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they found a wonderful lead singer, but they became
Simian which are not my cup of tea. I went to see The
Music in Leeds: I was taken out by their manager and
fell in love with them and I spent six months arranging
the new label around The Music, and at the last minute
their two managers who were friends of mine brought
a third manager in who was a complete twat, he wanted
a bidding war and in the end signed for lots of money
to Hut. It was very depressing and I was outraged for
about two years.
The Music weren’t that good though Tony.
No, The Music were that good and they had that
potential, but the way their managers took them was
completely fucking wrong and ended up taking them
nowhere. If we’d have put them in the right environment
then they’d have created a far more important
second album. So the wrong environment has just
fucked them. In fact I heard someone within their camp
say that to some one the other week, so yes that’s what
I think about them.
And as I say it’s never stopped, it’s always if I ever
see a great band. When I saw Raw-T live at In The
City I was blown away, there were several major labels
there who were also blown away. I presumed that
my job with Raw-T would be to bash them around
the head when they started behaving like twats, and
instead the majors all offered them crap singles deals,
no one offered them a real album deal and suddenly
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the rest is history.
Who’s designing the imagery for F4?
I have a graphic designer who I’m very fond of
called Jason Nichols who does In The City’s stuff
and in it’s great having him move on from that to
do the record sleeves. He did the F4 thing and I’m
very happy with that. We were originally going to
be called Red Cellars and there was a very clever
designer called John Walsh designed a Red Cellars
logo and was doing the whole thing. I took him to
meet Raw-T and he met them and experienced them
and got a logo from one of their boys, took it away
to work on and a month later had been too busy to
do it because he had more important work on. To
which after a few days I exploded in a very unpleasant
manner and said, ‘Fine, the most important thing
in the fucking world is Raw-T so you can fuck off!’
Strangely the reason it’s not called Red Cellars is
not just that my partner thinks it’s a good idea cos it
relates to Factory and it avoids a 15-minute explanation
of why it’s called Red Cellars. But it was when I was
lying in my bunk in the Amazon rainforest doing drugs,
the very night Raw-T’s first single had to go to press,
and I thought if I call it Red Cellars I’m going to have
to use John’s logo and I’m so angry at John for being
too busy to do Raw-T, and so utterly outraged I refused
to use his logo. So I needed to think up a new name,
and finally thought F4. That was out of a fit of anger
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