How Gomez's Tom Gray Ended Up Taking On Spotify in Parliament - Part 1

0:00How does change happen? And who are the kinds of people that get involved in politics when they've had a reasonably successful or a very, very successful career in music? In this episode of Drowning Sound podcast, I catch up with Tom Gray, someone who I've known for years, but actually not spent very much time with in person. A lot of our chatting has been online, DMs, you know, the general kind of knowing someone, seeing them speaking at events, chatting to them all the time, but actually not really hanging out. This is by far the longest the pair of us have ever spoken. In fact, we spoke for so long.

0:39This is a double episode. If Tom's name is familiar, you might know him as the guy from the Ivers who represents songwriters. You might know him as the guy that led the Broken Record campaign. which tried to make Spotify's royalties much, much fairer for artists and to take on record labels to find out what their deals really were with artists and with the streaming platforms. Tom is also, and possibly most notably, and probably to most of you, he is a member of the band Gomez, the band that when they kicked off their career in the late 90s, won a Mercury Music Prize, they got several albums into their career before they got big in America, and they were an extraordinary and are an extraordinary band because they did some 20 year shows not so long ago and I don't think there's any signs that they will never ever play again.

1:31So yeah, Gomez, really special British band. If you're not familiar with them and you like a bit of the kind of like Tom Waits, Sparkle Horse oddness with a little bit of jazz kind of feeling, then yeah, you'd absolutely love this band. And as I talk about in the start of this episode I was really into their first record because one of my best friends at school was really into the record and it became one of our go-tos there's a lot covered in this episode at one point we mentioned an artist that we both knew really well which made us a little bit emotional to bring up their name we talk about Tom working on Tilly and Friends the kids tv show which I sort of knew he did but it was quite nice for him to bring that up and I think this this first part of the conversation is much more about tom the person the musician and the music fan and the advocate but in part two we get much much more into the work that he's done around spotify and with ai so without further ado this is the dronin sound podcast brought you in partnership with kobuzz and each week i create a companion playlist on kobuzz and this week's will obviously have a selection of tunes involving tom's music and some of the music we mention in this episode, including some Tim Buckley and some Frightened Rabbit.

2:52And there will be various other bits and bobs I'm going to pop together on a playlist that goes down nicely with this episode. So over to me, sitting in the Shaw Studios with Tom Gray.

3:16right well welcome to the drowndon sound podcast tom you've been on my list of potential guests since i started recording i think oh no persons of interest 85 episodes ago in fact i've been watching that series ponies about persons of interest it's quite a good good start um and one of the reasons was because I guess I should start one of those disclosures like they do in a parliamentary hearing. So when I was 16, one of my best friends was obsessed with three albums around the Furby Deftones, a corny Pine album, I'm not sure which, and your debut album. And I know that record intimately from basically playing those three albums over and over.

3:56And when we were going to gigs, car rides, we came out of a gig, it would pretty much be the first thing you put on driving home um it won a mercury prize did that had a very big rocket the start of your career i also should disclose i was a very big supporter of the broken record campaign which we're going to talk a little bit about today um which was holding spotify's feet to the fire i think i think it's fair i think the major rights holders and spotify in a in a in a unique grip together yes and we've known each other a little bit over the years not that well i I feel like we've actually only met in person a couple of times.

4:32Yeah, we've done a lot of stuff around the sides, haven't we? In and out of bits of politics and music and campaigning. That's how I know you. Lots of folk, I said I'm coming to speak to Sean this morning, and lots of folk I spoke to were like, please send Sean my regards. Everybody knows you, Sean. Everyone. Is that a good or a bad thing? I don't know, we could Kevin Bacon miss, because I think we probably know the entire music industry between the two of us. I once dated someone who lived next door to Kevin Bacon. there's Kevin Bacon also the other Kevin Bacon the producer did the Long Pigs albums the Long Pigs albums and stuff like that in fact we were in near London Bridge at the moment and I met him once when he was working down Artists Without Labels I think he was running for the album I bumped into him in Boots on Oxford Street the day of the Ivers a couple of weeks ago anyway so one of the reasons why I was keen to talk to you is because the idea of this podcast is to help music fans and musicians sort of understand things and work out what they can do, what the solutions are.

