Nick Raphael - How I Signed Jay Z

Full transcript: Nick Raphael on London Real

1:46 This is London Real. My name is Brian Rose. This is Nick Gabriel, and joining us today is Mr Nick Raphael, who is the president of London Records. Welcome. Hello, hello.

1:57 Good to have you. Hello, Nick. I was wondering if you could tell us, what is a good week for you, and what is a really horrible week for you in your business at London, Records. A great week is to find a great artist. Is to get to sign that great artist, and uh, that’s that’s the beginning process of any good week, or good process, then is to start making a record with them and find out they’re better than you thought they were.

2:28 The worst, which has happened many times, is you sign someone in anticipation of them being incredible, a world beater, the next Elvis, the next JZ, the next Oasis, the next Bics, and then they turn out to be as the best thing they ever did was the thing that you sign them on. Uh, a good week is when media understands the dream, the vision that you have for that artist. A good week is when the public hear the artist on the radio, on the TV, on the internet now and tell you that they love them as much as you do, and then go out and spend their money to prove to you that they’re that good, because ultimately the only thing that matters in the business I do is that the public understand and agree with you, because if the public don’t agree with you, the artist history will say wasn’t great.

3:19 Now there’s others will say, but critically, this one was better than that one, better than that one. We’re in the business of creating media, creating music, creating content for people to buy, for people to, uh, feel strongly about, and that’s what I do, and I do that every day. Have done that for the last 20 years, and it’s probably the most exciting, fulfilling thing I could do. And even in my darkest moments, which there are many, cuz sometimes you sign something and you put your entire belief, uh, your entire effort.

3:50 You convince all your team, the team that you hire to work on it, and it turns out to be, in the polite terms, dog s***, and you’re gutted because you believe this person was the second coming. You believe this person was the musical messiah. They were going to, you know, they were going to do for music what JK Rowling did for book publishing, or uh, what Simon Cowell did for music TV. Um, and you hope they’re critically acclaimed as well. You hope that with history and hindsight, people go back and say, “Not only was that good, but they were, they were the best.

4:22 They were so special. The reality is sometimes you sign something and it’s hugely successful, and people uh, buy at the time, time, but the naysayers, the critics, say, “Yeah, but that’s bulls***. We’ve had it all before. They copied someone else. They’re not that original.

4:37 They didn’t write their own songs. Whatever the reason is, they’ll dig people out, because we, especially in the UK as opposed to the US, we live in a culture where they build people up and to knock them down, and my job is to try and find someone who no one has heard of, or someone who people have heard of, and to turn what they do into something that is tangible, is a career, and first and foremost his career for them, and then, and then, something that can basically allow me to carry on doing the job that I love doing, which is making records and making people, in pop stars, seeing someone playing in a pub, and then two years later seeing them playing in arena as a headline artist, is fulfilling beyond belief. W, that must be amazing.

5:18 That must you know, is that why there’s so many megalomaniacs in your business, because they basically can create or destroy a life that way? The truth of the matter is the public persona, Simon, and he’s seen as a megalomaniac. Is he, uh, no, he’s actually a really genuinely nice human being. Your office used to be next door to his, right? We, I used to share the same corridor as him.

5:39 Yeah, when we were, we both BMG together, and obviously I shared some artist with him. I signed, I pinched some artist off him as well over the years. For those who don’t know, this is Simon Cowell from The X Factor, and uh, and the truth is when you sign someone, everyone’s natural reaction is it’s dog s***. It doesn’t matter how good that person is, they’re dog s***, and then when they succeed, everyone’s like, ah, it’s obvious, it was going to happen anyway.

6:08 And what you have to learn to be is ignore other people because most of the most successful artists, everybody hates them. It’s this whole thing of, “They’re not that great,” cuz normally P me normally things come from places that no one would expect, and you always. I can every artist I’ve ever signed and we could go through some of them, and I tell you the things that were said along the way, and if you listen to those things you would stop immediately.

6:36 This is heads of radio stations: “I’m never going to play that record over my dead body.” Uh, people in the media say they’re not even real. You know, other record companies say, “Oh, we dropped that artist six months ago.” Let’s give an example, and I have nothing to do with her, so I’m not going to claim anything. Katy Perry was dropped three times, sorry, twice, and she, on her third record label, by the time she had success.

6:56 You’re like, what? The Beatles couldn’t get a record contract, and signed to a guy who the last bunch of albums he signed, George Martin, had produced were comedy albums. They couldn’t get a recording contract with a record company that released music. They signed to George Martin, who was a comedy producer. Now, the rest is history.

7:14 He’s an incredible musician himself, and was, you know, a fully trained musician and a great producer, and he was like the fifth Beatle. But the truth was that they couldn’t get signed. You know, one of the things that I’ve signed, of being incredibly successful, with Jay-Z he had been dropped from his label in America. He had spent eight years in the doldrums. He had released that first album Reasonable Doubt on his own record label with his business partner Damon Dash.

7:40 No one wanted to release him, and the reviews if I showed you the reviews written at the time about the album: “This guy’s the death knell of hip-hop. This is the beginning of the end.” It’s so obvious. Some of those people 10 years later wrote the review to say Reasonable Doubt is the greatest hip-hop album ever made. Now, I’m biased, of course, I’m going to say that.

7:58 It was a major part of my career, but trust me, I nearly got fired for having Jay-Z on the label, and my partner at the time, Christian. I remember when a new boss came in, and he actually said to me, so, new big boss, and the guy who was like running the UK division said, “The new guy that’s coming, he doesn’t like your boy band,” which went on to have a number one with the next release, thank the Lord, and he doesn’t get you, hip-hop guy. Everyone in New York past, this guy, why would two geek white guys from London be signing hip-hop artists?

8:26 What do you know about hip-hop that they don’t? And we, but we think this guy’s great. We love him. We believe in him, and he’s like, well, if something doesn’t happen quick, you’re going to have to buck your ideas up. And I was like, yo, anyway, looking in the history now with hindsight, that was a genius move.

8:44 This guy became how did you sign Jay-Z? How did I, I mean, what are the semantics of that? Okay, that was really quite funny. Well, my, I worked at London Records. That’s why now I’m the president of London Records, but this was years ago, this was the previous, uh, incarnation of London Records in 1994 and I worked there till I was in 1996, and I worked next door to a guy who’s a brilliant executive, a very good friend, called Christian Tfield, and he had the office next door to me, and myself and him were doing dance music.

9:11 He was doing everything, from Wigfield to Orbital, so from one end the cheesiest pop thing to the other end the coolest electronic dance band. And I was sitting next door in marketing, and I was picking up the old dance record, and this led me to be moved up into an A&R, and into the dance label called ffrr, classic dance record label that had some of the greatest dance records of house records of all time. Fast Jump, Master Funk, Love Can’t Turn Around, uh, French Kiss, Little Louie, uh, just incredible, incredible records.

9:37 And they had this history thing, and when uh, Christian and I, uh, we were basically getting more and more frustrated with the structure and the people and where we could go, and we’re looking for new opportunities, and a new opportunity came our way, to go to work at BMG and set a new label up, and we set a new label up called Northwest Side Records. The reason it’s called Northwest Side Records is we both lived in Northwest London. He lived in Northwest 3, I lived in Northwest 6, so that’s the thing we had in common.

10:03 So we named the label, and then he said, what are we going to sign? So I said, I love this guy. He’s on MTV all the time, and I’ve tried to make a call, him before, and do a deal, but there’s a problem with the lawyer, and I, it’s a long, boring story which I won’t bore you with, uh, and uh, he said what’s, play me some stuff. So I played him Can’t Knock the Hustle, and another record called, um, this is the name of the record before anyone gets offended: “Ain’t no n*****.”

10:27 And I said, it’s Jay-Z’s record. Reason, I said, I love “Ain’t No N*****,” and it used the Four Tops loop. [singing] better, which was the original. And he went, [singing] [singing] Okay, and so he had the girl singing the hook, um, and which is Foxy Brown, and he would do the rap. And I love this record, and it was like a club slammer, and the other record, Can’t Knock the Hustle, had Mary J. Blige on it, and was like a radio cut.

10:54 And we listened to it, and we watched the videos for Dead Presidents, and we watched the video for, um, I think we just watched a video of, “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” and we were like, yeah, this is great, this is great. So I looked at the label, and it said Freeze Records. Now, Freeze Records was a dance label that had Todd Terry on, and we come from dance music. So I, like, yo, I know Will, Soc, off the guy. He owns it.

11:15 I call him. I call this guy, and he said, Will, Will, it’s Nick. He’s like, cool, man, what’s up? I said, hi, Jay-Z. Jay-Z here.

11:23 Oh my God, man, these cats don’t understand. I said, what do you mean? He said, these cats don’t understand. I licensed their record to a distribution company called Priority. Now, Priority is like the biggest independent hip-hop distribution company in America at the time, he said, and they are, the records going on the radio, and it’s blowing up on the East Coast, and every time it blows up, the record moves up the chart, but there’s a delay of six months, to, between six and 12 months, for the money to come from, six months, the retailer to pay the distributor, and then 12 months for the distributor to account to us.

