Basically they percieved us in a completely different way than we did. They wanted us to take the same path that the Shamen took which was: release your first few 12"s, get some remixes done and get a club following you then turn around and get some pop remixer to come in and get in the charts. In the first place, we didn't want anyone to remix us, the Andy Weatherall thing came out of a huge fight about us being remixed and in the end we said OK, but we choose who does it, who we work with, that was the compromise. Then they kind of wore us down over every release from the album "You've got to have a remix of that' etc. and it got to the stage that with Forevergreen about six grand was spent on remixing which is just ridiculous, nonsense.
They wanted to release another track from the album, Mellowman but we didn't want. As far as we were concerned we were finished with that album and wanted to get on with the next one. They said "We want another single because we feel that the album has undersold, if you put another single out it will sell another 20,000" so we eventually agreed to do that if they would let us remix the whole album and re-release it with the single, which they agreed to. We were about half way through remixing the album when we got the Beatmaster's mix back of Mellowman which was absolutely fucking attrocious. We had been off on tour so we gave them the tape and when we got back it just sounded appalling. There wasn't the slightest doubt in anyones mind, it was like a bad PWS song. We were thinking about trying to sell the mix to someone like Take That or something because that is how bad it was.
So we said "There is no way that we are putting that out" "Why not? If you have a hit then you can go back and do whatever you want after that." Which is the usual bullshit story you get from record companies. Once you have done a record like that you can't go back, because once you are in the public eye, they see you as a pop band and basically our fanbase would have just laughed at it and said `I'm not going to buy another Finitribe single.' They couldn't understand that we didn't want to release a record that wasn't ours. So we fell out over marketing policies I suppose, it's not a personal thing. We didn't understand them, they didn't understand us, so it was better to part ways. Its got more dirty since then because money was involved. They want the money back for the album that we haven't recorded yet. We just want to get back to releasing records. That's what we are here to do, make music and release records. Not get involved in Marketing strategies and trying to make us another Shamen, there is only one Shamen and it's not very good anyway, anymore.
The whole unified image is just for something to. . . hide behind isn't the right word. The three of us probably wouldn't be very good at coming up on stage without an image. We don't want to promote ourselves like come up on stage and say "Hi, this is Dave Miller this is what I do". That's why we do it so we can go on as Finitribe. The asterisk came out of the computer one day and that was it. It was as simple as that and it works. You can't really get a much stronger image than that. You can make it into whatever you want. You can make it into a human shape, a space pod whatever. It's not really a corporate thing at all, in fact it is fairly anti corporate when it comes down to it. We are really glad when we were with OLI that we kept that image and all the records had that on the label. So it looks to everybody else that we are still on the same footing, we haven't gone down the scale, we've just gone on. It is good for the people who we are working with as well because it gives them a much wider audience straight away. Hopefully people will collect these records as a series, a development of the Finitribe and Finiflex sound. The only thing that we stipulate with the label is that everything has that sound, it's all done in here, so it has that studio sound, we work on it, the promotion is done by us, so anyone who puts a record out is involved with Finitribe so that way it becomes bigger as well.
We were managed by Tom Watkins for a month which opened lots of doors and London, RCA and EastWest were the main contenders. Slowly and surely London became the favourites just because of their attitude and general belief in what we could do. Because of our situation with OLI (we still owe them 47,000 pounds) London said that they would give us an advance of 75,000 pounds to do the album, and we signed our part but they didn't sign theirs which means that we didn't have to pay off OLI. So the deal is that they have first option on the album, if they don't like it then we keep the money and keep the album and don't pay OLI.
So we started to record the album last May. Since then we have been working on writing and rewriting the album, having lots of personal trauma's and shit like that. It's been a gradual process of getting it to a certain stage then going over it all and reassessing it again until we have now got ten complete songs which we are happy with. The marketing people are coming up today to discuss strategies and all the kind of nonsense. So I suppose it has taken a year and a bit to complete it, which is a very long time.