5:33And you've spent a lot of time with various different campaigns. Lobbying would be one way of describing it. Organizing would be another. And I was curious to begin with, would you consider yourself a campaigner, an advocate, activist? What's the right word to use? I hate all of those words. I think, you know, if you go back to the beginnings of what I do, which was, you know, Gomez, you know, It was very much like playing outside the lines and not conforming. I would say I'm a non-conformist. I mean, really, that's what I am. And I just believe that we are capable of applying the same kind of excitement that we bring to creativity to all the things that we do in our lives.

6:23I just feel like it's all possible. and what I try and do is show people that it's possible because that's really what I think the whole gig is. I think that's sort of what I try to do with music as well. It was kind of go, shouldn't it be possible that we can break these rules and we can be playful and we can be a bit silly and sort of ridiculous and also be serious about the art? Is that not possible? Yeah. that was really and that's still kind of and that's also the same way I look at politics and how I look at most of life you've forced me to my poet brain's kicking in too quickly but this is kind of the stuff that I think about yeah so I think there is a consistency and I think there's three lines through lots of different things like I I heard you speak in one interview and I think I've heard you say this before about potentially like your other career path if sliding doors moments you could have ended up being like a political script writer or something Yeah, I thought I was going to be a speechwriter.

7:24That was really... You could be one of the Pod Johns now. One of the Pod Johns. The Pod Save America guys. Yeah, I know who you're talking about. So, yeah, I was in my third year studying politics and parliamentary studies. I was supposed to go to Washington and work there on the hill for a year. But at that exact moment, that's when I got offered a record contract. so I never got a degree in anything and and there I am today no I didn't even go to uni I was too busy pissing around with the internet honestly I barely I mean it was one of those degrees where they only have you in flight one hour a week so of course that was the one hour I missed yeah I used to run a club night on a Thursday night until 2am and I had a photography lesson at 9am on a Friday I think it was, or business studies.

8:22I hosted parties in drag and I was just having a ball. I wasn't really paying attention to anything. Occasionally get dragged into a room with a tutor who tried to force me to study the works of Sun Tzu or something like that. But it was, yeah. I mean, I've always thought that I just love playing with form and words and sounds and stuff. And it's like, for me, there really isn't a distinction, I don't think, between a great song and a great speech or a great piece of prose. And it's interesting that a lot of the work that you do is actually behind the scenes. It's getting people to understand stuff.

9:17I think one of the big things of the Broken Record campaign is it helped people understand the complexity, and it is really complicated. And I don't think we should get into boring people about why how complicated it is today. But the fact that there's a giant pie and it gets chopped into tiny slices, but actually most of those slices don't really exist. And if you did get a slice, it would be too small to even eat it. And I think what I think was the most successful thing of the campaign was just giving people ways to explain it. Like I think the music industry trying to advocate, you've got businesses with trade bodies that represent them who were doing all right and weren't that bothered about it.

9:57And then you've got musicians going, wait a minute, where's the money? We're nowhere near like getting the money back that's been invested in us. And the complexity of like artists that have been, that were sort of part of the campaign popping up on news night and sort of knowing feeling confident they knew what to say even though it's a complicated topic you know had all the five minutes talk about it yeah i think that organizing is one of the things that people talk about a lot like to get a collective of voices speaking from more or less the same hymn sheet like speech writers do that our musicians have an ability to kind of humanize or create stories and narratives or a sense of who they are and what they're going to do and the sort of the function that music plays in our life so i guess it's interesting that you used both examples of like songs and speeches because actually a lot of the work you've done is about those penny drops it is about bringing people together and unifying them and getting to move forwards on things would you say that's a fair assessment i think that's an entirely fair assessment i mean a lot of you know most of my work is is just making that information available and making being in being available to anyone who needs that information when they need that information you know um it'd be like oh this person's got this media thing who could write that for them i'll write it for them in a minute and that could be a pop star or it could be an mp i'll brief either one yeah because it has to be done because that's really that's the work right um and um you know there's the stuff that i speak publicly about but obviously a lot a lot of it is just it's a very complicated industry yeah but i don't think complexity should stand in the way of of you see complexity is the enemy of clarity but if you know what you're about and you have it's it's sort of maintaining that internal clarity about what you're trying to achieve through that complexity um is really the key so you have to give people the confidence to have that inner clarity yeah otherwise they get they'll get nowhere um because of course the what happens a lot with musicians and artists is that we're sort of treated like these sort of quixotic kind of silly billies who don't really know how the world works or maybe aren't paying enough attention to really try and figure it out.