11:56 That’s long. So I think I’m exaggerating it, but say minimum, it’s six months, maximum up to 18 months, to get your money. So every time the record moves up, these young guys, Jay and Damon, want to inject marketing money, which is a logical thing to do. Your record’s getting bought by people, so you want to tell more people about it, so you need to spend money, but the money is not coming quick enough from the distributor, because of the way the structure of the deal is, because they are not only licensed, it, they licensed it to somebody else, who licensed it again, so they were, they were screwing.

12:26 They had no money, so Jay and Damon were stuck. And Will was every day getting them calling out, “Yo, where’s my money, man? Where’s my money at?” and they were like, he’s like, “I ain’t got no money,” and they like, “Just advance us some money.” He’s said, “Y’all, how much money do you want?” He’s, “We need 100,000 immediately.

12:43 We need 200,000.” He’s like, “We ain’t got that money.” So he’s on MTV, his videos being played, and they don’t have any money. He’s got, this is true, pop stars all the time. Okay, so this guy’s now blowing up, blowing up, blowing up.

12:54 He’s got no money. So I call up in the middle of this, and he said, “Yo, Nick, take this guys off my hand. Take these f***ing guys off. I can’t handle this f***ing with dance music. I put a dance record out, it’s, we get money in, the guys are cool.

13:09 They’re DJing, they’re producing, but this guy, he needs this to sustain, whereas the dance guy, he puts a record out to get him more DJ gigs, get more remixes, getting more production, so he doesn’t need this cash straight away, whereas Jay and Damon, this is their lifeblood. So I get on, so I said, okay, give me the number. So he gave me Damon Dash’s number. I called Damon, and I said, hi, my name’s Nick Raphael, and I run a label at BMG called Northwest Side Records, and he said, uh, yeah, I want to license your record.

13:37 He said, you’re at BMG? He said, yeah, yeah, so you work with Clive Davis and these people? Clive Davis is a legend who ran Arista Records, and you know, the RCA guys. And you know, I said, yeah, yeah, I said, I know everyone. I knew no one.

13:48 I was brand new at the label. But how old were you at the time? 25. Okay, but they were young too. Yeah, Jay is two years older than me, and Damon was the same age as me.

13:59 Okay, but, uh, so I flew to New York with Christian, so we both went there, and we get to New York, and when we get there, um, we go to their office, and at the time it was cool for the guys in the record business to wear like a raincoat, like a full raincoat thing, and we used to have these raincoats, and it was like London trend. It was like, like a ma, like a Macintosh thing and Burberry thing. No, Burberry, no, we, we weren’t, no, not that sort of thing, but it’s like this whole thing.

14:25 So you’d wear a jean and you’d wear a pair of like Church’s shoes, and a rank. It’s not a million miles different now, but it is, it’s a bit of, sort of, we’re young guys and we’re looking a bit older and cooler. Anyway, I remember young guys like to do business with their young guys, don’t they? I mean, that gave you a lot of credibility, I’m sure, with Jay and Damon. I didn’t look at it at the time.

14:42 Maybe, yes, with hindsight, maybe. At the time I felt like the biggest bluffer in the world. We started a new record label. There was me and Christian. We had, we didn’t even have an office.

14:51 We were sharing a phone, the finance director had gone on holidays, office, and we had one phone, a mobile phone, and we didn’t have I don’t think our email address had been set up at BMG. It’s crazy, ass stuff. Do you have money, or is it something? No, we were funded beyond belief. BMG has said to us, here’s a truckload of cash, set a label up, make us, you know, you’ve got three years to make Sonic work.

15:12 Do you have to sell the artist to them, or do they pretty much, they give you, they, we were early doors. We get, we get a split. The split is not as good as you get once you’ve had success, but it’s the first rung on the ladder of really earning, cuz we’d proved ourselves elsewhere, we’d had success, we were on the next level, so this was a great situation for us. So we get there, and Damon, so we get there, and I always remember it, and there’s a proof.

15:37 If people look it up, there’s a billboard ad, and the song was called “Ain’t No N*****,” right, and they had gone gold on their album, sold half a million in 13 weeks, and they didn’t add in billboard, with three of them with the middle finger up. Jay, Damon, I’ve got Bigs Kareem, who used to work with them. He was the other guy who’s involved, and it said, “Golden: 13 weeks, ain’t bad for a bunch of n*****s,” star, star, and that was their logic. We, their finger up to the whole record business.

16:08 You know, we’re the outcast, the whole thing. We turn up. I think just me and Chris, at least me and Christian, there might be another guy, Ben, with us. Anyway, two of us, at least, turn up, two white guys in Mac, and the woman at the desk said to us, “Are you IRS?” We were like, “What are you, IRS?

16:27 What IRS?” And they, we’re like, and we’re like, “No, we’re English,” and she’s like, “You DEA?” I’m like, “No, we’re not DEA. What are you talking about?” and she’s like, “We look like the two geekiest guys you’ve ever seen, right?” And we’re like, “No, we’re from the record club.”

16:41 “Oh yeah,” Dame J said, “yeah, hang on,” when they’re just doing a photo, and they came back, they’re like, “Check this photo we did.” This, and D, anyway, about three weeks later, we saw the ad, we couldn’t believe it. They did a whole page, black and white ad, and billboard was just like, the music Bible in America is a wrong move. No, no, no, no, it, no, it was brilliant move. What it was was punk.

17:00 Okay, I think hip-hop is punk. Interesting. It’s startup, do it yourself. I got nothing, but was punk. Is it, is it still punk?

17:09 I think a black hip-hop culture is a brilliant book called, uh, can I forget the blank name, uh, Payback or Paycheck, and it’s about the history of hip-hop, and I think what’s more important than history of hip-hop is at the beginning, how hip-hop was subservient to labels, and later on, the labels became subservient to hip-hop. So then Puffy became so powerful, or, uh, Dr. Dre became so powerful that they were basically playing the labels, rather than labels playing them. In the first, you’d buy you’d buy the masters and you were in control, but hip-hop became so big through Def Jam, Russell Simmons, and, um, uh, Russell, I’m going to completely go mad, Rick Rubin, his partner.

17:54 Uh, at the beginning they created this counterculture, and this counterculture then went into clothing, and, you know, rocker wear, and the way they got involved with Adidas and brands, and then later on 50 Cent gets involved with Vitaminwater. Now Dr. Dre gets involved in Beats. They became the cult, counterculture, they now become culture. You know, I’ve got a 12-year-old son who, um, Nick knows, who’s, you know, he’s as hip-hop as a, as a white kid from Hampstead can be.

18:21 You know, he’s got his Beats headphones, he’s got his new Air Jordans, because it’s a culture, and I now think hip-hop is playing the label, run the label, playing hip-hop, and I think that’s exciting, and I think, you know, the same is with these brilliant, incredible executives in America, the guys who run, um, Lil Wayne’s label, and they’ve got Nicki Minaj and Wayne and Drake. These guys are ridiculously successful entrepreneurs, but they do it on their own terms, and they do it in conjunction with a label, because they need the scale and need the, they need, you know, they like to take someone else’s funding. They’re not risking their own cash.

18:52 It’s like a guy working in the city. I know you worked in the city. So Jay basically signs with you because you have capital that he can’t really secure. Is that because it seems like the last thing those guys would want to do was give up any control, or give up any equity in their music, with the deal that we did with Jay? Jay was so bright from the beginning.

19:07 Jay, in the first meeting we had with him, when we went that day and we met them, they told us about the picture. We went out to an Italian restaurant, and we sat there, and Jay told us that day he said, “I, we are going to start, we are a record label already, Rockefeller, right? Um, we’re going to sign other artists, we’re going to do a clothing line, we’re going to be bigger than Russell and, um, and Rick’s label.” That’s your aspiration. We want, we want to become the biggest.

19:31 I want to, I want to do this.” He named about five things he wanted to do that he’s later done, and we sat there, me and Christian left there, went, either this guy is going to be the greatest, or he’s crazy, and we both went back to the thing and said, “I hope we’re right,” but he, there was no doubt in his eyes. Who’s telling this bulls***? This is what you want to hear. When you meet an artist for the first time, do you want to see that kind of vision or entrepreneurism, something like that?

20:00 You want to see a vision, and different people, different things. Jay was business as well as incredibly talented. His flow, his lyrics, his intensity. He’d done eight years on the road. He’d wrapped on other people’s records.

20:14 He tried before, so he was part of the culture. His best friends were Biggie, sort of stuff, but he had, he understood, he, he understood the business side of it. So you’re dealing with an artist. Some artists are incredible, but they don’t understand the business, so they can make the greatest song, and they can do this and do that, but when it comes to the business side, they have someone else make all decisions, cuz, literally, what do you want me to do?

20:35 What, and what’s, well, that sounds like or they’re anti-business and don’t want to do the things that move the business forward. Yeah, they, they, they have a different, they have a completely different mindset. They don’t think like, it’s called the music business, and I got an economics degree, and I love music, and I DJed, and I was in music. My, you know, music was being like a ridiculous passion in my whole life, but I come from a logical place. Speaking of this ridiculous passion, Nick, tell us about Chinese with attitude.

