out under the way. And I think that's actually the reality of what will happen.
TG: And talent will always find a way out
JQ: That’s right. I’ve talked to people in the NFT community and I think that might be a way of doing it, because I think that being able to have that undeniable provenance of creativity is great. But i’ll often come in with my artists of the day, who will be somebody in the teens or in their early 20s, and i’ll mention i’ve listened to New Music Friday, and they’ll respond with “God, it’s so f***ing s**t”... and that's quite weird, because if you as a 20 year old feel like that, then where is all the good music? Because it's not there!
TG: Well, if we take all of the artists good and bad, who would you say who would you have loved to have worked with that you've never worked with?
JQ: That's actually a really good question… I'm trying to think of somebody contemporary. You know, I'd actually love to work with Kendrick Lamar… I'm also kind of a closet fan of J. Cole - I actually taught my son to drive, and it was really great because he would play his playlists - and he's a big kind of hip-hop, grime aficionado - and so our whole journeys would have his playlist on and it was great for me because I found I actually really liked J. Cole. Great production values, amazing detail in the records, a lot of work put in it.
And then obviously, I would've loved to work with Bob Marley - My secret reggae roots!
TG: Well, not so secret - You've got a Grammy hanging on the wall!
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