12:44Yeah. And, you know, even though I'm sort of like, I think sometimes, I probably belong to a thing that traditionally is called the soft left, But I think sometimes I code quite right to people because I'm very pragmatic. Yeah. And I'm very like, don't let perfection get in the way of the good and don't stop trying to push people around the edges to make things better. Yeah. And I like, I mean, I've been called a centrist a bunch of times and I think my politics are probably to the left of Zach Plansky and Jeremy Corbyn. So it's like the, on a lot of things, but I understand that to change things, like you were trying to like with the broken record campaign for instance you had boris johnson in government yeah you had probably one of the most right-wing tory governments in a country with right-wing media and it's like what you meant to do just like wander off to the left so far away and not speak the language or use the system that you've got like there's no point turning up to play tennis with a with a table tennis racket you're not going to be able to play the game.

13:52Well, nobody wins the game. That's the point. It's not a game. This is the whole problem. Yeah, sorry, I shouldn't use a game. No, I know, but this is the whole sort of framing of the thing. It's like there aren't winners and losers in this. Yeah. And whenever anyone changes anything, you will change who the winners and losers are. And of course, the argument that will always be used against you by anyone who's conservative about these things will be, oh, you know, you're just making different winners and losers. This is all unexpected consequences and all this kind of language. But of course, nobody changed anything without changing the outcomes.

14:30And no system, no order, no hierarchy, no culture, no modality of anything is perfect. And you can't, that's the world we live in. So accepting that is, you know, or internalizing that, I think is kind of necessary to actually operate here. You know, like, and to make that in practical terms, like, I remember a meeting with Nadine Doris. Nadine Doris. Which I guess for any of our international listeners, she was kind of like the Marjorie Taylor Greene or... 100%. She was a very confusing lady who would sit and speak with so much confidence about something. Like the Channel 4 was publicly owned.

15:16I can't remember what the thing was. And it was like, it's not. It was like, there's a tiny bit of funding from the license fee. And she said it was such confidence. Anyway, Nadine Dorris. Nadine Dorris. There's some context for people who didn't know who she was. Who was at the time the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. and I was in the meeting and she was talking for a while she was really not paying any attention and I went Nadine you're an author aren't you she went yeah you're a published author yeah what do you think of your royalty statements and then honestly she switched on and she was like oh yeah well it's a mess it's really hard to understand I don't know where the money's coming from you do know if we reformed copyright law we could sort all that out for you yeah and you've never seen someone switch on faster in your entire life it was amazing it's like night and day suddenly nadine doris was like author's champion yeah i wonder what percentage of politicians have earned books as well it must be a lot easier to and it's like figuring out okay that's going to be the thing that unlocks it they might not have a kid that's released the record and they might not have understood that they might not give a flying fuck about rock and roll or grime or our communities or what how what how we keep looking after our kids or any of these things but they might care about the bottom line yeah yeah and so you just gotta and like we gone great so i mean it's just like i i i have there is no there is no amount of discomfort i won't take in order to try and get this stuff done.

17:00I bet she's a fun person to go for a pint with. I bet she's got some podcast stories. She's definitely got some stories. Let's not go there. Let's rewind back a little bit. For a lot of our listeners who are music fans, they won't know much about your campaigning, but they will know about your music. Like, your W album, the American Music Prize in the UK is such a big, and especially at the time when you won it, was such a big deal to kind of filter out exceptional albums from everything else was going on it was at the same year that Massive Attacks were up for it and like everyone thought they were going to win so when I thought they were going to win so when you guys home recorded record like was it on a six track eight track four track four track yeah four tracks four track yeah and you were making music which maybe in the modern times would have made sense why it was so successful and maybe 20 years before that might have made sense why it was so successful it was like i don't know i don't know how you would describe gomez to someone that's not like i'm thinking there's going to be some people listening but i think like in a time of i don't know ben howards or um there's loads of like massive contemporary artists that wouldn't be too dissimilar to what you guys were doing but at the time like just past brit pop this record that had like the kind of like smoke of jazz and like a kind of great classic songwriting at its heart i think he kind of had a weirdness and a kookiness and a brokenness and a wonkiness you know i think in many ways it has more in comparison with like even yeah it definitely has the kind of serious roots music thing in it but it also has this absurdist mac de marco energy as well.