21:05 I’ll happily talk about that. So when I was at university first, you first got to tell us why Jay signed with you. Okay, sorry, we’ll get back to that. We can come back to that one. Uh, the Jay then said, we sat with Jay and Damon, and they said, listen, we need a bunch of money, and we need this amount of money, and we need it quick.

21:21 It’s okay. Said, if you’re serious, let’s make the deal. I said, okay, fine. So I made a deal for the entire world, and then my American record company all said to me, yo, this guy’s a chump, why would you want to sign him? So I said, well, I need your commitment, otherwise I don’t have the American rights, and every single one of the BMG companies passed on the American rights to Jay-Z.

21:43 And then he signed you’ll see in history to Def Jam, seven, eight, nine months later, after the album became platinum in America. The first album independently, and uh, to this day now, cuz Sony bought BMG. Sony own Reasonable Doubt. In my lifetime, one, in my lifetime, volume two for around the world, ex-North America, and what Jay wanted, and he said it from the door, “I want to be the most famous and the most successful hip-hop artist on the planet, and whatever I have to do to do that, I’ll play crap gigs in Sweden, I’ll go on a cigarette-sponsored tour in Germany.”

22:18 Basically, he was the hardest-working, the most honest grafter I’ve ever worked with, and at the same time the most incredible talent, and the deal was we have no career creative control, so we basically bought into his creative vision. That standard, or is that not standard? No, very, very unstandard. But I was like, listen, we just want to be in business with this guy, and let’s just make the deal, because if that was really important to him, the money was not crazy.

22:43 The money was very sensible. Millions and millions? No, no, no, no. We, that, and you bought international rights. You didn’t get the American rights, well, we had the right to buy the American rights, but our American labels just thought we were just two white chumps from London.

22:56 Sign why would you sign a guy? All our hip-hop specialists don’t get you. Didn’t sign with him, or you did? We signed him everywhere outside North America, cuz we couldn’t get a North American license, cuz BMG wouldn’t sign off on this. No, BMG in North America said, yeah, we, okay, don’t waste our time.

23:12 How many times has that happened in history, that the incumbent bureaucracy has been so shortsighted and just missed out on the golden opportunity? It happens every single day, all the time. Happens all the time, because there is. Do you think that’s happened to you that you just don’t know about, or that you might even know about, cuz you’re pretty established now? Have people come to you and said, this is the next best thing, The Innovator’s Dilemma, that it’s just going to happen over and over?

23:37 It happens over and over. I don’t get offended by it. When, when, when you’re younger and this happens, you’re like, you [expletive], you got my respect. Have you met the 25-year-old Nick Raphael? And if you’ve been like that, kid doesn’t know what the f*** he’s talking about, and he wants to sign the next Jay-Z, and you’re like, he’s wrong.

23:52 Is that going to, that’s going to happen sooner or later in your life, right? It’s definitely going to happen to me in my life. Okay, uh, um, it’s happened before, right? I mean, you, the people have come to you with the signing, and you’ve said no, this is crap, and it’s turned into a huge hit. Not, um, not within my own staff.

24:08 Not really within my own staff. You know, I work with one person, a girl, Joe Chingon, who’s exceptionally probably one of the best executives there is out there in my opinion, and has been incredibly successful working with me. Um, and she’s outstanding. We do everything on the basis of, we both have to believe, or one of us has to believe so strongly the other is willing to give up. So we almost do like this: if we can’t convince the other person, we can’t do it.

24:33 Uh, the truth is, uh, it will happen to me in history. Uh, I’ve had things I wasn’t allowed to sign that were successful. Um, you just got to, if you want to take the corporate buck, which, which is a safe option, the way to do it, you got to deal sometimes with the corporate politics, and that may mean someone doesn’t want you to do it, or they won’t put your record out in a different country, and you know what part of growing up is to say okay, and if you want it on your own terms, risk your own dime, and if you’re not willing to risk your own dime, play by, you got to learn to play their rules and play, and learn the politics of a building, your own, as in your own personal, though.

25:11 You put, so you put your own money into some artists. I put my money into my publishing company. Um, and would I put my money into some artists? I think at some point in the future that may happen. Uh, at this moment in time I’m committed, and I, I want to create my label for Universal, which is who I’m involved with and I work for.

25:27 I want to make sure my label is the most successful label and the most successful thing I’ve ever done. This is London Records. London Records. But the reality is, in the future, 15 years, 20 years from now, can I see myself doing this with my own money? I could, yeah.

25:43 Why I’m passionate about, I believe in it. Uh, and if you’re not willing to back yourself, then why would anyone want to back you? It’s tricky. I mean, a lot of film directors don’t put their own money in movies, and uh, I was just wondering if you might get biased one way or the other, you know, having your own money in this guy, and my money isn’t that guy. And it’s tricky.

25:59 I mean, you have to keep it kind of church and state a little bit, don’t you? It’s, it’s hard, and I think, I think what does help is when someone else is funding it, and they can, they, you know, R&D in music. Someone, there’s a figures released this week, how many billions record companies invest, because we’re all regarded as horrible, ignorant fat cats, but the fact is you’ll take too much money and you rip the artist off. The worst load of nonsense I’ve ever had in my life, because the reality is for every one act you see that’s hugely successful, there are 39 probably who’ve been signed who will never make one penny for that organization.

26:32 The R&D costs are off the scale. Okay, what’s R&D? Research and development? No, I, we don’t call it. I’m saying it’s the same as having a chemical company where you develop a thousand different drugs, and then five of them, and each one you spend 100 grand on, or 100 grand, I know it’s way more.

26:49 We, when you sign an artist, you’re spending a, normally I’d say in a major record company, this is not for independence. And before your computer troll starts saying, “Nah, that’s not the case,” I say, in my knowledge, having worked within several of the major record companies and seen the P&Ls, most artists it normally costs about half a million, right, minimum, to bring pounds to bring an artist to market, minimum. And in America it’d be even more, because you’ve got a bigger, you know, you’re dealing with 352 million people as opposed to 77 million.

27:20 Will you spend that money on studio time? Will you spend that money on promoting them on MTV, or, you know, okay, the things that you would spend first of all? Assigning, you have to give them some money. Give them cash, give them cash. Then you’ve got to make a record.

27:33 Okay, then you’ve got to do some marketing. Then you’ve got to hire people, in my case, cuz I don’t have a staff. You have to hire people to work on the project. You have to make videos. Okay, you have to create content.

27:43 Uh, you have to do tour support. So before they earn any money on tours, they have to normally get supported by the record label, who’ll say, “I will pay for you and your pal to go out and play.” So you’re involved in video creation and all the creative. Is that as well? 100%.

27:57 That’s, there’s so many questions I could ask him. Can I want to know specifically about you dressing up in a dress and playing as a DJ? Okay, that’s a, that’s, that’s a fair and a very interesting story. So when I was, I went to university first of all. I went to university in Leeds so I could play professional football for Bradford.

28:14 My dream and my desire was to become a professional football player. What I realized within eight within about four, five, six months of playing and training with the team, uh, playing a couple of times for reserves, uh, that they were like, “Yeah, they’ll sign you, but you’ve got to leave university.” I was like, at the club, watching me play every day, like being aware of myself playing, and thinking, “I’m not going to make the grade.” I might I might just about make the grade at Bradford, which was a division below the main, the big division, and I’m really not going to earn.

28:46 I’m not David Beckham. I’m not, uh, Lionel Messi. I’m not going to earn crazy bank, and I’m not probably good enough to play in the top division in any club. I thought to myself, I’ve really found my level here, and my level is not going to be enough to fulfill my ambition in life. And you know, impressive that you did that, because a lot of people, they won’t be able to identify that.

29:10 They’ll just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. The reality is it was too bloody obvious to me. It was, it was like going into a boxing ring and you lost your full fight, and your fifth fight, and you’re saying, “Yo, you know, maybe I need to change weight, maybe I need to change trainer, you know, maybe you’re not cut out for this.” And the truth of the matter, I was, I was good enough to beat everyone in the amateurs, but I had four pro fights and I was like, not that great.

29:34 And I think the reality was when I got to the standard, when I was playing with the real guys who do it every day, I was like, f***, is this going to be my life? I was going to earn a okay salary and do the thing that I love, but actually fundamentally be substandard at it. You know, I was never going to be, I was never going to be great at it, and I thought anything I had to do in life, I got to, I got to know in my heart of hearts it could be great at this.

30:01 So you made a conscious decision, “I’m not going to pursue football anymore, I’ve got to try something else?” got to try something else. And at this point, when I was in London, when I was 16, and I was at school, I put a club on at Dingwalls, which, by the way, is totally illegal. Yes, I know you can’t put a club on until you’re 18, cuz it’s a licensed venue. I lied and I put a club on, and it was hugely successful.

30:20 How important do you think breaking the rules is for anyone to have success? It depends to what level you break rules. It depends if the thing that you do to break rules has long-term consequences for other people, or whether it’s something that has no real consequences and will have a… you know, if you do something, that’s the difference between a lie and a white lie. You know, there is a decision. If I did it and it caused harm to other people, or I did it and I risked other people’s lives, or something, that’s unacceptable, or I did something and I defrauded you of something, that’s a different thing.

