f56
Left to right, Real World recording artists The Musicians Of The Nile – “market traders!” – Ananda Shankar & State Of Bengal, The Breath … J
ones’s love of academic research proved helpful in her new role. “There was no internet then. The only way you could find about this music was in the library, in
the Grove Encyclopædia. I was researching the answers to questions like ‘What is a kora?’ or ‘What is Balinese Gamelan?’ I was discovering music from all over the world, including our own.” Jones also learnt how to license music, which would later stand her in good stead. Initially the company did not possess so much as a self-correcting typewriter. There was how- ever a Dansette record player, and one of her first jobs was to take a fistful of cash and go out to buy a cassette player.
University had also been key to hon-
ing Jones’s antennae for artistic creative relationships. Her dissertation on Vorticism and Imagism explored a quickly moving aesthetic form that flared briefly at the beginning of the last century and linked abstract art with abstract poetry.
Jones found she’d tipped up in the Bristol of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound, of the Blue Aeroplanes and Gary Clail. “The Dug Out on Park Row was where The Wild Bunch started, the sound-system crew that by 1987 became Massive Attack and fea- tured Tricky. Portishead would appear a few years later. It was still quite shabby, you could live in a squat on Cornwallis Crescent. The unemployment rate was so high when I graduated that I only had to sign-on once a fortnight.” This freed her up to march in support of the miners and Rock Against Racism. “It seemed that the whole city was up in arms against Thatcher, well all the student bodies. My tutor at Uni was a Marxist feminist…”
Growing up on the south coast between Southampton and Winchester, Jones’s early introduction to music was intertwined with tour organisation. Her parents listened to classical music and her father played trombone, while also organ- ising tours around the world for the Southampton Youth Orchestra. Jones learnt to play violin from about the age of eight or nine, dutifully taking her grades. “Suddenly taking grade five was a revela- tion. You could play a few bars of Vivaldi, but then you were cannon fodder for the orchestra.” She then got into punk, though the first two albums she bought were Bridge Over Troubled Water and Roxy Music for which she pooled her pock- et money with her sister, fuelling some “traumatic moments”.
As it turned out, she was in at the beginning of the Womad festival revival as it rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the cultural triumph/financial disaster of its Shepton Mallet debut in ’82. Building on the success of shows at London’s ICA and Ashton Court in Bristol, Amanda had her hands to the deck helping set up the 1985 Festival on Mersea Island, Essex. She says: “Alan James was really key in putting together a truly incredible line-up. We had everyone from Mbilia Bel and the Penguin Café Orchestra to The Fall. It was the first time Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan performed to a non-Asian audience in this country.” At the festival she was stage manager for the tent that hosted the now legendary all night sound-system play-off between dub supremo Adrian Sherwood and Jamaica’s Studio One founder, Sir Coxsone.
By this point, stage managing was not new to Jones. She had discovered this par- ticular skill while at university and getting stuck in with the drama department. This led her to a job with the Arnolfini Gallery, “doing everything they threw at me, from sitting in galleries to organising events in the theatre space”. It had led her too to touring with a children’s theatre company: “We’d pitch up somewhere new and it was ‘Hey let’s put on a show!’” for which she’d design and help build the sets.
Jones’s ‘can do’ practical and positive approach was ideally suited to the nascent re-flowering Womad, so that she thought “Wow, you get paid to do this?!” And what with both the festival and the Talk- ing Books project, Womad Records was a logical next step. “We wrote to Peter Gabriel who’d just finished building Real World studios in Box with a large live room. He’d just released So and Sledge- hammer was a huge hit and we said ‘why don’t we start an in- session record label?’ We had loads of wonderful musicians com- ing in for Womad, it would be great to capture something live.”
“Peter knew that for musicians, rela- tionships with record companies could be problematic and he didn’t want to be poacher-turned-gamekeeper. We said, don’t worry, we’ll look after the label but can you help us with the distribution? Peter was signed to Virgin. We moved the Womad offices to Box in 1988 and Peter introduced us to Virgin.”
Jones remembers meeting Simon
Draper, Branson’s co-founder in Virgin Records, its MD and head of A&R. “He had
an office on the top floor with a picture of the Uffington White Horse, XTC’s cover for English Settlement, over his door. He total- ly got Nusrat. It was so exciting. Simon said: ‘You can’t call it Womad Records! You have to call it Real World. We immediately knew we should go with Simon’s enthusiasm and make the jump. Womad Records was put quietly to bed and it became my job to look after Real World Records. Simon changed my life. He made it all possible.”
She says now that it was good to have
differentiation between the record compa- ny and the festival, for Real World was not conceived as just a platform for Womad artists and vice-versa. However, the connec- tion with Womad was and is still strong. Jones says “We listen to what Paula Hen- derson (who books the Womad artists) is doing. And we’ve got a new stage at Charl- ton Park: The Society Of Sound stage. Including electronica and hip-hop DJs, it will feature musicians from all over the world who are working at the cutting edge of experimental sound, like Atau Tanaka from Japan.” Jones is animated. “Tanaka invents sensor-based instruments that can be strapped to the wrists and legs and he creates music through movement.” Her excitement is catching. It sounds amazing. But then from the outset Real World Records were out on the cutting edge.
I
nitially Jones, Gabriel and Brooman worked closely together on the A&R decisions, which were, she says, “based entirely on music we liked. Peter, a hugely talented musi- cian, had sophisticated ears: Pete Town- shend had already introduced him to Sufi music.” She gives me a beady look. “We were wary of a worthy ethnomusicologi- cal approach. Thomas introduced us to wonderful artists at Womad, and artists like the Musicians Of The Nile often felt more comfortable playing there than say at the Theatre de La Ville in Paris, where the audiences are hushed and seated. The Musicians Of The Nile are market traders. They’d run off stage at Womad and imme- diately start selling their albums!”
On Real World those albums would feature the immediately identifiable iconic design. The original concept for this Jones says, “was created by Garry Mouat at Assorted Images – an outside design com- pany headed by Malcolm Garrett. Togeth- er we discussed the vision and the idea of different world zones and the creation of the ‘colour bar’ for each spine of every record. Peter was very involved. He would
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
