Over the last fifteen years Nick Moore has at various times successfully occupied many different roles in the music business including promoter, manager, consultant, founder of the Barfly organisation (now called Channelfly) and he’s also run his own label. Nick is a somewhat maverick entrepreneurial character who constantly seeks fresh challenges. Despite the slight cynicism that inevitably accompanies his extensive knowledge and experience of the music business, Nick retains an enthusiasm and passion for the industry, and whilst being fully versed in the ‘old school’ approach to building a band’s career, he’s always been quick to embrace new technology and new ways of doing things.The Barfly has consistently provided A&R men with an easy option for the last ten years; until he left recently to travel the world for a year’s well-earned sabbatical, Nick and his partners’ good taste, commitment and hands-on approach have ensured that the barfly has almost always been the first to back new talent and give them exposure to the industry.

SISSY: How did you get started in the music industry?

NICK: I was always in bands as a kid, playing guitar and keyboards. I started promoting when I was 16, just sorting out our own gigs. I realised that if I booked the other bands as well then we’d pull more people. On my first day at college we had a guy from the student union come and talk to us… he said he was the Entertainments Officer and he booked all the bands. I said to my friend, ‘that sounds like a job for me!’ In 1990/91, I became Ents Officer for the student union at Wolverhampton Poly which is now Wolverhampton University, then I promoted gigs for a year at clubs and pubs in Wolves. In those days I was putting on bands like Ocean Colour Scene, Blur, the Manic Street Preachers, the Shamen and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine when they were on their way up; one Blur gig was the night before they went top 40 for the first time.

SISSY: What prompted your move to London?

NICK: My friend Ace, who later became the guitarist in Skunk Anansie, phoned me up and said ‘what are you doing Nick? My band (called Big Life Casino) are getting stuff together and we’ve just started a club called the Splash Club’ so I came to London to help them with that; there were four of us involved; myself, Ace and his other band members Julian Wright and Ben Jammin. We started doing nights at the Water Rats in Kings Cross which is a pub owned by the Grand Order of the Water Rats, a kind of Masonic lodge for entertainers!

SISSY: Did you have any kind of goal or manifesto in mind when you started the Splash Club?

NICK: Back in those days most of the small venues operated a ‘pay to play’ policy where a band had to pay something like £30 each to play a gig so that the promoter was guaranteed income without having to make any effort to promote the night. So our main objective was to stop the whole pay to play rip-off and coming from a musician’s background we had the ethos that we wanted to make sure there was a decent PA and lights and that the bands were treated properly. The Splash Club actually took off pretty quickly because everyone wanted to play there. I was very fortunate in that this was around 1993 so I stumbled upon the start of the Britpop/britrock scene. You could say that the Splash Club helped to break bands like Kula Shaker, Skunk Anansie, Rub Ultra, Feeder, the Bluetones, Echobelly, Gene, Travis; Oasis played their first London show at the Splash. The club was very much geared towards getting bands to come down and see other bands; we thought that was pretty important to get the scene going. I think at the height of the Splash Club you’d see a lot of ‘faces’ in the audience so suddenly it became the place to play if you wanted to get noticed.

SISSY: What made the Splash Club leave the Water Rats and change its name to the Barfly?

NICK: Eventually the Grand Order of the Water Rats perceived that we had ‘outstayed our welcome’ due to a series of controversial events! One incident that contributed to us leaving was that we allowed notorious queen scene impresario Matthew Glamour to host a night called the ‘Mint Tea Rooms’ that was pretty outrageous; two guys were on stage ‘wearing’ a double ended dildo and someone from the News of the World was there. They ran the story and alleged that there had been 16 year olds in the audience. Then one night we put on an anti-nazi gig and loads of skinheads turned up to hijack the night and a fight kicked off. So the Water Rats people said they had problems with some of our more ‘avant garde’ evenings!

We moved to the Falcon in Camden and Ben Jammin who had ended up being my key partner in the Splash Club decided to do his own thing. So I started the Barfly with Jeremy Ledlin and Be Rozzo as partners, and we also started the Fly magazine (which is still going strong) to do reviews, features and interviews with the bands playing at the Barfly.Around this time I also set up Blue Dog records which I ran but was funded by V2 and signed the Crocketts (now called the Crimea) to the label. The Barfly eventually outgrew the Falcon and took up residence at its current home, the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road. Now there are 5 other Barflys around the UK, all aspiring to perpetuate our original ideal of treating the bands well and maintaining high standards.

SISSY: What prompted you to branch out into managing bands while you were promoting and booking at the Splash Club?

NICK: Primarily an eclectic hip-hop/art rock band called Rub Ultra. We’d given them a few gigs and they were inundated with interest from the record companies. I had met their bass player Charlie Beddoes a few times at the club and she would ask my advice on dealing with the industry. It seemed like a natural step when they wanted me to become their manager.

SISSY: What attracted you to Rub Ultra?

NICK: They were a wicked live band, really powerful and chaotic on stage so you never knew what would happen next! Will Matthews the singer had this way of talking where you never quite understood what he was saying but you felt like it must be really cool anyway! For example, he would describe Rub Ultra’s music as ‘bubble over crunch with a cosmic fruit centre’ or ‘testosterone crackle with a feminine underbelly’!

SISSY: Who else did you manage?