30:56 Putting a night on, a night class, and being a little bit sort of ambiguous about my age. All the kids turned up, we all went. They still have to show identification if they wanted to buy alcohol. If they had dodgy identification, that’s their responsibility, not mine, and we did it, and it was a huge success. We made a bunch of money.

31:12 This is like a little club that you started on your own? No, it’s just this one night, one off night, when we were at school doing business enterprise with a bunch of my pals, because we had to do something in my economics group where you had to create something, so people are making, like, you know, pencil cases or birthday cards or whatever, and selling them to the family. I was like, that’s bulls***. I want to hang out with girls, and I want to listen to music, and I want to be, I want to be the man.

31:37 So me and my four friends decide we’re going to set a nightclub up anyway. We did that, and it was a success. So I hadn’t done that until, this is where the big why comes in. I hadn’t done that until, uh, I did that at 16. When I got to University and I was playing football, I didn’t turn up to University for the first year, for the first six months.

31:54 And a lot of the stuff they’re doing, I was getting the notes, and I was reading, I was reading the books. I was like, yeah, I can handle this s***, uh, once in a blue moon I turn up to a few lectures. It was cool, and then I saw a nightclub in town opening up, and so I decided to go to a nightclub, and I said, yo, I’ve got experience, I ran a nightclub. And the two guys that ran the venue had no experience whatsoever, so they’re like, yo, we got this guy from London, man, he’s done clubs in London, you’re running things.

32:20 I was like, whoa, running it? What are you talking about? Oh, yeah, I can handle that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How much you gonna pay me?

32:26 And they told me how much money. I was like, yep, I’m doing this. I’ve been working in a pizza place in between, so I was like earning rubbish an hour as a pizza chef, and by the way, I was happy to earn rubbish, now, because I needed to eat. I needed to live, and I totally understand that that was all I was qualified to do at the time. Next thing I’m going to get a run, a run at running a nightclub, a whole nightclub.

32:46 And so I was putting carpets in, ordering sound systems. They were bringing money in every day. How much you need? 10,000. Yeah, we bring 10,000.

32:54 How much you need? Oh, going to put a lighted dance floor, 12,000. Yeah. How, this stage, I’m like, 20. Okay.

33:00 Uh, oh, 19, 19, and this, this was all going crazy. Anyway, I did that. It was a huge success from the door. I then had a disagreement with the guys who ran it creatively, so the other big club in town, which had three venues in one club, they hired me. So I go and run for them, and that was a great success, and it was incredible, and I was doing my University notes at night, when the clubs running downstairs, and people are bringing money up, and I was booking DJs and doing advertising campaigns.

33:27 I was like, this is easy, and it was easy because it was my nature. My family always in business, everyone’s always in business around me, so I was like, this is business. You buy, you sell, how much you earn, how much you need to get the door. It’s quite easy, s***. So why aren’t you a club owner?

33:41 That’s what I want to know. That’s because that’s a whole different business, and it’s not, and that’s not a business-like thing, and my life led me, you’ll see where my life is. And then Nick asked me the question how I did this, and you people look me up on internet, see this TWA thing, Trannies with Attitude. Why did you dress up as a woman one night? We had this club at the back, back of the venue, the smallest club, called the Kit Kat Club, and two friends of mine, Paul and Susie, ran it, and the best-looking girls in town were coming to this club, and they were wearing less and less clothes, and they were getting more outrageous, more crazy.

34:10 I mean, some girls would come with no tops on, and they’d dance, so all the beer guys in town, the rugby guys, are coming, go, yeah, the girls, the girls get a clothes off and everything in this club, and it was not the, that was not the vibe, that was not meant to be the vibe. It was meant to be a free place, a free spirit. You’d go crazy. It was almost hippie in its mentality, and we wouldn’t play house music. We play hip-hop, rare groove, rock records, uh, lounge records.

34:35 We play any type of music you like, and we were the alternative to when ecstasy and house music was blowing up. In the other room we had a house thing, and in the bottom we had, like, a jazz, or we had a goth night. We had all three different venues going on, but this one back room was the coolest, the funkiest, the best-looking people. And Paul and I used to DJ, so one night we got back and we were crazy. We were off our faces, and we were crazy, and we’re drinking, and whatever else we’ve been doing that evening, and Susie said, “I can’t handle it anymore.”

35:03 She was a girl, and she was Paul’s girlfriend. She went, “We need to get rid of the beer monsters. How do we get rid of these guys? We can’t have, if we put a sign up, ‘No beer monsters,’ you’re going to get more beer monsters.” Like, the beer monster is what exactly?

35:14 Just a guy comes, drinks loads of beer, stands at the bar and goes, “Great tits, great ass, I want to f*** that.” You’re just completely not part of the vibe. You know, I want to dance. I hang out. This is great music.

35:25 I get the thing. So what did you do? So what we said was, we decided the only way that we could get these guys out was we hit the one space that they hate. We hit homophobia, right, because these guys are naturally homophobic. “Yo, I think he’s a [expletive], right?”

35:41 And we were like, okay, so we were like, so what we going to do? Like, have a gay-only night? And she’s like, “Make it a gay club.” And she’s like, “You know what we’re going to do? So what, says we’re going to make it a ladies-only night next week.”

35:55 I was like, “Paul and I DJ this club, so we’re not going to come to our club anymore.” So she’s like, “No, you can come, but you have to dress as a lady.” So we, me and Paul, like off our face, “Yo, that’s crazy, let’s do that f***ing…” And the most famous group in the world at the time was [expletive], and that dude, n… So Paul goes, “We’ll be TWA Tres without you.”

36:19 Okay, so we decide, “Oh, this will be crazy.” So we invite, tell all our friends, “Wear a skirt, wear a kilt, wear something, but you have to not come as a straight-up guy.” And by the way, before Scottish people hate me, the kilt thing, that’s what other people chose to do. I’m just repeating what they did. So we did this one night, and it was a crazy-ass thing, cuz what happened was when the beer monsters, who didn’t know nothing, we made it amongst our friends, and then we put these signs up: “Girls only night.

36:43 Girls only.” The guy goes, “I want to come to your club.” Yeah, my friend last week said it’s really fit girls in it. And the girl and the daughter said, “Yo, it’s girls only.” And then, suddenly, walking on the street with some guy in some high heels, walking like, “What the… was he?”

36:56 So were you signed as TW? I was, it was no. So what happened was, we played as TW for one night, and some lady called Jean Branch, who was a club promoter, no, she wasn’t a club promoter, she was a club promotions girl for a record company, where she got DJs to play the records in the clubs. She saw us, she was like, “That was…” And the night we had that night was the craziest, cuz there, none of the beer guys came, so the girls were going crazy.

37:19 The guys all dressed up, all had makeup on. It was like the best fancy dress party you ever been to. And me and Paul DJed. She turned up that night, she’s like, “Oh my God, this is the best night I’ve ever been to.” I think we shut the doors.

37:30 We had a lock-in. We had crazy stuff. The next night, the most trendy club in the country, that time, was a club called uh Venus at Nottingham, and she went there, and the promoter said, “Oh, where did you go last night?” “Oh my God, I went to this club called the Kit Kat Club, and these two guys DJed, called TW, and they’re the best DJs I’ve ever seen.” And he was like, “I’ve got to get them in my club.

37:51 How do I get him?” She goes, “Well, this Nick Raphael, what the club promoter leads?” “No way.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, thought he’s a professional football player.” “Well, he’s not anymore.

37:59 He now wears skirts.” So he’s like, “Yo, call me up,” so on the Tuesday he called me, and he said, “Will you come and DJ at my club?” I said, “No way. One off, never again. It was funny.

38:09 I ain’t doing that s*** again.” He said, “Okay,” and he offered me an amount of money for me and my partner Paul to do it, and he offered a limit Zam for all of our friends, and basically he would allow us to do whatever we like and go as crazy as we like, and we did. And the night we played there, the biggest DJ agency was just flying, and a girl Karen was there, and she’s like, “You guys are the best bloody DJs I’ve seen.” We were technically terrible, but we were the party guys, and we then got six months’ worth of gigs at £1,200 a gig for two hours.

38:38 So how many, how many years did you continue this TW? Years, really? Yeah. And that was your main income, your main claim to fame. We can YouTube it.

38:46 We can YouTube it. I did. I, we started. Are you proud of those videos, or ashamed? I’m no, nothing to be ashamed of.

38:53 We, we DJed, we promoted, we did all this s***, and to me it was like it just became like s***. I do this s*** and no one, and everyone was like, and people be like, “Oh yo, you’re gay.” I was like, “What’s the problem? You’re making money, you’re having fun.” I was having, I was having enough time in my life.

39:11 Okay, everybody else is at university, right, at this time, or my friends were starting new jobs, and I was earning more money than the guys, the guys who are running footy companies, right? I’m there earning that money, and only worked Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You earning millions of pounds? Well, no, you’re talking. I’m talking then.

