18 Music Week 12.12.14
www.musicweek.com
‘INDUSTRY PEOPLE RECOGNISED THAT COMMUNION WAS A GOOD PORT OF CALL TO CHECK OUT NEW BANDS’
Ben Lovett (pictured) co-founded Communion in 2006, along with Kevin Jones (his former bandmate who now plays in Bear’s Den) and producer Ian Grimble, and has seen the company turn into a global operation.
What inspired you to start Communion? It was a solution to a problem – Kev and I were in a band called Hot Rockets, one of many bands playing for 50 people every couple of weeks on the London circuit. We weren’t really getting anywhere; we noticed there were a lot of good bands playing, good songwriters, and we thought it was a shame that not many people were turning up to the gigs. Venues were saying it was up to us, as musicians, to get people in the room. That didn’t feel like the right balance – we should be turning up to play songs, not selling tickets. So we decided it would be great to cherrypick from the best bands we knew in the area and put them all on a show and promote it. We did the work of telling people, but it was a lot easier to tell lots of people about a handful of bands than it was to get our family and friends down to see Hot Rockets for the tenth time in a year. People liked our curation of the bill; I think the first night had Justin Young, who at the time was JJ Pistolet [now of The Vaccines].
And now Communion is a global operation... We never had the ambition to do much more than that - it was just a club night in London for a year. People would buy tickets for Communion in the same way they would for Glastonbury, before they know who’s playing. They trust the experience. We built up that loyalty, then expanded to Brighton, launching in this beautiful old ballroom. That went really well, initially there were lots of people coming down from London, but it started engaging with the Brighton music scene and the crowd there. That was the tipping point; when we realised it worked outside of London, we thought this was a model we could try worldwide. We launched in Sydney, in four or five more cities in the UK, and then New York followed. And a lot of the musicians who played those nights were going on to be pretty successful. We kept backing the right horses, I guess. Some of them came back to us and asked if we’d be interested in putting their records out; we had no idea what that meant or how to do it, so we had to learn as we went. That was 2010. We put the first Communion compilation together, with 21 artists on it. When we put it out, 16 of them were unsigned; a year later, only three or four were still unsigned. Industry-wise, people recognised that we were a good port of call to check out new bands. Because we were the starting point for a lot of acts in
London, we got brought in to help develop the careers of Ben Howard and Michael Kiwanuka. We’re very lucky that everything we try our hand at works out for the best.
And of course, you have publishing arm as well now. The publishing company is a global entity; it’s simpler to do it like that. It’s operated with both sides of the Atlantic in mind. We launched it because, first and foremost, we believe in songwriting. Kev and I are writers for our own bands, Ian is a great producer and recognises the difference between a good and a bad song. Being a publishing company made sense, and we have good dialogue with our published artists about their writing, and being able to drive that process along a little bit, collaborate with them on stuff.
How much communication is there across offices? Everything we publish, we publish globally, through Kobalt. They’ve got great strength all over the world, especially in the UK and US. We can plug into their team and they can
bridge any gaps in our infrastructure that we might need. It’s not the most complicated part of all the things we do, just because one opportunity, whatever income stream it might be, benefits the global song rights.
So what is the most complicated bit? It’s probably the different markets we work in. Even though everyone speaks English, the culture around venues and ticket buying, what nights per week people go
out...you have to think individually about each city when you’re putting on shows. You can’t cookie-cut the approach. You wouldn’t think putting a gig on in New York is much different to London, but there’s a different culture to how venues run, how agencies see offers. Where we have our ways as Communion, we also need to speak the same language to an American agent, a UK agent, but we can’t speak our own language. We have to adapt to work with them, so they get what they need to do their job. Then the artists don’t feel like they’re getting too much of a different thing too.
Will there be much more expansion, either geographically or in size or number of acts? It’s a bit of both. We’re definitely doing bigger. We’ve sold out those three Ben Howard shows at Alexandra Palace; 30,000 tickets in London is a big event for any company, especially one as small as us. It does require extra people to make sure it runs smoothly. We are looking at going into new markets, new cities. We release records in Canada, currently, but we don’t do concerts, so we’d like to do shows there. We’re talking about continental Europe too. It’s a
tough thing; you want to make sure every step of the way we’re keeping up the quality of the work that we do, that it’s still feeling very much delivered with care and attention, so we don’t want to spread ourselves too thinly there. We’d become what we’ve been trying not to be all these years. We’d never want to say to a band: “Why don’t you invite your great aunt to the show?” We should be the ones filling the room, selling the records. If there’s ever a day we go and not think about doing that, it’ll be the beginning of the end.
Here in the UK, we’ve had problems with small venues shutting down - are there any live issues in the US? It’s not too bad here, it’s pretty buoyant. Some of the tricky stuff we have is exclusive deals between venues and promoters, when in the UK it’s an open room: any promoter can go anywhere, so the right promoter with the right band ends up putting on the right show. In the US, some rooms get held off for one promotions company, which is something we have to work through. We’re trying to find the spaces that would allow us to come in as Communion Presents, whether it be a great rock venue, in the middle of the country. Wherever it might be, we’re just building up our list of venues we can operate in. They’re by and large all doing well, live music has never been stronger. Small venues shutting down in London has more to do with real estate than the music industry.
Do you think live is the main income bringer for artists? I don’t think I’m revealing anything by saying that; it’s definitely been that way for a couple years. Especially this last year - global ticketing revenue surpassed record sales. I think that sums it all up. It’s also easier for a band to understand, like when you play to 300 people for ten quid, you can do the maths pretty easily. But the record industry, with all these different income streams - it’s never straightforward as to how you’re going to get food on the table at the end of the day.
Does coming from an artist background yourself help? It does mean that we understand the language artists speak, we know what we’d want if we were sitting in their place, and we know what to deliver. We always put the artist first; the music industry wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for the music. We always respect that the most.
Do you have much planned for 2015? Lots. Hundreds of shows; Bushstock is planned out. The Catfish And The Bottlemen album will drop in the US. It’s going to be a big year. We try not to get too far ahead of ourselves. We know we’re doing good work right now and we just want to continue to that. We’re all young – I’m 28 years old, and I’m planning on doing this for 40 years.
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