16 Music Week 12.12.14 PROFILE COMMUNION HOLY COMMUNION
Since launching in 2006, Communion has gone from a monthly night in Notting Hill Arts Club to a global record label, concert promoter and publisher, with its own festival and radio show to boot
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LIVE n BY CORAL WILLIAMSON
F
or a company that started as a monthly club night, Communion has become something of an indie behemoth, boasting not just a live
promotions company, but also a record label and a publishing arm. Communion Records hosts the likes of Catfish
And The Bottlemen on its roster and releases through Universal Music’s Island and Caroline International, while the company’s Bushstock Festival, a multi-venue event, sold out this year. Communion co-founder Ben Lovett (of Mumford & Sons fame) has taken the operation stateside, making it a global player in all three of its strands. Music Week took a pew with Maz Tappuni, Communion’s head of live promotions, and general manager Jamie Emsell to find out how it all started, and where they hope to go from here…
How did both of you join Communion? Maz Tappuni: I grew up with Ben [Lovett], we were school friends, and used to tour manage [co-founder] Kev [Jones]’s band, Cherbourg, when I was about 20. I set up my own night in London which Kev’s band played. The minute Communion started taking more shape, they asked me to come on board. That must’ve been about four and a half years ago.
Jamie Emsell: I used to have a little charity festival and booked Ben and Kev’s band, then just stayed in
ABOVE
Take them to church: Maz Tappuni (left), who runs Communion’s live promotions and hosts an XFM show on Sundays, and Jamie Emsell (right), Communion’s general manager
“Live shows and Radio 1 support, working in parallel, are perhaps the most powerful combination you can have in the UK at the moment for launching and breaking a band” JAMIE EMSELL, COMMUNION
touch with them. When they were setting up Communion, they asked for my advice with some of the business side of things. When they set up the label, they came to me saying they wanted to sign Matthew Hegarty [Matthew And The Atlas], who didn’t have a manager, and asked me if I would manage him. I wasn’t sure what a manager did, but we went for a beer and I started managing him, and he was the first release on Communion. About three years ago, Communion was getting to the point where, rather than it being three people in three bedrooms, we should probably get an office and email addresses. That was when I started.
How did Communion end up working with Island Records, and Universal? JE: The first bit of Island, with Ben Howard, predates me, but I can talk about the point we formalised our relationship. On the label side [of Communion], it was the guys looking at some of the artists playing the club night, without management, labels or publishers and finding a way to document their music, with the initial route of EPs and singles. That led to the relationship with
Island because, as a young label good at identifying, nurturing and developing talent, what you then need is someone to say, “Okay, you’ve lit a fire, now we can throw some petrol on it”. Island was a natural place to do that, partly with
Mumford & Sons already having a relationship with them, but also, I think we felt a natural affinity with them. It’s a label that, even now, as one of the biggest frontline labels within the biggest major, still has a very strong sense of their own culture and brand. From a practical point of view, that relationship enabled us to do the work we wanted to do in developing artists, and culturally it felt like a really good fit as well. With something like Bear’s Den, where it
was a slower thing, we talked to Caroline. We’re operating broadly within the Universal system, finding the right route to market within that system. I don’t want to understate Island’s support and the role they’ve played in developing the label over the last couple of years, but some stuff’s going through Caroline too.
How much do the branches of Communion overlap in nurturing new acts? JE: It works brilliantly well. Maz can talk about the live stuff, but the way we approach it - having evolved from that slightly innocent stage of a band saying, “Hey this is fun, can you be our promoter?” - looking at the business now, we’ve got the publishing company, the label and the promotions arm, and what we want to try to do, because it makes sense for us to be working with artists we believe in across as many disciplines as possible,
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