39:31 So I was earning, then, uh, in some years, a quarter of a million pounds plus a year. Okay. I was 19 years old. You’re laughing all the way to the bank with a skirt on. If money doubles every 10 years, right, is what they say.

39:45 So you think that that was in 1990. So you think, how much money would that have been worth today? It’s like earning a million pounds plus a day, a million pounds plus. This just from Trannies with Attitude, or this is from your night, the club, Trannies with Attitude, the shop, the remixes, everything that we did. We were earning crazy bank.

39:59 We were going crazy and we were enjoying it, and by the way, we were having the time of our lives. We were flying around the world. We played in New York, we played everywhere, and we had this successful club, and it was voted number one club in Europe by DJ Magazine. We helped our friends who started Manumission. We opened and closed Manumission.

40:15 They came to our club, those guys, Mike and Andy, so we were involved in that with them. That was their club. We had to do with it, but they took inspiration from our club, and then we opened and closed their night. We played at their place, in them, when they did it in Paris, when they did the sex show. We were part of this crazy culture, and I was like, who cares?

40:31 I’m 20-something years old, I’m living the time of my life, I’m earning an incredible amount of money, I’ve got no responsibilities. How did that end? I just got bored, to be honest. I got bored of the whole process. We stopped wearing drag, and we got booked as DJs of TW wearing normal clothes, okay, for two years, three years, and then I got there and I was like, I can’t, this isn’t this is like Groundhog Day.

40:55 The essence of what I love, the reason I did it, has become, I’ve lost it. I’ve played in every country. I played at most the brilliant clubs. It’s just, I just couldn’t see the future. I’m always looking to the future.

41:08 You got into music business on the back of that? No, well, in the middle of all this, Nick knows my wife, uh, Amanda, um, who I met in one of, when I was doing the clubs. She had come. I took her to a ballet in London. She was already modeling for Sissons.

41:24 I took her to a ballet in London, uh, because she’d never been to ballet, and I’m from London, and she got stopped in the street in Marshall Street by an agent from a model agency. I’ve got to ask you a question about the music business. We can come right back to this. I, I, I’m just thinking about all these things in my head. How do you scout talent?

41:40 I mean, there’s tons of people listening to this right now, and they’re like, I can play a song, I can do this, osmosis. Okay, is that a really bad answer? I’ll explain what I mean by osmosis, where talent has come from throughout what I do has been the most unlikely places. The first thing I’d say to anybody watching this now, who wants to know about how to get to hear things, get yourself a manager, get yourself known locally, get material up on the internet, because if it’s out there on the internet, even if it’s bad at first, and you get better as you go along.

42:18 Get someone to help you. Don’t call up a record company, right, on your first day, or you’ve been doing it. Your first thing you try and do, so you’ve left school, and you go, or you’re at school and you go, “I’m brilliant. I’m the best singer in my class.” We’re not looking for the best singer in class.

42:34 When you enter in the charts, when you release a record, you’re competing with the best of the best. The week that you come out, Coldplay could have their album out. The week that you come out, Adele can have her new record out, so you’re going to compete with her in the charts. And there is no handicap system. You can’t come in like a girlfriend, saying, “I play off 16, I play off 18.”

42:54 No, when you come out, you play off scratch, and if you can’t play at scratch, don’t play. There is no belt division. There is no allowance for how long you’ve done it, so you’re coming, and you’re coming real. Now, we might see a diamond in the rough, but you’ve got to get so you want to see a self-starter. You want to see someone who, “I want to see you do some s***.

43:14 I want to see you do some s*** that I can’t ignore you.” Okay, that I’m coming to play on your terms. So local presence: get on YouTube, get a fan base on your own, get, yeah, get playing gigs, get doing [expletive], you know. Get, and then good people will find you. So a good manager, a good lawyer, a good person will find you, and then that person will say, “Yo, I’m going to introduce you.”

43:32 It’s all vicarious. We introduce each other. Everyone knows each other. It’s a relationship business. I met Nick in the first place through a guy called Steve, who was in the record business and who was mad into Jiu-Jitsu, and Nick had come here, and I train, and I trained with Nick to do, um, strength and conditioning.

43:48 Right? I wasn’t even interested in doing Jiu-Jitsu at this stage. I was interested in strength conditioning, but it was, I met Nick through a hookup, and then he met another, we met another guy. He came with me. Guy friend of Mel Douge, and he’s also in the record business.

44:01 But everybody, it’s a small business, like the city. It’s a small business. You mix in certain circles, and to penetrate that business in that circle isn’t that difficult, cuz we are always, we are desperately looking for the next big thing. The problem is that when you knock on the door and you’re not ready, right? It’s like turning up at a gym on the first day and saying, “I’m going to fight Roger Gracie,” or “I’m going to fight Muhammad Ali.”

44:27 You can’t come to the, you, you’ve got to come. You’ve got to find another gym, and you’ve got to do the thing, or you need to go and learn at that academy, or you’ve got to go. You don’t come in the first day and call out the biggest guy. Do these artists need someone like you, or can they do it all themselves these days? Well, tell me, tell me, tell me how many artists have done it all themselves?

44:44 I guess, I mean, Jay did it up to an extent by himself, right? No, but then he went through us, and then he went through Def Jam, and now he uses Warners, even though he owns his own masters. Okay, the truth of the matter is Jay is an exception. Okay, he saw tapes out of his trunk for years, and the J, J, Jay, Jay is a special case. You’re taking a great case, but even he used the power of a record company.

45:06 The truth is you need a filter. You need someone to feedback. You need someone to believe you, you need someone to fund a lot of these artists, uh, and a lot of artists are incredibly talented, but because you can play the piano, or because you can write a song, or because you can play guitar, or because you look great, or because you’ve got a good voice, because every success in music, in film, in life is a team. Very rarely does anybody ever achieve anything on their own.

45:39 That’s what I said, and the truth of the matter is there’s a terrible phrase, and you can edit me out for saying it if you need to, but there’s no I in team, but there’s a you in s***. And I’ve got to say it’s a horrible thing, but it’s true. If you think it’s all about you, you probably are being the terrible… Is that where the music business is? Huge.

45:59 Goes no. No, no, I don’t believe that’s the case at all. I just don’t believe that’s even the case. Listen, it’s a business where you have to have the strength of your belief. You have to, if you believe in something, and the strength of that belief, it’s a very, very hard thing to have when all around you are saying it’s bulls***, you’re wasting your time, you’re a loser, backbiting you, but that’s true in TV, it’s true in film, film.

46:26 It’s true when you hold a position in the City, when you short something and everyone else is saying it’s great, you know, when everyone else was dealing CDOs and saying, yeah, great, I got my bonus, man, cuz I sold off the Deutsche Bank, you know, $1 billion worth of CDOs, and you’re sitting there going, they’re not worth anything. I’m shorting them now. Those guys in The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s book, you know, I bet other people are saying, yeah, those guys are chumps.

46:50 What do they know? The Black Swan, when you look at his philosophies and stuff, is going against it. It’s very hard to go against the market. It’s very easy to just follow, you know, when that whole thing, anyone can follow a hot market, anyone can follow a trend. Yeah, the truth in the matter is when you really win, you normally have to go against trend.

47:09 So all of your artists have had, so many NOs, have had to push through, beyond, beyond most, almost and I specialize, or try to specialize, in the business where I always the first or the last person you see if everybody else is interested. Don’t come to me. Oh, you are the first or the last, or the last. I never want to be the person in the middle. I never want to be the person you see when all the chumps are in.

47:31 I normally say, not for me, good luck. Interesting. How long does it take when you see an artist work until you make a decision? I mean, is it like 10 seconds or 15 seconds? If I showed you a video on YouTube, let let me tell you this.

47:43 I’m dying. Another day. Here’s a brilliant thing. I always say the record business is the, the record contract you sign is like a prenuptial agreement, right? You only ever refer to the prenuptial agreement if you fall out.

47:58 If you’re happily married, no one ever looks at a prenuptial agreement, do they? You’ve been married 50 years. You’re never going to look back at your prenuptial agreement. By the way, I’m not arguing that prenuptial agreement is a good thing at all. I never had one.

48:09 I never will have one. I’ve got one wife. I’m very happy, but the truth is the prenuptial agreement is to say that if we ever fall out, these are the terms on which things get sorted out, or if you make money, this is what I pay you at, and if you do make money, they normally come and say, “Can I have some more? Can you give me a bigger share?” And you normally end up doing it, because it’s the natural process, and you say, “Will you give me more albums?”

48:28 They say, “Yes, as long as you give me more money and you give me a better share of what I deserve,” because you have to keep the artist happy. It’s not like a legal contract, cuz if they’re not happy, they’re going to go, “Well, they’re not happy, they’re not happy,” and you say, “I’m going to sue you,” and they say, “Well, right, fine, I’m not going to record any music.” And then you’re, but that’s not the basis. But what happens is you speed date, right?

