TJ Chambers
During a recent coffee n’conversation, catching up on matters relating to live entertainment and things-in-general, I was delighted to be asked to present a session at FastForward #FFWDxLDN25 (https://ffwd.events/ldn25), a future-facing business conference aimed at connecting people driving positive change within the music industry.
First launched in 2015 by Chris Carey (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjcarey/) the event exists to stimulate new discussions on current issues, shared pain points, and outline potential solutions to enable a healthier, more robust music industry in the future.
Since then, the conference has run several editions in Amsterdam, London and Sydney, and this year’s assembly takes place 4th + 5th February 2025 at 21Soho, London.
For those who don’t know Chris, when he’s not being a data scientist, business analyst and sought-after speaker, he’s also a cricket enthusiast.
I worked with him during the pandemic when we collaborated in producing several pieces of original research and economic analysis for LIVE (Live music Industry Venues & Entertainment) (https://livemusic.biz/) when the industry needed to urgently respond to the COVID-19 shutdown and lobby the UK Government for sector-wide support.
A key problem was (and fundamentally still exists to this day) that the live music industry is an ill-defined group of competing commercial organisations, representing differing strata of the live music ecosystem (Artists > Promoters + Producers > Venues > Marketing Partners + Affiliates > Ticketing) each offering similar but differing cultural products (IRL concerts, festivals, residencies, AR/VR spectacles or live streaming / VOD) across multiple genres (Pop, Rock, Hip-Hop/Rap, Country, Jazz, Latin etc.) and with overlapping interests in event monetisation via Pre-Sale (to closed-user groups – fan clubs, membership schemes, preferred credit cards or mobile operators etc.), On-Sale (the incremental retail marketing and distribution of tickets), Up-Sale (the ticket plus bundling or packaging – merchandise, Hospitality, VIP, travel and/or accommodation), or Re-Sale (including authorised or not resale and/or ticket exchange, as well as yield management tools and ‘surge pricing’).
And then there is the fact that no-one wants to share data (including event-anonymised but trend-indicative) and is often jealous rather than gracious of other people’s success. Or worse where media organisations owned by one event promoter deliberately under-report a competitor’s activities.
Anyway, despite the lack of a centralised data source, Chris and I were able to produce a number of reports, with robust methodologies, including, Valuing Live Entertainment (July 2020), UK Live Music: At A Cliff Edge (October 2020), Valuing Live Music 2021 (November 2022), and Valuing Live Music 2022 (https://livemusic.biz/live-insights-live-music) which assisted LIVE together with their industry partners and lobbyists, in their discussions with the Department Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and the UK Treasury. And may even have had a small part to play in the £1.57Bn+ cultural recovery package(s).
Oh, and my #FFWDxLDN25 presentation ‘Fundamentals of M&A’ will take place mid-afternoon of the 5th Feb. – see you there.
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Last Sunday (12th January 2025) I found myself in the delightfully shabby Walthamstow Trades Hall for another wonderful event produced by Mark Hart (https://rocknrollbookclub.co.uk/).
The afternoon included scene-setting video footage of the Hulme estate crescents (no longer standing) in Manchester and then a friendly Q&A with musician and now author Mark Hoyle.
Reading several extracts from his book ‘Swerve. Dub Sex and Other Stories’ published by Route (https://www.route-online.com/all-books/swerve) he recounted his early life, musical career, the Manchester Musicians Collective, glass collecting at the Haçienda, the Kitchen, Martin Hannett, and John Peel sessions with both Dub Sex (https://dubsex.bandcamp.com/album/search-for-the-right-words) and Numb (https://dumboverflow.bandcamp.com/album/king-tubby-meets-max-wall-uptown-album).
Mark was modest about the accomplishments of his bands, but enthused about the transformative power of music, of the special time and creative place that was Manchester of the 80s, that despite the appalling poverty, and the general lack of facilities and opportunities, the D-I-Y post-punk mercantile attitude somehow prevailed.
He also made reference to Malcolm Whitehead at IKON (initially Factory’s video arm until 1989 then independent) who also worked with the band: ‘Swerve’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DzmPu4YOzY), ‘The Underneath’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9auwSTHVOw), The Underneath (Studio)’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFxmQxWkCg8) and ‘Live at The Haçienda (1990)’: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6La4R8Ez_h8).
Afterwards when chatting with Mark he mentioned that we’d not seen each other since Malcolm Whitehead’s Memorial Service in 2019.
Without getting overly maudlin, or nostalgic for a now distant past, it is important to remember those pioneers of art, fashion, music, and politics that reshaped our cultural identities and imagined new ways of being.
As a young man, I worked with Malcolm and Claude ‘Kickboy Face’ Bessy (who died of lung cancer in 1999, read ’Underground Babilonia. El sorprendente viaje de Philly y Claude’ – Ivar Muñoz-Rojas, Editorial La Felguerra, 2019), together with Linda Dutton (read ’I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women At Factory Records’ – Audrey Golden, White Rabbit Books, 2024), Scottie, Brian Nicholson and Howard Walmsley, who collectively produced a unique library of video – now sadly mostly lost, destroyed or decaying in vaults (https://www.factoryrecords.org/ikon-fcl.php).
After leaving IKON to work with The Fall, Thin Line Records, the Stone Roses, and then the Happy Mondays Elland Road mini-festival in 1991, I eventually ended up in London to work in venues and then ticketing – but that’s another longer tale or two.
After Malcolm’s memorial I wrote, ‘I can almost see Malcolm with half-drunk pint on the table, leaning towards us with cigarette in one hand and whispering (sotto voce) ‘Soft lad’ with a half-smile on his lips.
IKON was indeed a unique time. Created in part by amateurish energies, enthusiasm and a cultural willingness to experiment with just-enough stumbling commercial endeavour to sort-of fund the next project.
Primarily formed to release the Joy Division live footage, it then took on a mail-order life of its own. With the documentation of live events at the Haçienda, the cosmopolitan ‘foreign-ness’ and exotic network introduced via Claude, the support of Scottie, and more creatively Brian’s devotion to the cause, it became something else.
It existed despite almost living in exile from Factory, and consistently having little-to-no budget, the Northern bloody mindfulness and scrappy independence combined to produce a bewildering visual catalogue. The resultant range and diversity of (lo-fi) video and films that IKON generated is a testament to you all’.
I remember my time with IKON fondly. Life-long formative experiences, laughter and a few tears. So, thanks to Mark Hart and Mark Hoyle for the reminder.
IKON interview with Adam Sweeting, 26.05.84, Melody Maker
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Until the next time.
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TJ_Chambers 