www.musicweek.com FEATURE TOM HINGLEY IF ONLY I’D KNOWN THEN… The key industry lessons learned by one of Northern indie music’s most respected frontmen


10.08.12 Music Week 21


all it’s the same as it was 50 years ago. If The Beatles, Take That, Oasis or Inspiral Carpets came along now in the digital market place, they would still be successful because those bands knew how to maximise the environment they operated in, they had the songs and the personality to rise to the top.


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piece of work you do leaves something positive behind. Making one supporter is worth it, selling one download or CD outweighs any cynicism about doing a show.


such as X Factor give, that ‘talent will out’, is nonsense – there will always 1,000% more talent out there than is required by the UK music industry for recording, performing or songwriting.


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Talent in itself is no guarantee for success! You need a tricky combination of luck, timing, hard work and luck. The lie that programmes


om Hingley was the lead singer of one of Britain’s most revered pre-Britpop bands, The Inspiral Carpets.


With huge early ‘90s hits like This Is How It


Feels To Be Lonely, Dragging Me Down and I Want You under his belt, Hingley’s been there, done it and sold the baggy T-shirt. His new book reveals all about his time in the


industry, his musical career and a young Inspirals roadie called Noel Something-or-other. Here, he reveals the 10 things he wishes he’d


have known about the music business before signing on the dotted line…


The work that you do never goes away. Even if you aren’t playing in the right venue on the right night for the correct promoter, every


ABOVE Hingley | Inspirals frontman encourages industry to drop ‘unsigned artist’ from its vocabulary


on the broader ones, you will find the skills you need are identical to those you would need to be successful in most professions in any other walk of life. It doesn’t matter whether you are a musician or a plumber, you still need to be reliable, punctual, efficient and above all pleasant if you want to have an extended career. It doesn’t matter how big you think you are, people won’t work with you if you are too much of a diva or basically unpleasant.


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order to become famous and successful – such as playing on kids’ television or turning up unannounced to another artist’s show and do an unexpected support – but as they go through their career they rip each page out; they become unprepared to do that thing again. At the end they don’t have a book, they just have a scrap of paper with ‘Get paid’ scribbled on it in biro. Try and keep your potential ‘do’s the size of a book and not a scrap of paper.


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always do printed fliers and posters. Talk to folk and ring people up, one Facebook event page wont necessarily being anyone to your event on its own.


I’m not very good at ligging or talking to famous people backstage and at labels, I am far too shy. Taking copious amounts of cocaine would probably have helped me through this


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Promote yourself offline as well as online. A lot of bands, labels and promoters think that everything is promoted on the internet, but


Bands/Artists commence their careers with a big metaphorical thousand page book which lists all the potential things they would do in


If you ignore the specific skills present in musical activities – such as performing, songwriting and recording – and concentrate


The music industry never changes. The platforms for delivery, methods of recording and publishing may change, but underneath it


difficulty, but the problem is that if I had pursued this course of action I would have been (a) an arsehole on all occasions and (b) probably dead by now. My personal cocaine dead list of friends and associates stands at six who have overdosed/ died from taking it, or from impurities in what was supposed to be coke.


positives of playing music as a lifestyle choice – like Sunday league football or playing golf. Most amateur bands/artists and producers are never going to be famous, so we need to change the focus away from the celebrity/ talent show/unsigned paradigm. It’s a cultural change that’s needed, and as so few artists are actually signed now, I would like to see the term ‘Unsigned’ as a descriptive term expunged from the popular music/business cannon.


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Singing/promoting/writing/ administering in the music business is not in itself heroic. On an episode of


BBC One’s The Voice recently a professional singer spoke about having pneumonia and having to raise his singing game at a party because Prince suddenly turned up and he wanted to impress him. Surely a true artist would arrive at a party with pneumonia where Prince was supposed to be attending, then find out the star wasn’t turning up, and would still raise their game because being reliable and consistent is paramount and singing is a job, just like being a bricklayer, teacher or nurse? It’s not the Saturday nights and press nights at the theatre that you have to be at the top of your game for, it’s the wet windy Wednesday afternoons were there are only school children who are talking over your performance and throwing boiled sweets at you – that’s when you need to be at your singing best.


 Tom Hingley's book, Carpet Burns, about his time as lead singer of the Inspiral Carpets, is available now


It’s fun, don’t be too serious (see above).


There’s a world of difference between amateurs and professionals in the business, and amateurs should be helped and encouraged to enjoy the


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