48:49 You don’t have an opportunity in this business to normally hang and fill them out. You don’t go on 12 dates when you, an artist, either you think, wow, like when you see a potential partner, a sexual partner, whatever, you see someone and you’re like, yo, I get the vibe, the chemistry, we’re cool, we’re rolling, we’re happy. It’s a good thing, right? And next thing you know, you’ve signed up, and it’s almost like the craziest blind date of all time, but but sometimes you’ve been watching them from afar, okay, right?

49:25 Because you’ve been looking at them on YouTube, you’ve been listening to their demos, but once you meet them, either that chemistry is there, either they think, yeah, you’re the person going to help me because you’re going to make a big difference to their life, or they think, he’s full of s***. I hate him, he talks rubbish, he doesn’t know. You have to meet the artists. Is that a big 100%? Really?

49:44 And by the way, I’ve walked away, and they’ve walked away from me equally, when I walked in the room and going, “Guy’s a dick.” What, you, what if he’s a talented dick? Sometimes you’ve got to think you’ve got to work with this person, okay? And by the way, they’re only addicted to you. It’s objective.

49:58 Yeah, I know, right? And the other thing is, it’s we’re not selling talent all the time. We’re selling likeability, not our likeability, your likeability. So if you’re my new artist and you’re a crazy dick, but you’re incredibly talented, the truth of the matter is there’s a lot of crazy dicks. I don’t sell on your records.

50:14 There’s other people who aren’t crazy, talented. You know, I’m not. There’s people you can look at in history, who were not the best singers. Who were not the best looking. Best looking is not relevant.

50:25 We’re dealing in an audio business, but you’ve got to have the charisma and the look and the vibe, but sell hundreds of millions of records, tens of millions of records, and you say, yo, how did they do that? Because they’re ambitious. MH, ambition is the number one ambition, and likability, and the two most important things. Okay, talent, right, can go on a scale, but if you are unlikable you can have the greatest talent in the world, but no one’s going to buy your record.

50:51 Interesting. They want to buy into you. You can have the actor who’s got the greatest talent on the planet, but they’re totally unlikable. The, the, the the, the screen. The TV camera magnifies you.

51:03 So if you are an awkward person, you look more awkward on TV. If you are a fat guy or a fat girl, you look F on TV. TV puts 20% on you. I think TV puts 20% on everything. So if you’re that’s interesting.

51:19 So, and I think that’s what happens. I’m looking for it. It’s so I I had Boston Consulting Group when I worked at Sony come in one time, and, uh, God, did they hate me. And maybe there’s a lot of people watching this are going to hate me as well, but they came in and said, yo, your success, your ratio of signing things to success, is disproportionate to the business as a whole, as to Sony or to the overall business. We’ve done a thing.

51:44 Explain to me how this happens. I said, if I knew how I did it, I wouldn’t work for these guys. I’d be a billionaire there and work and fund it myself. You know, I get funding and just do it myself. I think no one really knows what goes into a hit record.

51:56 Like, it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, like a, Jour, sort of like, it’s an intangible kind of, um, thing that you can’t create a formula out of. You can’t, like, reverse engineer it, and it’s impossible. There’s no, there’s no such thing as reverse engineering. Most of the things that happened, it’s, it’s unbelievable. If we go through the history of s*** that happens, and you go, really, it got to there, that how, what.

52:21 There’s so many brilliant stories about songs and records, and some of them apocryphal, them, aren’t true. There’s a story, which I’m sure you can ask, cuz you know the guy who signed them, Coldplay, where he was asked to write one more song in the studio on the first album, and he went into the rec room and I don’t know if this is true. It’s a story I’ve heard a million times. It could have been exaggerated. It could be apocryphal, but allegedly Chris Martin was flicking through the Yellow Pages looking for inspiration for something, another song, and you know, “I wrote this song for you and it’s all yellow.”

52:48 Now, this, this might be rubbish. Might be, but trust me, songs are written. There’s a brilliant one which I heard from, um, a woman called Gwen Dickey. She was in Rose Royce, and you know she sang “Car Wash” and “Wishing on a Star,” the most successful song that’s been covered a million times, one of my favorite songwriters ever, Norman Whitfield, and a guy called Barrett Strong. And allegedly she told me, when I was in New York with her, that that song was written because Barrett Strong was told by his wife, if he spends another all-nighter in the studio, that she’s gonna, she can’t handle it anymore, and she’s going to leave him.

53:26 And he comes back from the studio session, of course, he comes at 7, 8:00 in the morning, and he grabs the mail from those American old American mailboxes you saw at the end of a drive, and he walks, he grabs it out, and he walks up the drive, and he opens the door. “I’m home, honey.” He looks upstairs. Obviously this is added with a little bit of flare, because I don’t know what he really said when he walked in his house. “I’m home, anyone home?”

53:47 And he walks up the stairs, and he walks into his bedroom, and the closet’s open on her side, and all her clothes are gone, and the bed’s not been slept in, and he opens the door to the bathroom, and on the glass it said, “You abandoned me. Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Right, and he fell to his knees, and with a pen, brr, he wrote the entire song on the back of an envelope. Are the best songs written with anguish? Amy Winehouse’s album, you look at um, I’m thinking Gwen Stefani’s album, you know, “Don’t Speak,” and all that stuff.

54:19 The best stuff, this, this stuff is real. I think the stuff that’s the stuff that connects is real. There’s something in there, there’s an emotion in there, someone is trying to tell you something that’s so real that you cannot ignore it. I’m not talking Gangnam Style, which is an incredible. I want to ask you about Gangnam Style.

54:36 I saw him perform last night on Jonathan Ross, and I interviewed him too. He’s a smart dude. Listen, just this, by the way, this guy’s going to have the biggest selling single in the world this year, maybe for many, many years. It’s this incredible phenomenon, and he’s caught the imagination, and the truth is I wish I was on my label. Would you have signed him?

54:54 I actually called up to try and sign him right before, after, uh, no, when the whole thing was going down. I found my American company was doing it, and they said to me, yo, yo, we’re on it, leave us, let us do it, and they did it, and I said, oh, can I have the UK rights? And they’re like, no, we have a link with another label called Island Records, and we’re going to do it through them, because that’s how the setup is. And I was like, okay, cool, listen, that’s my company, my parent company, got it anyway.

55:18 So that’s life. That’s the way it goes, and I was so late anyway, but to be honest, it’s, those things are wonderful, they’re inspirational, because you say, wow, f***ing, one record can, it’s going to sell what around the world? He’s got half a billion views on YouTube. This record, you didn’t think it’s overdone, you weren’t like, that’s gone too far. You didn’t want to be the middle of the pack.

55:38 You think he’s going to get bigger. I don’t, I don’t know what’s going to happen to him next. He could be a one-hit wonder, he could be the biggest star in the world. I think he’s already successful in career. I don’t know.

55:47 He is successful in career, so the truth of the matter is it’s irrelevant. I’m pleased for him. I’m pleased for music. It says to me there’s a huge appetite for records, even if it’s in Korean, they’ll buy it if it’s good enough. They’ll buy it.

55:59 Adele, when she sells 30 million records, it says to me it’s incredible. If we make something that’s great, they’ll buy it. Does this mean your industry is still alive, or is this an abundance mentality? This industry is so crazy alive, it’s ridiculous, and the naysayers, you know, we’re living in, we’re living in a culture where we’re still with naysayers, and they’re negative, and we’ve gone through we’re going through an evolution. So we’ve gone from the standard buying business to the digital buying business, where you can buy online, to the streaming business, to the YouTube business, to the Vevo business, to the next, whatever the next subscription model is.

56:33 We’re living in an evolutionary time. The truth of the matter is, people, music is more omnipresent than it’s ever been. Fact, uh, number two, is music is the most important. It’s a soundtrack to our lives. We could all talk about, we could all say, I could ask you each, what’s the most important song in your life?

56:48 Music is, you know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Music is the most important thing in my life. Music is the one thing when I’m in a shitty mood, when, like, the whole world, this kind of a… even though it’s just my own stupid perspective at the time, I can, yeah, it’s, the chimp, it’s in a chimp. I can put on a certain track and it just changes everything, and I put it on, walk onto the tube, and there’s a smile on my face, and I get those goosebumps all over my body.

57:10 I’m like, f***, life is great again. Music is such a powerful thing, and, and that’s by the way, that’s the reason I do this. That’s the reason I’m in love with it. That’s the reason why I’m so proud when I hear, when we go to another country and I turn the radio on and hear one of my records. I’m pumped.

57:24 I’m like, yo, I made, I made an impression everywhere. This record’s real, right? I’m proud beyond belief. It’s like a, it’s like a, it’s not a baby. You can’t say it’s, it’s like a baby to me.

57:35 It’s like [expletive] [expletive], they made me proud. That made me proud. I’m proud, I’m proud. I’m proud of my artist. I’m pleased with my artist when I see them playing a big stage and everyone’s going crazy.

57:43 I look around the audience. I’ve heard them do this a million times. I don’t need to watch them anymore. I’m now watching the audience. I’ve seen them do 200 shows, right?

57:50 That’s an exaggeration. I’ve seen them through 30, 40 shows. I’ve seen the first show on thing, now I’m looking around the audience. What are people doing? What people saying?