18:55So it's kind of... And like Sparkle Horse and Beck. Yeah, yeah. And we're trying to undermine all of that. I'm walking around with everything. And just saying, yeah, why can't you... What people don't understand now, I think it's really hard to understand in a post-streaming world, is that for us to be sort of 18, 19-year-olds, because I was 20 when Gomez was signed, and then 21 when we won the Mercury Prize. for you know 15 to 18 year olds to have accessed the kind of music that went into making that which was you know everything from obviously more easily accessible stuff like Beck to but you know Tim Buckley and and uh you know Beefheart and and and Waits and and and you know lots of kooky oddball music that we were just finding was meant we'd had to be sort of obsessive crate diggers right we'd been we were all probably big magazine readers i guess yeah yeah constantly reading but constantly talking to old guys in record shops as well like like just try just like if that guy he knew about that thing in fact you know you know following those kinds of detective paths yeah i remember it took us years to get a hold of a copy of star sailor not the band Star Sailor by Tim Buckley it had been out of print for so long I think it took us about five years to get this thing and when we got it we were all very disappointed Is that the record with Hallelujah on it?

20:28It's the one that's like the vocals are all over the place and it's like it's really cool but he's like deep into the smack and it's like oh yeah this isn't the one for us. Because that is right isn't it Tim Buckley wrote Hallelujah and Jeff Buckley made it famous or is there a different song? Leonard Cohen wrote Hallelujah and Jeff Buckley made it famous. What's the Timbukki connection? Tim Buckley made Dolphins famous, but that's written by, what's that brilliant songwriter called? Oh, gosh. Now you're testing me. Now my brain's not clicking into it. This isn't a pub quiz. Not enough coffee this morning.

21:02It'll come to me. You can text me later and I'll put it in the intro.

21:08Who is the same guy who wrote Everybody's Talking, which of course was popularized, by harry nilson yeah there we go but i'm fred neil oh thank god for that i've still got the music yeah you still got it i've still got it um go and listen to dolphins by tim buckley right now yeah go and do that close your eyes and listen to that oh my god that's that's the kind of music that makes me kind of like well up thinking about it it's so powerful yeah and that is like music like you've lived your life in music and your band at that point in time you would have gone from i'm assuming like the kinds of records you've got into yeah had been relatively successful but i suspect your idea of what you were making was much more in the art world than we're going to make loads of money out of this yeah but at a time of peak cd sales like you sold you like you sold like a million copies or more didn't you yeah yeah which is like taylor swift numbers yeah yeah triple triple platinum album without having a hit single the highest single got to like 36 um yeah totally bananas and um and i think it might be quite strange go i told that earlier story because i think it's probably quite strange going back and listening to gamers now out of context because I don't think people would realize how completely peerless it probably sort of sounded at the time to a lot of people.

22:38Yeah. Because we were just pulling, every toy was coming out of the box. There's touches of Portishead all over it because we were using old records and mucking around with that and playing things slowed down. and anything that was sort of joyful and jarring and we could get a melody out of it, we were doing. And with the four track, were you like recording, then going back and playing something over the top of it? Yeah, no, we had to, so this probably explains a lot about us. You know, five bright, very stoned teenagers who, you know, who also... Making music for very stoned teenagers. Well, I mean, you know, Ian Ball, who was very much a kind of partner in crime at the very beginning of when we were getting Gomez going and the idea of Gomez, the sort of concepts of Gomez.

23:49Ian was a master at this four-track. He'd figured it out. so completely. So I'd make these charts. He'd tell me, and we'd work out how many times we had to do bounces so that you'd preserve a track, hopefully, a bit for the bass and definitely one for the vocal because they were the two things that the compression in the full track would wreck the most. So we were constantly working through this process of trying to keep the bit at the end. And also it led to this part of what sort of became part of our aesthetic which was these sort of hard cuts where we would just stop the tape and then just everyone would start recording again playing completely different instruments and it would and getting those right would take you know dozens of takes and I think it's interesting to think like in a digital world that now someone could literally open up a laptop and create a like 50 track recording I hate all of that I think it's the enemy of creativity I think you know I will get onto AI and all the rest of it but I genuinely think that the confines of what you were doing made it what it was I think limitation is what creates creativity I think limitation is what you know when you are just handed a thing and someone says do something with this that's when the lateral brain has to operate your brain will not be lateral if it can just keep moving forward the path of least resistance is not a path you didn't choose that, it's just happening it's just a series of choices and choice is okay, I respect people having taste well done, you dressed yourself but that isn't artistry and I think people often confuse the two I think like planning to attempt something impossible it was completely ridiculous the arrogance of the kids to do that but like that's the great thing about kids it's like we didn't think anything could stop us and it couldn't and then suddenly we sold a million records and it's like this is weird I mean I had difficulty with Gomez after that because I think in many ways we executed that first album and the idea of what it was so perfectly that we almost couldn't do it again because it was just such a we just it was like okay so what do we do now then lads?

