Scout’s Honour

Money can't buy happiness: Just look at the guys in Coldplay! From left, Jonny Buckland, Chris Martin, Guy Berryman and Will Champion. Photo Dave Hogan/Getty Images.

In the dark and cramped back room of London’s Dublin Castle pub, five tall young men take the stage. Four of the musicians sport beards, and they all wear dark jackets bearing the British Rail insignia. While one guitarist plucks out skeletal chords and sings in a lugubrious voice about disastrous Norwegian expeditions and fallen American chess champions, the trumpeter projects homemade slides and black-and-white Super 8 movies behind him. Every once in a while, the five play repetitive figures on musical instruments; as the sound swells, they sway about as if struggling for balance on a rickety rail track.
 
At first glance, iLiKETRAiNS — an eccentric band from the land that gave us Thomas the Tank Engine — would seem to have little potential appeal beyond their core cult of fans (who are issued “railcards,” natch). At least one music expert sees things differently — and he’s been known to be right.

“It’s something that can work in Canada,” says Simon Williams, founder and president of iLiKETRAiNS’ label, Fierce Panda, referring to the band’s appeal. “It should translate really well.”

Williams is not idly speculating. He just launched Fierce Panda Canada, with Victoria, B.C.-based Cordova Bay Entertainment holding a 50-per cent stake in the label on both sides of the Atlantic. The significance of this deal may not seem earthshaking. Over the course of its 12-year existence, the biggest hit Fierce Panda has ever had is a #41 single in the U.K.; it came earlier this year, courtesy of comedy rockers Art Brut. But Williams is a talent scout nonpareil. He recognized the potential of British pop groups such as Keane, Placebo and Embrace before anyone, releasing their first singles after larger record labels had passed on them. Ash and Supergrass also released songs on the label before they achieved notoriety, while U.S. indie sensations Death Cab for Cutie and the Polyphonic Spree shot to U.K. stardom with help from Fierce Panda’s distribution.

Surrounded by stacks of CDs, posters and panda figurines in his office on the ground floor of his family’s house in North London, the 40-year-old Williams recently looked back on the circumstances surrounding his label’s most famous signing.

“When we picked up Coldplay,” he recalls, “the entire music industry had passed on them. They’d all seen [singer Chris Martin] a bit in the city and just went, ‘He looks like ['70s star] Leo Sayer. He’s wearing a tank top, and he’s laughing. This is never going to work.’ We just went, ‘They’ve got some really nice songs, and he’s really entertaining.’”

Keane was another band that fought record-label indifference before releasing two singles through Fierce Panda. When I talked to singer Tom Chaplin last month, on the eve of Keane’s much-hyped sophomore release, Under the Iron Sky, he spoke enthusiastically about his first meeting with Williams.

One-track minds: British band iLiKETRAiNS. From left, Alistair Bowis, Guy Bannister, Ashley Dean, Dean Martin, Simon Fogal. Courtesy Fierce Panda.

“We had become a bit jaded. When we met Simon, we were like, ‘Can this really be true? This guy just wants, no strings attached, to put a single of ours out, see how it does.’ He released [Everybody’s Changing], and almost immediately, DJ Steve Lamacq picked it up on Radio 1 and played it on his evening show. I remember tears of joy. It felt like a huge breakthrough: the first time anyone would take any notice. We were just so frayed and scared that our dream was basically reaching the end in a nightmarish way. Then he came along, that beacon of hope. I think otherwise, we’d still be playing down the [Camden] Monarch. We wouldn’t have got anywhere.”

Williams claims Coldplay’s Brothers and Sisters EP, put out by Fierce Panda in 1999, transformed the London band’s career in a similar way. “Steve Lamacq got a hold of it. He played it, and all of a sudden, around the country, about 8:00 at night, all you could hear was the screech of BMWs being pulled over off the motorway, ‘cause A&R men were fiddling around, listening to their car stereos, going, ‘Bollocks.’”

Lamacq had worked with Williams when both were journalists at the weekly magazine New Musical Express in the '80s and '90s. The DJ has been hosting the popular show Lamacq Live on BBC Radio 1 since 1998, the year before Williams quit his job at the magazine to devote all of his time to Fierce Panda, which he founded with journalists Paul Moody and John Harris in 1994. The label’s name was a response to the fact that, as Williams puts it, other indie labels at the time “had such pretentious, stupid names that didn’t mean anything.” The journalists assumed that their first release — an EP called Shagging in the Streets, which featured six bands from the short-lived New Wave of New Wave movement  — would also be their last. After one release turned into five, Moody and Harris left Williams to his own devices. “I think they thought Pullover were crap,” Williams shrugs, citing one of Fierce Panda’s early non-successes. “It happens, doesn’t it?”

