jake, do you have connections with Jeepster? business or otherwise??? i'm just intrigued, i just wondered why the 'me with my fan hat on' thing... but whatever. Here's me with my very foolish looking (ab)normal person's chapeau on: if you think that Jeepster is really any different to any other record label, maybe you need to remove the indie-blinkers. Jeepster is a record COMPANY, and the job of a record company is to make money. How do you think they manage to pay the members of their bands lovely plump salaries, as well as those of the lovely folks like David and Katrina. Personally i can't decide if Jeepster have been very shrewd or just very very lucky with B&S... i wonder if the band had not had the sorts of feelings about the way their records are produced and marketed, whether Jeepster would have treated them any different to the other un-named labels you pour so much scorn on. i wonder if someone at Jeepster just had the sense to know that B&S would get big because, well they sounded so fucking GREAT, and that in the long run the whole procedure for putting out records the way they do and not doing interviews, well that would all just help build the myth in the right places. It worked of course, and maybe you'd need to be extremelly naive to think that isn't a marketing strategy all by itself. Or just horribly cynical to think it is. It's been three short years, and look: B&S CDs next to Billie, full page colour ads in music press. And in case you were wondering, the full page ad is to MAKE PEOPLE BUY THE RECORDS, which IS TO MAKE MORE MONEY. i personally think Jeepster is weird... i mean, how could they be so prescient in signing B&S and then be so full of myopia when signing the mediocre at best Salako, and the abominable Snow Patrol? To me, those two groups make EXACTLY the kind of second rate indie sounds that you like to think all the 'evil' labels are touting. i'm not damning Jeepster, i'm just saying that they're working in the same system as anyone else in the business, and i don't think that the folks in charge are naive enough to think they are doing anything else but being a business. They might have started out as being more passion and belief than anything else, but so did Creation. Sooner or later, when success arrives, the goals change. It's fair enough. And i don't think Jeepster has anything like the cred or kudos of early Creation, simply because they don't have enough talent on their records.
If you want a band that'll be on radio one all the time go and love gomez........... (or the divine comedy, Neil has just signed to parlophone for £1m, and just watch him become pish)
but the Divine Comedy have always been pish. And i get kids telling me they heard B&S on radio one all the time, i just don't listen myself... for obvious reasons (i'm old and have better things to do with my life). keep the faith kids, the duke ------------------------------------------ 'all of our dreams are dying of overdoses' ------------------------------------------ Tangents On-Line http://www.tangents.co.uk PO Box 102, Exeter, EX2 4YL, UK tangent@lineone.net ------------------------------------------ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list please mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". For list archives and searching, list rules, FAQ, poor jokes etc, see http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +---+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" +---+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+