26:29It was like oh we've got five more albums to make And then we've just been paced put in this nice studio Yeah yeah all that kind of silliness and which I enjoyed now you know I think you know I think we made loads of other brilliant records and weirdly didn't have like our biggest record in america until like our fifth album and yeah and that was totally crazy as well in the mid-naughties like suddenly um you know very very different model post you know napster and everything we we'd kind of gone well let's not stay in the uk it's not happening here we're an albums band that doesn't really work fly here you know unless you win a mercury prize um and we were dead lucky to have like brilliant um agent in america uh marty diamond who basically said you guys fly in america just come here and keep playing gigs and from sort of 2001 to 2006 that's what we just did like maniacally I think in 2004 we played 240 shows Wow and do you go out do you do some big supports and things like that or was it here and there but it was you know it was mainly Gomez shows and just growing and growing and growing you know we would do three four night stands at the Fillmore in San Francisco you know play the you know the bigger shows in Colorado basically wherever the heads were Gomez was and that's kind of how it worked Chicago was a really big town for us, you know, and the sort of Wilco connection there.

28:11We sort of slipped into a different culture there. It was like the My Morning Jacket, Wilco, bordering onto the jam band kind of thing. And all that thrill jockey world of things was sort of in that. Yeah, yeah. So suddenly we were just in that culture. And a lot of people over there just didn't know we were a British band, I don't think. and we often sang in American accents because we just did and didn't think twice about it which is probably another thing that hasn't dated that well but yeah and that was it yeah I think in 2006 we were in the top 30 grossing live acts in America wow which is bonkers like how did that happen yeah and it's interesting I used to speak to Scott from Fry and Rabbit a fair bit and they had a similar oh bless Scott don't make me cry now you can't do that to me you can't just invoke scott like that i i loved the fact that they were so much bigger in america and he used to write a tour diary for droning sound all the time and his stories from the road when you compare to like where they were playing in london and like some of the venues just mentioned they were playing yeah yeah you know just early on i remember him i remember him now this is sad sorry i remember it's all right i remember when he played um yeah it's making me sad he is such a special human and i think like i don't think it's easy to talk about someone that like i don't think i've fully processed it yeah and it's like he is but i remember seeing like i think they wrote about touring with you guys at one point and I should have dug it out before this to have a reread I find it quite hard to go back and reread them and but it's like you've cracked me up by a broken sky it's alright mate and I think for anyone not listening to this that hasn't got that connection with their music they might not understand quite how special a songwriter he was and lovely human being and but the fact that America opened its arms to a band like that and a band like you and like and I think we hear all these stories of like export ready music and all that stuff and bands going off to play south by southwest and then it doesn't but it's like you did the hours the miles the like he he was a brilliant brilliant songwriter and and too sensitive for this world and uh yeah he i would very occasionally just lean in and check in with him yeah not we weren't great mates or anything you know i just had a sense that um some people but you just know you need to keep sort of being a bit present with.

30:52So I'd check in with him every now and again.

30:56Yeah. And then I literally checked in with him the day it all happened. Yeah, I think I saw him a couple of months before that. Yeah. He came to see Ed Harcourt play with Nathaniel Radcliffe in The Night Sweat. Oh, gosh. And we went out until dawn. The last time I saw him was on Solid Hole Street pointing me to a chip shop. which I think sums up kind of in a weird way I guess the reason I wanted to mention that is because I think that Gomez as a band in the sort of peripheral vision of a lot of music fans you sort of had that big burst first album and sort of trickled along as a band but you weren't like headlining Redding or like, because I remember seeing you guys play Redding I think in one of the tents and things and my friend pretty much lost his voice singing along.

