Music

Ask any panicking record company executive what they’re doing to promote their artists and they’ll tell you ‘Why? Have you got a good idea? We can’t pay you, by the way.’ The traditional promo routes – Radio 1, ‘Top of the Pops’, ‘Saturday Superstore’, publicity stunts involving bestiality – are considered as passé as the stovepipe in this techno-happy cyberworld in which we live. But while the internet is the avowed enemy of music and musicians, plain old television is battling hard to save it.

It’s not just dedicated music shows, such as ‘Later… With Jools Holland’ – influential chat shows (‘Parkinson’, ‘Friday Night With Jonathan bleeding Ross’) and youth-oriented soapudramas (‘Skins’) are increasingly targeted as a means to get lower-profile acts into the mainstream consciousness. Like gun crime and methamphetamine abuse, this emerging trend is already far more established in the US. Top cop show ‘The Wire’ recently put out a compilation of suitably low-key and tense-sounding tunes interspersed with terse snippets of dialogue (eg ‘Hey! That guy’s wearing a wire! BANG’) while ‘Scrubs’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Smallville’ are known for their subtle indie leanings. Even ‘Lost’ has its own desert island discs.

The real kingmaker, though, is medical soap ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, which already has three soundtrack compilations to its name, with another due this year. The tracklisting suggests it’s been compiled by programmers at 6 Music – with tasteful indie-pop songsmiths such as Feist, Jim Noir and Jamie Lidell sharing disc-space with KT Tunstall, Paolo Nutini and Snow Patrol. This is great news for young artist Bryn Christopher. His debut single, ‘The Quest’, was selected to soundtrack the big finale of the most recent season. As a result, his Stateside profile went into orbit over a matter of days.
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‘Radio is a big thing,’ says the disarmingly affable Birmingham-born singer, ‘but TV is what you need, and that’s been perfect for me. I’m a total unknown, no one knows who I am, and I’m like: What the hell? They’re proper selling it! They’ve cut and pasted the verse and the bridge, repeated it, the chorus… I wanna shake the person’s hand who put it on there. It’s such a nice thing that they’d put my song forward.’

The fickle public, idiots that they are, don’t swallow everything which is dangled in front of them (which is why ‘Skins’ was good for The Gossip but no so much for The Archie Bronson Outfit), and there’s no guaranteeing that those crazy consumers will buy the song, but it’s a distinct evolutionary advantage in marketing terms. Just ask house stalwart Roland Clark, whose little-known track ‘Running on Sunshine’ (recorded as Jesus Jackson) was rush re-released after massive demand from viewers of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ season three. Clark suddenly found himself uncomfortably recognisable, and fled to the countryside.

'The Quest' was not only used to soundbed an ordinary operation or someone crying in an office or anything, oh no. It was stretched over the season finale, sprawling across the resolutions of four different subplots, one of which included (SPOILER ALERT!) a lesbian kiss, which is considered especially good for business in the music world, unless you’re Madonna at the 2003 MTV VMAs. It’s proved so popular that the network is now using the sequence to advertise the next season.

‘When I watched it on YouTube, I was like: This is so weird! Beause you can hear my voice so clearly and you can hardly hear what they’re saying in the show… and it was a bit weird because I don’t watch the show and I didn’t really know what was going on. But I just thought it was so perfectly put in the right place, and the lyrics really complement the show. I was like: You’ve just advertised my song in the most perfect way you could.’

Consequently, Christopher now has to film a new video for the inevitable re-release as the first one was ‘too dark’ (although he’s quite happy about that – ‘I’d been waiting my whole life to shoot a video and it just went by too fast!’).

Christopher, though, has more going for him than massive exposure. He’s already known to a cluster of pop fans – the enthusiastic ones who turn up on time for gigs and watch the support act – after touring last year with Mary J Blige and Amy Winehouse. Indeed, he has been lazily described as ‘the male Amy Winehouse’, thanks to his grounding in Stax-y soul. Although that’s possibly because producers Midi Mafia have the exclusive rights to use Stax samples, several of which are on his forthcoming album. Christopher distinguished himself by the amount of effort he put into his performances. ‘After the last Mary J Blige show, in Birmingham, I literally went off stage like [mimes sweaty heart attack] ha ha!

'I only did six songs, and I’m panting, I had a stitch, I was sweating drips! People would touch me and would say “Ugh, you’re soaking!” And I was in so much pain – that’s the way you do it.’

Despite Christopher’s outwardly sunny demeanour, his tracks are surprisingly emotionally ponderous, including his favourite, ‘a really random one about that moment when you die’, and soon-to-be crowd favourite ‘The Way You Are’, written specifically for ‘a girl who’d really lost it, she’s really desperate about the way she looks. In this industry and this world that we’re living in, everybody’s wanting to lose weight – men are getting paranoid about the way they look now. And just think, you’re born that way, be happy, you’re lucky that you have two legs. Just don’t change, don’t let anybody change you, and she needed to hear that. There’s a lot of women in this world, and men, and people. Who need to hear these kind of things. And when I write a song I always think I want them to be for people.’

While ‘The Quest’ seems to have caught the public imagination because it deals very specifically with with a very general soul-searching theme we’re all familiar with, its actual origins may come as a surprise to the prime time-appreciating masses.

‘The lyric is very much based on my brother being in Iraq. I was thinking: Okay, I’m living in London, I’m lucky to be doing what I’m doing, I’m not having to fight for my country and maybe die. And I was going through that whole sad phase where I was thinking: Why am I here? What am I gonna do with my life? And what can I fight for, because my brother’s doing that? And then, after writing the song, I realised I can’t answer that, you just have to do that and go and experience life as it is. I’m 22, I’m not gonna be able to answer them questions until I’m 40, 50, 80… Or probably never, for some of them. Writing that song put me at rest. I’m like: There’s my answer right there.’

Bryn Christopher plays the Soho Revue Bar on July 9.