The label is still going, we have put out nine records on the label, so we've also been busy with that as well. We've been in here, we haven't done anything spectacular. I started to DJ, I just did a thing in Aberdeen on Friday and I'm getting a residency in Bridge of Alan (near Stirling). I play trancey-acid and a bit of dub. I don't want to make a big deal out of it. I just want to get my expenses. I started doing it as a joke. Somebody said that I should just do it. I am not technically very good at it yet, but as long as you have good records its fine. It's just fun for me and it's good to find out what other people are dancing to. See the atmosphere in different clubs, it's a good way of spying. It's like being on stage, that's what I really enjoy about it, it's like doing a Finitribe gig.
Anyway we all have our own functions within the band, but we also do our own things to bring in money. It helps also keep the name in the press. We have managed to keep Finitribe and Finiflex in the press for the last two years which is quite good since we haven't had a Finitribe record out since last January.
It is still going to be a problem, there is still going to be a certain amount of remixing which has to be done. But this time we are going to get to pick who does it, and hopefully work with those people here at Finiflex. There will be no more fiasco's like the Beatmasters. We are hoping that our remixes are good enough for the first single and we won't have to send it out. We've already got five different mixes of the song.
If we had been left to our own devices we might have worked with other people just because we wanted to, but because we were forced into it, John was reluctant to let anybody else touch his stuff, that's what he felt and so we had to go along with it. Phil and I didn't necessarily agree with him.
Its changed again, there is some harder stuff of it, some hard club mixes, but they are all straight forward pop songs really. I think this album has a more coherent sound than UGT, and it's also more poppy.
That is one thing, there are no samples on it. They are too hard to clear, for a start, and we've just got sick of them really. When we started doing the music it didn't seem to fit, it just never came up. This album sounds very linear and the samples would have made it . . . messy.
Yeah, oh yeah.
Absolutely none. The lyrics have absolutely no relevance to anything, they are there because you have to have them in a pop song. They are like pop lyrics about boys and girls and all that sort of nonsense. Nothing political, I guess we've given up on that and sold out to the devil. Lyrics are a real problem for us. If we could get away with not doing them, we wouldn't have them at all.
Yeah, but I think that is something that has been overdone. I don't like that, I don't like hearing sampled vocals on tracks. It is kind of a collage type thing and we wanted to get away from that we wanted to do pop rock. It is quite strange listening to the album now that it's finished.
It's not that much of a pop album. No, No! I think it will just carry on from where it was. We kind of got rid of the wacky sort of image. No more costumes.
There might be something like that, but we are at a different stage now.
You could say that, maybe we are getting too old to go out with wobbly hats making fools of ourselves. It's not that we want to be taken seriously. Maybe it is just maturity, growing up, but our presentation will evolve over the next two or three months when we start putting the whole live thing together. If costumes come into it, costumes come into it, but we are not going to come across like Right Said Fred or something like that, we don't want to use gimmicks like that. We would much rather show the technology, because to us, the technology is the most important thing and use that as the front, use that to present the music; bringing the sort of underground scene, like people like Fluke and Underworld and bands like that to the mainstream. I think that is how I see ourselves as being presented to the public. It is that kind of music that is further on, is slightly more mainstream.
Both Underworld and Fluke came from the underground and are now mainstream bands, in a sense. They are pop bands. To me that is quite good because that's development, that's the next stage. People have now accepted technology and are listening to it. Look at the Grid, they have been in the top ten for like four or five weeks. It's a novelty track but it will introduce people to a whole new sound. There are three or four good albums which people will buy and they will hear the development of techno music I suppose. I don't like the word techno - it covers so many different types of music. There is a new underground coming through - Jungle is coming through. Really hard breakbeat stuff. There will always be an underground, whenever there is a mainstream, there will always be an alternative to the mainstream. We haven't taken this long because we wanted to wait this long to get to where we are. We would have been quite happy to be mainstream four or five years ago.
I suppose that we will be presented as a rock band really. There will be people playing instruments, so it is not going to be like a guy in a hockey mask and shell suit waving his hands in their air. We have never been about that. I think that is where we can go further than a lot of the other good undeground techno bands that are coming through, because I think that we have a better live show.
The new style Club cum gig - in a bizarre way it's almost becoming cliche.
Yeah like Midi-Circus, lets do everything under one big thing, like the Megadog. I really like those events but you are right that they are becoming the norm. I think people enjoy going to an event as opposed to a gig. They enjoy going to see two or three acts, slides, lightshows, jugglers, stilt-walkers whatever as opposed to just going to see a band at the Venue in Edinburgh with just a couple of keyboards and a singer, who the fuck wants to see that. Even Mr. Egg has a show now with his UV Lights etc, he is the show I suppose. It is very important to give something to people and that is what I think we have always done. Our music has perhaps not always been up to it, but I think that we have given people a show live. Now we hope that the music is up to the standard and that we can give them a show as well.