31:50I'd like in Glastonbury in like 99. We had such an incredible blast off. But it was ridiculous. It was unsustainable. Because most acts that would happen like four or five albums in. Yeah, well, the thing is, is that we were, what we sort of were was like a British, like, I don't know, like pavement or something, but a bit sillier. Like if pavement were a bit like madness. which is a very British thing but you know what I mean it's a bit like that yeah but the British music scene doesn't have a way of holding that yeah I remember Alexis Petridis once said to me if you guys were American we would think you were geniuses yeah but because you're British we just sort of like elbow you along down the street but it was that weird thing like I remember it was sort of similar with elbow yeah but you'd often get an American band record now elbow yeah And it's one of the reasons why Guy to this day is very kind to me.

32:54Because basically, it's because of us recording that ourselves that they became a self-recording band. Oh, right. Yeah, so I think probably for me, the main thing was to sort of, I'm more proud of the influence we had at the time on being a scrappy outside a band and showing people that that was possible than I am about worrying about whether or not our back catalogue stands up or whatever. I just don't care, right? It was just stuff. I think most people who make art, it's just stuff you make and then you move on to the next thing that you make. And I'm so ADHD, I can't remember what I did yesterday anyway, so there's absolutely no point to that.

33:41So for me, I'm more proud of the fact that people have got these stories. Even though Gomez weren't the coolest band, which is kind of the funny thing, sometimes you're Bon Iver, when he's a bit drunk quietly, he'll start whispering to you, telling you which is his favourite Gomez song. And you're like, yeah, I knew it. but I think there's something about that like the problem with British music sometimes is like when records came out on export like you'd have a four-month run-up of amazing press like my father John Misty first came out and that wasn't even that long ago like that record had so much acclaim in America and then it got released in the UK and it was like a UK an artist in the UK wouldn't have the same like foundation to when a record comes out and I think that like we've not really understood in this country how to transition across over artists and we just didn't transition because we just didn't see it as being yeah any limitation or any kind of it was just this is obviously both yeah this is obviously music that exists everywhere i mean the craziest stuff happened to us in you know in like australia or new zealand when we landed there we were like filmed by like the six o 'clock news in new zealand getting off the plane like we were the Beatles like I'm not kidding that happened it was like what is happening the music scene in New Zealand is really cool though I've only I went for like 10 days on a travelling music music conference thing and like I met Conor Mockinson who's now like people would have heard of and this really cool band called Die Die Die that were like this like hardcore refusedy type funk band well we spent so much time down there we we were just utterly loved so obviously like people who came along behind us like Luke Steele, who at the time was in Sleepy Jackson when he was really young and we used to take him out on the road.

35:41And of course, hilariously now, two members of Gomez are the life-performing Empire of the Sun. So if you ever see Empire of the Sun, there's Borley and Ollie, guitar and drums, playing with Luke Steele. And that's directly down to the fact that we were just omnipresent in Australia. So we just knew every kid who was coming up at that time. It was, yeah.

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37:26you preempted my next question which was what do the rest of the band do now because there's often that thing of like there's often a thread on drowning sound actually it's like oh this person that was in this like does anyone know what happened to i don't know insert other members of scarfo that weren't jamie or yeah like bands that people were just into they're like what what do they do now like i think there was someone like left metronomy and someone didn't realize they had like this whole other career producing records yeah yeah um so i just curious like for anyone listening that's ian and all are both in empire of the sun yeah if they were playing like in stockholm i think today or tomorrow was on a call with them yesterday they're in good form uh big ben oi well is always out singing yeah he's a troubadour uh in the true sense and still has one of the great voices if you ever want to hear someone who sounds who sounds only like themselves yeah go and listen to Ben Ottiwell sing and uh and Paul our bass player Paul Blackburn is uh has taught for years um and at the moment I think he's considering moving back to the states with his wife but I'm not sure yeah I'll see if I'll see if I can save him from that that that fate but yeah and when was the last time you played as Gomez was it a little while ago was it uh 2019 we came back for sort of a 20th anniversary once around the park and which was mad sold like 15 000 tickets in london it was crazy um which was great the main reason why i think that was great was because my son who's who's just turned 18 and he's actually doing his a-level at the moment um had had never seen me play live and didn't really know what I did yeah and he age 10 saw me play at the Royal Albert Hall and was just like what wow you know you're just a fellow who walks me to school every day what are you doing there what's that what's this nonsense because I guess also there wouldn't have been loads of like phone footage and stuff unless you made like a live album no and I don't and I don't keep discs in the house or awards in the house or any kind of the trappings of it so he didn't there wasn't anything there that would have he must have googled you a couple of times I reckon he probably did but yeah so the band like at one point something transitioned and I became aware of you as someone campaigning but amongst that time you were doing sync like co-writing those kinds of things is that right?