57:58 I’m proud of that stuff, and music is, it’s a soundtrack to our lives. If I listen to the album before debut, yeah, I fell in love with my wife to that record. That means that’s what it, that, that’s, anytime I hear a record off that album, it had given me little goosebumps. Yeah, I know that that record’s important to me. When I hear Jay-Z, “Hard Knock Life,” I think to myself, yeah, I was part of that.

58:17 I love that stuff. When I, when I hear my first ever number one record, Armand van Helden, you Helden, “you don’t know me.” I’m like, that was your record. Yeah, it was my signed, the artist, and I left the company, and another guy finished the record, Armand van Helden, “you don’t know me.” It’s a, so, so the truth is, the truth the truth is it’s so important.

58:36 You don’t watch anything on TV without music across it. I guess with iPhones these days we’re always plugged into something. We’re probably listening to music more than ever. Forget, forget the history of the world, forget the iPhone, everything we’ve got, and you know, forget, you know, any telephone. Because of the iPhone, now every telephone has got music on.

58:56 Even, even the BlackBerry has music on it, which is probably, probably on the weirdest, even though I love using my, um, all of them. There isn’t, now you, there’s almost no phone. You can’t buy a phone without music. Steve, Steve Jobs said something I found very interesting. There was a cool interview, by the way, that you recommended, Brian.

59:13 Amazing, amazing, intense. It was a last interview, hour with Steve Jobs, so he was saying, um, in an interview a long time ago, another one, he was saying when they were designing the iPod, um, they weren’t like even concerned that it might not be a hit, because they were like, we’re dealing with something that everyone loves. Everyone loves music, you know? This is, it’s a no-brainer. And, um, look what happened with it.

59:36 It’s just Steve Jobs. Without doubt, it could, could almost be said he, he is as important in music for the evolution of music as some of the biggest artists have ever existed. Some of the biggest. Does iTunes help your business? 100%, it does.

59:49 100%, because the truth of the matter is there is no excuse for stealing things, right? So you’re stealing from the person that owns it. You’re taking something that doesn’t, that belongs to someone. So you’re taking it from the artist, you’re taking it from the record label. You’ve stolen it.

1:00:01 Okay, so whatever anyone’s sharing, and this and the other, and yeah, I’m sure people are going to [expletive] at me again for saying, ah, record company guy. Course I don’t care. Truth of the matter is you stole something. It wasn’t yours, you didn’t, you didn’t have the right to take it. Steve Jobs created a method by which online you could buy music at a price that is acceptable to people.

1:00:20 Oh no, you don’t charge too much? No, we don’t. We do the research and development. We pay for the studio. We pay for the private jets for the superstar artist.

1:00:28 We do that s***, uh, because we love music. We believe in music. We believe there’s a future in music. It’s really, really, really really important. I believe music, my opinions, and my opinions and not the opinions of my company, and my attitude is this stuff is really important.

1:00:41 The fact is Steve Jobs came along and created a method that was simple. I can go on there, pick a piece of music, download it straight to my computer. It goes onto my phone. I take it anywhere I like. I can listen to it.

1:00:53 Tell you what, compared to previous formats, every time we get a format I’m like, cassettes, mad as a kid, right? Then I DJ, and it had to be vinyl, right? Then a CD came along, right? I was post, I wasn’t DJing when the CD was a format for DJs. I had to get my entire album collection on CD.

1:01:12 Now I’ve got all my CDs at home. I literally, like, one minute, when I want an album, I don’t want to put, I have to put it in my computer, save it. I sometimes just go online and say, uh, “One, send me.” And now Spotify’s come along, and everyone, I go to dinner, best thing ever. Everyone lives on Spotify.

1:01:28 I go to dinner parties and they’re like, oh, what you want to listen to, man? I’m like, what you got? And they go, we got anything. So what you want to listen to? And I’m like, uh, Marvin Gaye.

1:01:37 I’ve said it before. You know, Brian, think about 200 years ago, like, you wanted to listen to music. It was either sitting around the fire when some dude pulls out a ukulele or a banjo, or whatever, or it was going to watch a performance or something, and now we have every song you can possibly imagine at your fingertips at all times. It’s mind-blowing, an amazing time to be alive. Does that hurt your business model?

1:01:58 I mean, can you make money off music anymore, or do you have to make money on the tours? And that must change your revenue model. The fact that iTunes is there, and iTunes is taking half of it. No, no, one, no one can deny the revenue model has changed, but what it’s creating is more revenue streams. So, and yeah, do we earn off live?

1:02:14 Do we earn off this? Do we earn off, we earn off, yes, we earn off stuff, because we create that stuff, and we’re investing, Brian, in who no one’s ever heard of, and five years later you know, you’re the most famous rock star in the world, and yes, we invested millions of dollars to make pounds, to make that happen. The reality is they’ve changed the business model. The business model is evolving with society in the digital world. How do you guys make money off Spotify?

1:02:36 I mean, how does that work? I still have, and figured that out. 100% honest with you, there is, every time something’s streamed, we are paid an amount of money. Is that how it works? Every time I stream a specific track, you guys get, but it’s, it’s not, point, I don’t know.

1:02:48 I don’t even know what the figures are, so I would be an idiot to even say, but it’s like a minuscule amount of money. It’s like when you watch something on YouTube, we get a minuscule amount of money for every play, but when you add up tens and tens and tens of millions, point, point, point, it suddenly becomes, it’s like a, it’s like a trickle of money. There’s a recing iTunes, there’s a recurring theme here with a bunch of our successful, um, guests, and that’s his abundance mentality, and I feel it with Nick as well.

1:03:17 As in there’s, you know, he wants other artists to become famous. He wants Gangnam Style to be famous. He wants all these people to sell records, cuz it means that he sells more records, you know, well, means, means, means there’s a bigger, F for me, play it, means that I can’t hide behind my incompetence, and say, ah, my business is screwed, and the iTunes has ruined it, and Spotify’s ruin. None of them have ruined it. They’re only trying to make money from music, which means they have to pay us because we create music.

1:03:43 So I got to say to these people, thank you for being interested in our business, thank you for embracing us, thank you for for for modernizing what we do, and I’ve now got to find things that are better, because if you find, even in this modern world with Spotify and iTunes and everything else, well, iTunes helps those things. Adele’s going to sell 30 million records on her second album, right? At the minute she’s like 22, 23 million copies sold. She’s even in the heyday, even in the great old times, right, when everyone talks about the 80s, and you know, 70s and 80s and 90s, in terms of selling music, people weren’t selling 30 million.

1:04:22 People went, ah, no one’s going to sell that many anymore because of the new digital revolution. They said the same about book publishing. Then we get Harry Potter, and everyone goes, ah, book publishing is a really good business. Guess what? Someone wrote a good book, a series, good series of books, then 50 Shades of Grey comes along.

1:04:37 It wasn’t a freak. What happens is we need to step up to the plate, collectively, individually, and make stuff that’s compelling that people want to buy. Now you’re doing something. If what you do becomes even more compelling, you get better at it. More people will watch you, more people will be interested.

1:04:55 The more the internet blows up, the more people will be sourcing stuff that you do. The better quality of guest that you get, the more people search them. You see the ones that get searched and don’t get searched. You see the ones that you push and no one cares about. See, it’s the fact, it’s quality, so it’s a feedback loop.

1:05:11 It’s almost a more efficient feedback. Incredible. Yeah, but I, to I’ll agree with that to a point, and then, like, you’ll see a video of some kid squeezing a p… pole, gets like 50 million views. You know, it’s like, Brian and I put so much effort into this, and we, we might get a fraction of that, so I, I don’t know if it’s as cut and dried as that. Yeah, but you know what I mean?

1:05:31 It’s like, it’s what the public determines as being good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s quality. Okay, the kid that the Charlie Bit My Finger, for example, is a 30C one, and a one-and-a-half-minute clip, right? It takes no time. It’s cute, it’s funny. You’re not engaged with Charlie for the rest of your life, right?

1:05:49 What you’re trying to build is I don’t want to go into what you’re trying to build is something completely different. You can’t, you can’t, you’re comparing two completely different things. It’s your, you know, just because someone watches Charlie Bit My Finger 180 million times, or whatever it is, doesn’t constitute that as a serious piece of, you know, a serious thing, a good thing. The fact is it was st at the court imagination. It’s cool, it’s funny, it’s part of culture.

1:06:15 End of story, right? What we’re trying to, we, when we’re trying to create a piece of music, we’re trying to create something that, some, some, some things are Charlie Bit My Finger style, a one-off hit that no one really cares about in 10 years’ time. Other things, Adele’s album is probably going to be long-term quality. Mumford & Sons, long-term quality. Some other records that are slow builds that I love personally.

1:06:40 I love this Ben Howard record, but Island Records. It’s a really cool record, and I recommend it to a load of people. There’s a kid called James Vincent McMorrow. Tried to sign him when I was at Sony. He’s on a little label called Believe.

1:06:50 I love his record. Special. These things, some of them get the recognition, some of them word of mouth. Record, some, those things build, but you know, we’ve got to find things that are incredibly compelling, incredibly brilliant. We’ve got to do things in this digital age.