I think they (Orbital) are quite well set up because they have a buffer between them, but I bet you that when that record goes to the States and comes out on London America there will be people going "Why are there no vocals on this, why didn't you just get somebody in to sing on them?" And its all constraints and it ends up at the point where you don't want to make music anymore. Once you have a bit of success and you start getting world wide pressure to satisfy certain criteria which has nothing to do with what your music is or how it's developing, you get so fucked off and get in such a quagmire that you can see why people end up junkies. It's probably the only way to survive in the music business.
It is beyond belief how much pressure they put on the artist. That shouldn't exist. Perhaps it didn't used to be so bad when there was much more distance from their manager but now that artists are much more involved with their management they have to deal with it. I don't how most bands, unless they are incredibly strong minded or incredibly empowered and had a lot of knowledge about the business how they could cope with it.
At the moment there are quite a lot of superpowers in the music bis. - George Michael, Dire Straits, Madonna etc. who are up there and they have been up there for ten years. I think that the new breed has been supressed by the rock dinosaurs. Partly because they won't finish themselves off with Overdoses, they just keep going till they are sixty. Also the recession is hitting all new artists because record companies won't make long term investment, so the bands don't develop. That is what a lot of it is about now they want results straight away instead of the third or fourth album and it's just too much pressure.
We are coping with it fairly well, but we are a lot more organised than most bands, we are much more set up to deal with that kind of pressure. If worst came to the worst and we were dropped at least we have the label and now we have a good distribution set up, experience of running it, and a good back catalogue.
We still find it very hard. It is just that indecision, you record an album - fair enough. Then you start on this thing of finding the first single, finding the first mix of the single and that can just go on for half a year. You are basically twiddling your thumbs trying not to let the band get all upset about the music getting fucked over, trying to keep the record company happy that the band aren't being too intransigent and it just goes on and on for months and months and months. At some point, someone has got to say "Maybe we haven't got the ideal mix, but we should just go with it anyway just to keep this thing moving".
For us now since we have no problem with the album, it's just a matter of getting through the singles ordeal without sustaining too much psychological damage because we are in that limbo now.
Pop Music is the most unqualified, ignorant, conservative industry going. They are incredibly conversative, any sign of nudity, swear words which is fine in publishing - even business, banking monthly could probably have swear words and penises in it and nobody would bother but any sign of it in the music industry and they won't touch it. None of them are qualified . . . to do anything except get pissed which is, at a certain level, a qualification for certain parts of the job, but you have to have more than that and a lot of the people in the music business are incapable of doing anything except getting pissed on record company expenses.
Also the whole setup is more unfair than any other business going. This whole thing about George Michael with restraint of trade and everything is absolutely true, when you pay every penny for your record to get it recorded and at the end of it the record company owns it, it wouldn't happen in any other business. They recoup everything and that is fair enough while they are recouping for them to own it but they then should hand it over to the artist, because the artist has paid for it, both sides have made plenty money and the Record company will continue to make money when it's released because they will get a percentage but the fact that they still own the recording is still grossly unfair.
It is experience, if you actually make it past 23 then you will have a lot of experience in the music industry so it is all the older artists that are actually having any success in terms of ways of life. They might not be selling as many records as Take That but they are not being fucked over left right and centre like all the young artists are. It is very unfair, because a lot of the guys are taken for a ride because they are fairly desperate, they want that success. East 17 is pretty much off the streets and they want that success. They will do whatever they think they have to do to get it. They are getting nothing now: they are getting paid like 150 quid a week or something and they are going to come out of it with nothing. Their manager will spend all the money, they will stop selling records. They are trying to become an adult band, but they won't do it, nobody has ever done it before. The new kids won't be interested anymore because they will be 25 and so that's that. Fucked for the rest of their lives. Maybe those few years of top fame was worth it but look at Bros.
Watch out for their "Brand New" single in September and Album in October. From the sounds of it, I would think that the Fini's will finally become the huge pop stars that they deserve to be.