Williams now has three Fierce Panda employees working with him, but despite his ability to spot and shepherd musical greatness, he has seen little financial reward thus far. Inevitably, bands who garner press and radio play through Fierce Panda end up signing with larger labels for much more money than Williams can offer. He seems remarkably free of bitterness, but does acknowledge the need for a change in his label’s approach. Enter Cordova Bay Entertainment. Just as Coldplay et al. courted major labels without success before Fierce Panda signed them, the label itself courted major-label support for many years without receiving any satisfactory agreements. Last fall, at long last, the Canadian company arrived like Madonna descending from the rafters on a giant disco ball.

“It was like a Pop Idol competition which we ended up winning,” Williams says of the association with Cordova Bay. In the end, Cordova Bay offered Fierce Panda an “informal deal” that leaves Williams with total creative control.

They've arrived: British band Keane make the scene at the 2006 Grammy Awards, where they were nominated for best new artist. Photo SUSAN GOLDMAN/AFP/Getty Images.

“I’m not entirely sure if they’re expecting us to deliver a Keane in the first year,” says Williams, “but it would be a nice bonus if we could actually take the next step and do more albums.” The first release on Fierce Panda Canada (or “Fierce Panada,” as Williams quips) came in June: Grand Designs by the English quintet My Architects. The band’s sweeping pop should appeal to fans of Coldplay or Keane.

Williams has yet to visit Canada, but he nevertheless follows our music scene carefully, and is constantly attending sets by new Canadian bands when they play small venues in London. He speaks enthusiastically about the “second wave” of acts that has spun off from successful bands like the Arcade Fire and the Dears. The supreme talent-spotter aims to use the skills of Canadian A&R people to help discover bands whose work may translate well in the U.K.

That said, it’s unlikely iLiKETRAiNS will chug very far up the North American charts with lyrics like “A nation mourns your tragic downfall.” At the Dublin Castle, one young man in the audience was moved to request “Happy songs!” repeatedly between the band’s numbers. And while their swooning atmospherics can be quite captivating, almost all of their songs go from hushed to dramatically loud — a fairly restrictive blueprint. Nonetheless, says Williams, “EMI are really interested in signing them now. Why not? Sigur Ros can sell out the Hammersmith Apollo.…  Plus, it’s lovely soundscapes. That’s great for your TV programs about whales.”

Will all this money from licensing music to nature documentaries (or, God forbid, releasing albums which zoom up the charts) change Fierce Panda? Success has been a problem for other British indie labels. Factory (New Order, the Happy Mondays), Creation (Oasis, Primal Scream) and Deceptive (Elastica) all buckled under the financial burden of living up to the triumphs with early signings. According to Williams, “The reason that we’re so jolly and enthusiastic is that we’ve never had a success, so we’ve never had a terrible trauma of trying to recreate that success.”

It’s difficult to envision the affable and self-deprecating Williams becoming the kind of mercenary, patronizing record-label executive portrayed by Pink Floyd in the song Have a Cigar. Williams’s work clothes, on the afternoon when I met him, consisted of a holey Fierce Panda T-shirt, trainers and jogging trousers. It’s easier to imagine him becoming the record-label equivalent of iconic Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who constantly sought out new bands, before his death in 2004 at age 65.

“I don’t even go to see Coldplay or Keane now,” admits Williams. “That’s bloody awkward. It’s like an ex’s marriage. Everyone’s having a really good time, and you’re just sitting in the corner getting depressed about it. It would just be a bit creepy phoning up Chris Martin, ‘Can I be on the list for Wembley Arena?’ ‘F--- off. Go and find some new friends. I’m hanging out with Bono now.’ It doesn’t suit me, hanging out with millionaires.”

One of Williams’s all-time favourite gigs, in fact, was at the Dublin Castle, seeing U.S. indie sensations Death Cab for Cutie during their Fierce Panda years.

“It was sensational,” Williams recalls. “Absolutely mind-blowing. Two hundred people just going, ‘This is the greatest gig of all time!’ That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? It’s not the radio festivals and all that nonsense — your corporate bollocks. It’s about those special moments when you and 199 people were there. And then there’s another 3,000 going, ‘I was there as well!’ Those are the moments that make it really, really worthwhile.”

Progress - Reform by iLiKETRAiNS will be released in Canada on Aug. 29.

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.

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