www.musicweek.com INTERVIEW ABOVE & BEYOND THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
Technology genius Paavo Siljamäki, marketing guru Tony McGuinness and musician Jono Grant are Above & Beyond. Tipped as the ‘biggest band you’ve never heard of’ we discover how they’ve reached record-breaking success despite shunning most traditional routes to market
21.11.14 Music Week 15
TALENT n BY RHIAN JONES
A
bove & Beyond are a truly independent success story. Driven by passion rather than profit, the trio have spent the last
13 years building up a sizeable fanbase whilst remaining relatively unknown to the mainstream music fan. In October, they became the first British DJs to headline and sell out New York’s Madison Square Garden. It’s an impressive headline, but the truth is
they’ve been playing gigs of that size for a while. One third of the group, Tony McGuinness, explains: “We sold out a show practically that size a week before that no-one was interested in. Madison Square Garden is a really famous venue that holds a certain number of people that we are quite capable of selling tickets to and it’s fantastic for us, but the week before we were in Vancouver and did 9,000 tickets there. That’s the nature of where we are right now.” Two sold out nights at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre last year hosted 12,000 fans and their upcoming show at The Forum in LA on Friday, February 6 has already sold 8,000 tickets.
ABOVE
“It’s fascinating how many people are getting the artist side of things wrong and going into it with a business head. It’s got to be artist first, business second. In the creative industry, the product has got to be sincere” JONO GRANT, ABOVE & BEYOND
Performing around 100-150 gigs a year provides
their bread and butter. During their career, the group has released three studio albums, two remix albums and one side-project LP. Their own labels, Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep, have issued 23 Above & Beyond albums and compilations in the last 12 years. As artists they’ve sold a million records. Backed by an independent, standalone artist and business organisation (comprising of the two record labels, an artist management company and a publishing division, and employing around 20 people), they’ve got total autonomy. It all started in 1999 when Jono Grant and Paavo Siljamäki met while studying music business and
Three’s a crowd: The trio’s new artist album, We Are All We Need, is out on January 19. The artwork features names of fans and its first official single, Blue Sky Action feat. Alex Vargas, is out now
production at Westminster University. Then a big marketing cheese at Warner Music, McGuinness decided to try and make some dance music and was put in touch with Grant to help him remix Home by Chakra. Above & Beyond touched down with the release Anjunabeats Volume One. Says Siljamäki: “It was almost easier to start a
record label rather than get signed to a major. We knew how to press a record and sell it but we didn’t know how to get signed so we gambled our student loans. We knew that if we pressed 2,000 vinyl and sold 600 we would get our money back. We sold 2,000 - Above & Beyond was born and at that point we met Tony.” The trio were then hired to create a club mix
of Madonna’s What It Feels Like For A Girl in 2001 and McGuinness handed in his notice at Warner soon after. “I worked in the music business long enough to know that most bands don’t make it - certainly in those days, the major label machine was: sign acts, make single, take single to Radio 1, if goes on, great, if not, go and work in Sainsbury’s. I thought, [Above & Beyond] has got some legs, I think these guys are great, I think we’ve done some amazing things in our first year of being together,
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