00:00Good morning. My name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely and
00:07fascinating to speak to Kev Nixon this afternoon. Kev, you've brought out a really significant
00:12new book. It's got a fabulous title, Brilliant Sounding Rubbish, but that is a warning in
00:17itself, isn't it? You are a musician, former A&R director, producer, artist, manager, plus
00:23an expert voice in the industry. And you're saying that the music industry in this country,
00:29after decades of being absolutely sublime, is really in a difficult, difficult place
00:35at the moment, which fills you with not a lot of confidence, does it?
00:38Well, it's not facing up to the difficult place that it's in. That's why we're in trouble.
00:44So what is the problem in a nutshell? What's the problem with where we are now?
00:49Well, there's two or three fundamental problems. One of them is that nostalgia has got in the
00:57way of new talent. The reason for that is because major labels who owned the whole catalogue
01:03of 1950s, 60s, 70s music, 80s music, even before, you know, they make twice as much money out
01:12of that, more than twice, than they do out of new music. So the releasing of new music now
01:18is just really a way of satiating the artist's desires. They're not going to make a penny out
01:23of it. In fact, they'll probably lose a bit of money. So a fundamental way of fixing that,
01:31as we were just discussing, would be to change the life of copyright from 70 years to, I would
01:37say, 20 years. And then everybody gets a chance to make money. But the artists get their music
01:42back so they can make the money. That would change the music industry overnight.
01:48Absolutely. But also, you were saying a curious thing is that standing in the way of progress
01:52and our flourishing of our music industry is the technology itself, isn't it?
01:57Yeah. So it's too easy to make great sounding records.
02:01But not good records.
02:03Well, yeah, I mean, the drop in songwriting. There's a reason why British music dominated the
02:09world from 1963 to 2001. And now it doesn't. And, you know, there are many reasons. But
02:18one of the most simple reasons is the fact that the minute GarageBand was on everybody's
02:23phones in 2004 and on their laptops and computers, everybody's got a recording studio, whether they
02:29know it or not. And so people start recording before they've got the skills to make good records,
02:34particularly with songwriting and lyric writing. If you look back over the subcultures of the
02:41decades from the 50s when the first chart came along up to the end of the millennium, the
02:48music came from the street. There was great music constantly right up to Britpop, hence Oasis.
02:55But those subcultures don't exist anymore. There is nothing. There's no community for
03:02young people to go, oh, I'm going to go and hang with my mates and listen to the new Casey
03:09Musgraves album. She's a modern artist who, for my money, is an outstanding talent. But, you
03:16know, there's not many of those. We were talking about since the millennium, probably Amy Winehouse,
03:23Adele, Ed Sheeran, a couple more, you know, Ray. Ray is an outstanding talent.
03:31And also part of this, as you say, is Instagram, isn't it? The fact that people can just do
03:36it without the community aspect.
03:39Well, a hit record today is a million streams on TikTok. No one cares about the chart. It
03:45means nothing. And most people, like, as soon as Top of the Pops stopped, most people just
03:50forgot about the chart. So if you have a number one today, who cares? But if you've got a million
03:56TikToks, you're in, mate. You're through the door and off you go.
04:00But what about if someone was being really harsh and just playing devil's advocate to
04:04you? What if someone said, well, you've just got to move with the times. Times change.
04:08It's not as simple as that, is it?
04:10Times change, but they don't always change for the better.
04:13Yeah. And when it comes to music, I don't want to have to struggle to find great music.
04:19I want the music industry, I want to trust it to be able to do what it used to do and
04:24say, this record's great. You need it. And when they did that to me when I was a teenager
04:30and it was Stevie Wonder or it was Simon and Garfunkel, it blew me out of the room.
04:36That doesn't happen to my grandkids now, we're the same age. And they say, hey, granddad,
04:42come and listen to this and put it on. Before it's even got going, they're like, it's not
04:46so good, is it?
04:47Oh, fantastic. Well, it sounds a fascinating book. It's Brilliant Sound and Rubbish by Kev
04:54Nixon. Kev, really interesting to speak to you. Thank you.
04:57Okay, Phil. Thank you.