39:53yeah I wrote all kinds of odd things that sort of fell my way because you know I did like 52 episodes of a children's television show which was just well the music for it yeah yeah and wrote songs for it and uh and yeah my because my friend uh polly dunbar's just a really great children's author and she asked me to do it i went yeah go ahead and that was it which kids tv show that it was called what was it called tilly and friends it was cool yeah and um i wrote a song called the mashimo i remember being at the school gates once and uh well some was very little and they weren't excited about the fact that i was in gomas they were excited about the fact that i wrote the mashimo But I love writing very pure, naive melodic songs.

40:42I kind of love doing that. There's a Harry Nilsson in me that I can't escape. Who wouldn't want Harry Nilsson in there? But it's that kind of, you know, Paul Williams, those people massively kind of baked into me. and so I've often looked outlets for that so I did a lot of like children's theatre and stuff where I get to write very like dreamlike songs very sweet and in Brighton there's a kind of we have created a sort of small theatre company from that that's just celebrated its 20th anniversary which is a brilliant thing right but that's not a thing that people really know about but it's just it's nice to build things and make you know and and and you know have you headlined the kids field at glastonbury yet oh no god no don't make me do that that would that would the kids field is so there's a line there's a line on this stuff um no but it's like that field is like i i wandered into it once slightly hung over um i think i sat down i just watched the juggler for 15 minutes or like a magic show or something and I was like and then I was like I looked at who's like on like I think Mr.

42:02Tumble headline last year and like but it's great that that exists at a festival like that and I just like I feel like kids music there's like occasionally like a big show at Royal Festival Hall or something but it's it should be a really great gateway into kids getting used to going to shows and but also you know I think the thing is obviously I was sort of raised on music from the 60s and 70s and a lot of that just sounds like children's music now, I think. And it was that sort of, you know, slightly whimsical and psychedelic, dreamy stuff. Yeah. Very naive, intentionally so, stuff that's still kind of in the fibre of my kind of creative being.

42:46And I think that it just gives me an opportunity to do that. Yeah. I'm not bothered about the kids. and you know and I wrote music for TV and film and here and there but never really chased after it never got an agent to do that never never kind of pursued it well it's somewhere where music was valued and like and probably at a point when streaming was starting to raise its head like you're getting paid pittance per stream yeah and you're getting paid thousands for someone to use a piece of music to a scene or to an ad or to a like it's and i think for me like one of the big things that i'm really keen for music fans to better understand is the value of music because i think streaming's like turning the tap on i don't i don't know how much running a glass of water costs yeah um i know i get a water bowl every so often and i couldn't quantify like well how much that was my washing machine and showering and if i showered less it's not any cheaper really so it's like that kind of sense of music being kind of omnipresent and as an as an individual we value it differently to if i wanted to use a theme tune for this podcast yeah and i wanted to commission it i know i'm gonna have to pay a couple of grand to someone or at least 500 quid or i go to some off-the-shelf library and license it for like a fiver which is baffling and it's like a piece of copyist music but i think the thing for me is like you would have been in this headspace of not just having sold lots of records being paid decent money to play live but like you're seeing your industry go into this trench i guess almost of like where how come the money is suddenly not there like as a songwriter you're getting paid when someone covers your song and performs it and yet if someone's playing your song on a streaming service you're not seeing the same like was there a moment an epiphany moment for you that there wasn't really an epiphany moment I kind of knew from the start that it was bogus.

44:54A lot of what I tried to talk about with Broken Record was the interaction of contracts with streaming, right? Because the contracts that everyone was signing and had been signing for many years were basically a model that had been created in the last century. The percentages had slightly increased, but that was basically it. And by contracts, you mean record contracts? Signing to a recording deal with a label. Right. And there was the illusion of streaming that it was kind of this democratization of music. And I will accept arguments that I think are totally valid and correct that streaming allowed lots of music to get past gatekeepers.