The Blue Settee

(foreword)

The Blue Settee

Jez riley French

clouded

now memories arrive

like static simplicity

with thanks, always, to Pheobe, and to my mum, Maureen

The Blue Settee

Most days I sit on the blue settee that runs through the story of these years. Its age showing in the fabric wearing thinner and the cushion stuffing more easily forming ridges.

I keep returning to this writing, trying to find a balance between the personal and a more objective view of the music industry at the time. It has taken longer than I expected, but there is still so much detail to recall. Some of it stays in a fog;

I can’t remember much about the weeks we, myself and Julia, my then partner, spent preparing to step away from ADA, the specialist music distributor we founded and ran. I remember a few details from the weeks afterwards, and some of the legal processes, but the actual physical packing up of the office and warehouse eludes me. In the main office, at 36 Saturday Market, Beverley, East Yorkshire, there was a large, old wooden double desk. Large enough for myself and Julia to have three or so feet of space at either side. Despite its size and the difficulty it would have involved to move it, I can’t remember what we did with it. It has faded from my memory, along with so much else from those years. Much that could also perhaps contribute to the still to be written comprehensive history of independent, specialist music distribution.

That part of the industry is, inevitably, behind the scenes, yet it has helped shape music culture across all genres. Whilst its role has changed significantly in recent years, especially in terms of digital distribution, it used to be where you could find people who wanted to work hard for the music they were usually obsessed with themselves, but who accepted that even though it meant contributing significantly to the success of labels, artists and outlets, their efforts would go largely unnoticed, unrecognised.

If any of us pick up a favourite album from our collections we will know the history of the artist, any guest musicians, the label, the designers of the cover, the producer perhaps, but we are unlikely to know anything about the people who ran the networks that took it from the master tapes to our hands. Of course that is the same across most industries, where we separate service from product, from craft or creative. However, whilst there were certainly those in the industry that saw distribution as nothing more than a shipping process, specialist music distribution required creativity across multiple parts of the process. Mainstream music distributors were established as not much more than a processing hub, with a disconnect between the decisions of which products to ship when, and to where, and the music itself. It was in their design that a connection to the creative decisions of the labels was weak at best and even less so to the artists. Specialists however were started, almost always, by people actively involved in the music, and who could see ways to further its availability. For most the motivation wasn’t vast profits, and whilst they hoped for enough success to grow and advance their section of the industry, they wanted to do so only be maintaining their links to the scenes themselves. For me, that became complicated when we sold ADA, and in 2020, two decades later, pneumonia fogged my memories of that time further.

I spent a few days in hospital, in the midst of the first wave of covid, eventually diagnosed with ’normal’ viral pneumonia. An odd relief given what was happening in the wards around me. As I recovered I found my memory was sluggish. Often I would stare at books, records or music software knowing that I knew them well, but details wouldn’t fall easily into a coherent order, though an intuitive sense was still there. As a postponed project for an ambisonic installation I had been commissioned to create was given the go-ahead I found myself bewildered by the complexities of first and third order mixing, having to learn again almost from scratch every time I began another session. This fog, and conversations about my time in the music industry with Pheobe, my daughter, and friends over the years led me to decide to try to write this.

By the time we sold ADA, it had become the largest distributor of tradition-based and other specialist music genres in Europe, in terms of number and range of releases we handled. We worked hard, quietly, neither having the time or desire to use the business to promote ourselves as industry figures. We played a part in important shifts in the industry and music culture in general, but we also eventually found ourselves exhausted, drifting and dealing with loss.

The writing is more formal than I would like, or would represent all of the emotions through those years. There are such important personal experiences that I have found difficult to even start writing about, at times wanting to express freely the positive and the complex aspects of working with an art form one cares about, and at others caught in tangled nets of sensitivities. There is also an attempt to express my thanks to Julia.

What was, is important is contained in all of the minute details, far too vast to express here. I could lose myself in describing my mum’s voice, calling up the stairs to ask what music the teenage me was playing as she liked the sound of it, or Pheobe holding a grape in her tiny hand when newborn. A few years later we would sometimes place single grapes on branches, inventing new plants, laughing as she imagined people finding them.

This writing also isn’t complete; memories keep coming back and others are there slightly out of focus but I can’t quite find a way to take hold of them. However, not giving in to that included starting this process, beginning with a brief summery of how my connection to music and sound developed. It can be difficult to explain such connections, based as they always are, on myriad chance experiences and attempts to find expression whilst every aspect of who we are is forming, shifting, settling and sometimes thrown into tender confusion.