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07.12.12 Music Week 11
When you say you manage an artist on an international basis, you can’t just swan into their New York show or their LA show or their Tokyo show and then leave.
LEFT ‘I’m breaking the rule of a lifetime having this chat with Music Week’: Scott Rodger answers the Quest questions
FAR LEFT In the club: Mikky Ekko and Lykke Li’s management are now part of the Quest team
X Factor must be taking up a lot of your time. It’s certainly an interesting addition to your roster… A lot of people thought it was a bit strange when we took on the X Factor account. Management is a bit like going fishing: you sit at the river with all your other management friends for months, then all-of-a-sudden a really great act swims by and you all try and catch it. What X Factor does is provide the opportunity
to have five, six or seven acts you think may have the chance of having a career exclusively. It’s like fast-track growth for us. I brought in Caroline Killoury this summer to
deal with that – a great manager who I’ve crossed paths with for the past 20 years. She has a good pop sensibility and has completely taken over X Factor and other pop-related artists at Quest: [Westlife’s] Mark Feehily is her first signing outside of the show.
“You walk into a big management company in LA or New York and there’s a wow factor. I really want to make a impression here for my artists and my staff, the second you walk through the front door. This is a statement building and that’s deliberate” SCOTT RODGER, QUEST
Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, who Rodger has tasked with the X Factor account. Stroll up the staircase and you might bump into Klaxons manager Tony Beard, who has also been drafted in-house, and who has just delivered Mikky Ekko (pictured top) – set to be one of the biggest names of 2013. Other recognisable faces from the management
world on Quest UK’s top floor include Jess Keeley (Lykke Li, pictured above) and Debbie Gwyther (Beady Eye), who came over from ATC. Killoury aside, Rodger says his middle floor is
reserved for “the kids” – an affectionate nod to the young independent entrepreneurs being informally nurtured and developed within Quest’s walls. These include Rachel Coomber (MT, Faye) plus
Joey Swarbrick and Martha Kinn (Rizzle Kicks) – personally recommended to Rodger by Universal UK boss David Joseph, and labelled “amazing” by Quest’s founder (see box, right). These fledgling execs can plug into Quest’s international network, including its operational Los Angeles, New York and Montreal offices. Rodger tells Music Week that he has the utmost
respect for other leading British managers, not least Ian McAndrew (Arctic Monkeys), Adam Tudhope (Mumford) and his once-tutors Chris Morrison and Simon Fuller. But he’s deadly serious about building Quest, which is boosted by a relationship with Azoff ’s Front Line Artist Management, into something the UK has never quite seen before. Rodger’s momentous project really gets into
swing next year, when Quest releases no fewer than 14 artist albums onto the market...
Quest is still a bit of a mystery to some people… It was always meant to be that way. I’m breaking the rule of a lifetime having this chat with Music Week. We work with great acts. I want people to see what we’re about: there’s no smoke and mirrors. We want to create a great musical culture in an
office that isn’t a record or publishing company. Music management culture in the UK is pretty stale and has a bad rap – there are a lot of great managers but it’s usually a couple of guys above a little office in the High Street ducking and diving. You walk into a big management company in LA
or New York and there’s a wow factor. I really want to make an impression here for my artists and my staff, the second you walk through the front door. This is a statement building and that’s deliberate.
We have four offices now – we’re the only UK management company with that kind of footprint.
Quest works with artists who have longevity in their careers. The closest X Factor has come to that is Leona Lewis. Does that worry you? Richard Griffiths and Harry Magee at Modest are great friends of mine and they did a great job with X Factor. When we were approached to do it alongside a couple of other companies, I think we were the only one who could really service the programme properly and had the resource to do so. What’s fascinating – and I’m guilty of this – is
that you could look at X Factor and think: ‘Are there any real career artists there? Is anyone cool and built to last? Or is it all just disposable pop, five minutes of fame and we’re onto the next season?’ As soon as I got involved with this and it became
public, the amount of credible managers who called me up who I hadn’t spoke to in a long time asking if I needed any help was amazing. It was almost as if our endorsement had help make it acceptable.
LET’S KICK IT! ‘THE MOST EXCITING MANAGERS I’VE MET IN YEARS’
Kicking around Rizzle Kicks (left) and their hotly-tipped management team of Martha Kinn and Joey Swarbrick (below)
RIZZLE KICKS MANAGERS Joey Swarbrick and Martha Kinn are both still in their early twenties, and Rodger is predicting big things for the pair. “David Joseph said I
had to go and meet them because they’re amazing, and I did,” he says. “They’re the most exciting managers I’ve met in years.
“They base themselves
in our office and they’ve got their fanclub guy and their social networking kid. We just gave them a pool of six desks. We can help them when they need help, and we’ll definitely find things to do together. I’ve found an act in LA that I love and they like them too. I think we’ll do a simple split on that one.”
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