1:07:05 It’s easier for people to hear what we’re doing. In the past, the barriers of radio, the barriers of TV, the barriers of magazines. It was hard to get your s*** heard or talked about. Now we’ve got blogs, everyone talks about everything. I get it.

1:07:19 Well, you know, we’re almost running out of time, guys. I just wanted to know, what’s the future for Nick Raphael? I met you actually at the airport, and we were coming back from Rogan, and you mentioned okay, you’re in London now, you’re talking about the LA music business. I mean, you kind of made a reference that that might be the Premier League. But how much of your business is global, and what’s the LA music business like compared to the London music business?

1:07:39 The business is 100% global. With the internet, the business is global. With the iTunes, the business is global. Um, the reality is my comment to you when I was in LA, and I stand by, is uh, uh, LA’s Champions, America’s Champions League. Okay, right, so when you’re in the music business, America is the biggest market in the world, and by far, right, factors of 10.

1:08:01 Well, it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s massive, because it’s 352 million people. It’s ridiculously big, and if you break America, the level at which you can sell tickets, the amount of people you can sell to, it’s a whole different scale. Um, you know, a successful record in the UK, a stupidly successful record in the UK, can sell two, three million copies, really, ridiculously, for in America you can have records that sell 10-plus million copies, uh, rarely.

1:08:32 And same true in UK. So you can see the multiple scale. It’s a big difference, and just, just the multiple of people is five to one, or four and a half to one, or whatever ratio. So for me, there is a global business, and uh, I said to you, and I’ve said it to many people, yeah, one day I’d love to play on the global scale and to compete with in Champions League. It’s like, if you, I’m a soccer fan, if you want to play football and your club wins your league, you want to go and find out how good you are against the Spanish champions and the Italian champions.

1:09:03 And the being in LA would make a difference. Well, LA is the center of entertainment in the western world, because you’ve got movies there, you’ve got TV there, a lot of s… things are there. A lot of the best songwriters in the world now live there. The external songwriters are guys who write for other people. A lot of the best producers live there.

1:09:20 The weather is better than it is here. I know Nick, constantly, the South African who doesn’t like the London weather. Uh, I’m used to London weather, I grew up in London. Uh, is it important to be local to press the flesh and to get those deals done? Do you think, listen, I probably go to LA at least every two months, because of the nature of the fact that a lot of the entertainment companies are run from there.

1:09:42 A lot of stuff happens in there. Like we said, in the global age, the biggest selling record in the world in recent times came from the UK, so it came from the UK artists. Yes, there is Americans involved. Yes, Americans have written on it. Which album was that?

1:09:54 Which is Adele. Adele, I keep, I keep mentioning her, but you know, it’s the case. Truth of the matter is it’s a global business, and, and I would, I love what I do. I think I, I think you have to. I think everyone has to be flexible in the modern age, to be willing to move around the world to, you know, fulfill your dreams.

1:10:12 And I think it’s good to see the world, and I’m very lucky and very fortunate. I travel all the time. I see lots of parts of the world in the time that I’m not traveling for work. I travel with my family, and we go to the most ridiculous places on Earth, because my wife and my children want, we want to see what the world had to offer. And I’ve got to say, I think, you know, with modern travel you’ve got to take the opportunity.

1:10:33 You know, Nick refers to 200 years ago this, and 100 years ago that. Listen, modern travel is relatively, and I say relatively, so before anyone kills me for this as well, is relatively cheap in the modern age. You should try and make every effort to get on the plane and go and see other cultures and other people, and find out how they live, and thing, and then, you know, and I think that’s important in life, and I think it’s a good thing. And if, if you want to sell records on a global basis, you’ve got to learn the value of melody.

1:10:58 You’ve got to realize, when you get off a plane and you’re an African, you hear a song that’s an English song that you, you can’t even believe, and you go, oh, they love this song here. You know, I climbed Kilimanjaro and I remember running around Tanzania, and stuff, and hearing music coming out of places, going, whoa, they like that. That’s crazy. I didn’t expect that. You know, you go to Brazil and stuff, and you hear British music.

1:11:19 It’s amazing. Is it’s exciting. Wow. Do you want people to contact you? That’s the question.

1:11:24 If so, how would they, should they follow you on Twitter, or are you worried you’re going to get so many emails from all the aspiring artists? Um, I listen. I’m at London Records. I’m completely contactable. nick.raphael music.com, which is my, is my office email, U music, um, music.com, which is U music. Uh, of course I’m available to have things sent to me.

1:11:47 We have people who listen to stuff, uh, if it’s great, if, if I know you, or you have a history with me, of course I personally listen. If you’re sending me stuff blind, the reality is it’s probably going to be listened to by someone in our office, and they go through the hundreds, the 250 emails we get a week, probably, of new material, and they listen through and they decipher the probably top 10 or 15 things, and anything that’s got, they think, even got half a chance of us listening to it properly, they make us listen, and, uh, and then we listen to it once a week, and then we give people, we give as many people as we can feedback. Normally the feedback is great.

1:12:24 Can we hear some more material? Two, do you have any YouTube links? Three, normally is not for us. Good luck, you know, best of luck with your thing, because you can only do so many things well, and there’s only, you know, and the truth of the matter is 99.9% of stuff that comes into record company is going to be rejected, because people are totally unrealistic. It’s unbelievable how realistic people are.

1:12:46 I’ve never seen people’s more unrealistic in my life. It makes me laugh. I literally think to myself, really, did you not play this to anybody? And if you play, my mom loves this. Of course your mom loves this.

1:12:57 My mom, my mom used to tell me stuff I did was terrible, was good, and I’ll be like, oh, Mom, and then, and and then my dad would sometimes come home and go, who did that rubbish? And my dad, he’s like, oh, it’s great, son. It’s great. He’s like, of course you’ve got to get some. You know, go and play in front of an audience and find out what they say, because, tell you what, audiences are harsh.

1:13:16 The truth of the matter is I’ve got to think, I’ve got to think like the audience. If you send me something and it’s absolute bull***, you can’t expect me to send you like a long explanation. Some people go, could you give me more detailed feedback? No, it’s not good enough. I’m sorry, I’ve got a job to do.

1:13:33 I’ve made a commitment to this artist or that artist, and I need to spend more time on their record, and the fact is I’ve listened to your record, and at this stand, at this moment in time, you don’t hit the requirements. I’m sorry. So keep working. Is your advice, go play more live, refine your craft, do your stuff? Make me come and kiss your ass.

1:13:48 Don’t kiss mine. You know, I’ll kill yourself. Great quote. How many new artists do you get a day on a daily basis? When you tap out.

1:13:59 I tap out every time I get, I tap out at least five times a day. Um, the reality is I would probably, oh, just, just, I mean, we, Joe and I sit opposite each other, and in the process of conversation during the day, one or other of us will play, at least five to ten things that have come across our desk, going either, oh my God, can you believe, good, this is, or oh my God, this is the worst s*** I’ve ever been sent, or, oh my God, am I missing something here? Cuz I think this is better than it is, but, but I, I’m not sure.

1:14:35 So you, you have to bounce off someone, because, and sometimes you play something out loud with someone else. It’s a really interesting thing we do in music. You don’t have any choice, because it’s what we do. But I’ll be like, oh, it’s brilliant, it’s brilliant, and then you play it to someone else, in like, who you respect, who you work with, and as you’re playing it, they haven’t said anything. You’re like, yo, you, don’t worry about it, let me take that CD out, it’s rubbish, or let me take, turn my iPod off.

1:14:57 I made a mistake, because the minute you get perspective with someone else there, you suddenly go, oh, I was in some crazy moment, cuz, like, it’s emotional, so subjective, or you’re in a moment, you’re there and you’re listening, and you’re like, yeah, I’m feeling like this today, and then you play someone else and they’re like, yo, this is lame, this is cheesy, where did you get the idea this was good? And you go, uh, let me go and listen to this again. You listen back and you go, you know what, I was crazy, cuz you do have moments in which something listen.

1:15:24 People get signed all the time, and then people realize, like, a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later, a couple of years later, yo, that was s***, that’s crazy. Gosh. Um, Nick, thanks so much for coming in. That was science, completely dropped on us. If you guys enjoyed it, discuss it on the forums at LondonReal.tv.

1:15:40 You can click through to the episodes, and there’ll be a link to next episode. And uh, yeah, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, speaking of iTunes, um, if you just go right now and just do us a quick review, you can say you love us or hate us, but uh, just write something down there. It helps us with the rankings. And uh, shout out to Aubrey Marcus of Warrior Poet. Stuff’s getting really good.

1:15:58 He’s the man. And if you’re listening to the show, you can watch our ugly mugs on YouTube. Our channel is London Real TV, and um, come check us out on Facebook and Twitter as well. Um, awesome. Thanks Nick.

1:16:09 Thank you. Appreciate. Fun. Until then, it’s about the journey. Peace.

1:16:13 White sh… is, um, you know, it’s very objectifying the women. It’s very much the men are in control and the women are just kind of their being sh… the only people that have problem with the parties are alpha males, and I’m saying at the parties, outside the parties, cuz they just can’t get their head on. These are the most secure in love couples