NICK: My partner at the time, Kate Dale and I also managed bands called Goya Dress and Elizabeth Bunny. Rub Ultra and Goya Dress both signed their first deals in the same week so that was a good week for me… I suddenly had more money than I’d ever had in my life before! Elizabeth Bunny got signed as well but then their record label folded so nothing happened for them. Later also on I co-managed Talvin Singh with Sarah Withers.

SISSY: Did you prefer the experience of managing bands to promoting?

NICK: It was all good fun at the time; it was such a rollercoaster ride, the scene was really happening at the start and there were lots of ups and downs!

SISSY: Speaking as a promoter, manager and label, what qualities do you look for in a new band?

NICK: It’s got to be something that excites you musically, something you want to work with. It’s hard to quantify why you like one thing and not another. The best advice that I could give a new band trying to make it is to try and look at themselves objectively, step outside their role in the band and try to see the overall thing how someone else would see it. Bands often make the mistake of thinking that they’re being obvious about what they want to convey when the reality is that it’s very unclear to everyone else. Sometimes the simplest, most obvious songs will be the ones that define your sound and identity. It’s a good idea for a new band when they first form, to sit down and say ‘what are we trying to do?’ and agree on a direction or recipe for the music. Otherwise they can end up trying to cross over too many elements and confusing people. Its not that you have to be tied to one direction for life but you should be focussed. Problems can arise when there’s more than one key songwriter in a band; the musicians need to work to get a good balance and blend the different elements convincingly. Bands need to establish their own democratic process and all have a clear understanding of their objectives to prevent falling apart further down the line.

SISSY: Obviously the music industry is undergoing some major changes at the moment. How do you see things progressing in the future?

NICK: I actually think that the costs of recording and making videos have come down so much that it’s allowing the record companies to become the marketing companies they probably should have been all along. Bands along with management and production companies will effectively make an album before they even approach a major label. I think the future is very few A&R people looking for acts; there used to be about 40 A&R scouts but now there’s only about 10, partly because there used to be 7 major record companies but what with recent mergers and buy outs there’s only 4… everything is owned by either Warners, EMI, Sony/BMG or Universal.

SISSY: Is it true that the major companies are waiting to have a lot of the early stages of the work done for them instead of developing a band?

NICK: Absolutely; there’s no such thing as a development deal any more. Most people can raise enough money to get some songs recorded and in fact there’s plenty of examples of people recording albums in their bedroom on their computer. You can now release material and promote it through the internet. This can only be a good thing for music, because A&R departments in this country for the last 50 years have been run by middle class public school boys with a narrow view of what should sell and a lot of more cutting edge artists have come through in spite of, rather than aided by this fact.

The internet has allowed the music business to become a more democratic system, rather than an act becoming known because a major company has assigned them a huge marketing budget and to an extent manufactured their success.The old system seemed to work for many years because a lot of people were making a lot of money from it. Now that there’s less money to be made, companies can’t afford to be as wasteful as they were in the past. Now, A&R departments are more likely to look at a band to see what kind of profile they have already; have Radio One or XFM picked up on them, are they being written about in any music papers and most importantly, what’s the web presence? How many hits are they getting on websites and how many downloads have they had. The majors are monitoring peer-to-peer sites and if a band gets a significant number of fileshares, the record companies will be all over them. In a way that’s not that different to 50 years ago in the USA when early rock and roll artists would sell records in one state and the majors would view local success as an indication that an act was worth signing and releasing nationally.

SISSY: Who are your heroes, both musical and business?

NICK: I grew up listening to the classics… the Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Clash, the Pistols etc and I saw a lot of Jazz gigs as a child because my dad was into Jazz. When I was at college I was really into Billy Bragg and the whole idealistic political thing. I probably saw him play more times than anyone else, other than the bands I’ve managed.

When it comes to business, I’ve always loved Fiction records and admired Chris Parry who founded it. He previously worked at Polydor and when he was there, signed Sham 69, the Jam and Souxie and the Banshees so he had great taste. He originally signed the Sex Pistols but lost them due to Malcom McLaren’s shenanigans! He left when Polydor wouldn’t let him sign the Clash and started Fiction records where he signed the Cure and the Rebel MC amongst others. He also helped fund other projects; I believe he helped Derek Birkett with funding for One Little Indian records when they wanted to release the Sugarcubes, and he helped Neneh Cherry get started on her solo career. Chris was a real music fan and he was brave enough to take risks on things he really believed in and help them to develop without interference.Andy Ross who ran Food records is another proper music fan… he signed Blur, Jesus Jones and Shampoo. He’s got his own label and management company now called Boss.

SISSY: What are you up to at the moment?

NICK: I recently started a management company with my brother Dan called Moore Bros Music. We’re currently managing up and coming indie rock band Seeing Scarlet and a singer songwriter called Jack Rubinacci. Various people employ me as a consultant and I also have a ‘behind the scenes’ interest in a record company and publishing company.

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Whatever path Nick chooses to pursue, we’re sure he’ll be at the centre of things for a long time to come. Like his heroes, Nick’s a genuine music fan and innovator. Co-founding London’s top underground venue has given him an excellent reputation but also a lot to live up to in the eyes of those who grew used to looking to him to recommend ‘the next big thing’. Let’s hope he can meet the future challenges that this pressure brings!