Housed within London’s o2 Arena, the world’s most successful live music venue, is a unique permanent exhibition whose purpose is to celebrate and encourage the success of this nation’s musical heritage.
Harvey Goldsmith, the veteran promoter and manager who has been involved with the British Music Experience from the beginning, met with Clash to discuss the success of its first year.
You were involved in the transformation of the white elephant dome to the o2 arena it is now. Was it always the plan to make it a huge music event?
No. After the government built the dome and then decided they wanted a Millennium exhibition, they didn’t really know what to do with it afterwards. There were dozens of different suggestions, all sorts of weird and wonderful things, and none of them made any sense. And then I was approached by a property company, who wanted to develop the rest of the peninsula, called Quintane, and they said they had to buy the dome with it, and what the hell did they do with the dome they had no idea. So I said, ‘Look, the only way to look at the dome is to think of it as a massive great umbrella and not a building. And if you think about it as an umbrella, you can then build a whole district underneath. I then went to speak to the government about it. I said, ‘Look, if you want to find a solution, this is the only way it’s going to work’.
The next thing that happened was that Phil Anschutz, who owns AEG, was coming to London looking for a flagship venue – he was trying to buy Wembley and he couldn’t. I took him down there and he kinda had the same feeling about the dome – that it was a disaster – and I said, ‘Look, this is the opportunity to turn a lemon into a melon’ – which I’m not sure he understood (laughs) but that’s what I said to him. And I explained the whole philosophy: look at it as a big umbrella, build a town inside. And he got it.
He thought about it for six weeks and then phoned me up and said, ‘Okay, what do we do now? I’d like to get involved’. And then I introduced him into the whole team and they started to put it together. But what he delivered was FAR better than I ever thought was possible. The whole set-up there is really first class quality, very clever planning, and AEG just took it on and took it to the next level.
It’s become the most successful live venue in the world. Do you think it’s brought the spotlight back to London as a live music venue?
Absolutely. It’s brought a huge focus on London. I mean, London always was a very, very busy ticket market – it’s now probably the biggest live show and event market in the world, bar none. And what it’s done is it’s brought artists in for residencies, and it’s brought artists in that maybe would have just done an open air show and goodbye – they’re now doing both, and also it’s good for the rest of the country because that means they’re then touring around. So it’s a win for everybody.
And the British Music Experience that’s there…
So, once AEG decided they wanted to do it and started planning what they could do in there, they realised that when they designed the arena it sat in the middle and there was six hundred thousand square feet around it, still open. So then we talked with AEG and they said, ‘What do you think we should do around it?’ They didn’t want to do a shopping mall and all the rest of it. And I said to them, ‘You should keep it like a village and keep all the building separate, so you can have streets and sections and islands, so it doesn’t have that feel of a shopping mall with escalators everywhere. Phil Anschutz agreed with it, and not only that, he pushed it to the next level.
In the game plan that I wrote for them originally, I said we need to have a history of British rock and roll because it would fit together there, and there isn’t one. It was there on the agenda, of course, and I said we should go out to the industry and get funding for it, but of course it was just at the point where the whole record business started to collapse. They all kind of supported it – they’re terribly skeptical, the record industry; they never believed we’d do it. They were looking at an alternative, which one of their members had come up with, but he’d never got it together. I kept saying ‘This is gonna happen’ and eventually I convinced AEG to fund it.
So they put the money up for it – to their credit – and we then sat down and decided how to do it. We put a foundation together, and so I became the Chairman of the trustees of the foundation, and the foundation technically owns the thing, and once they’ve repaid most of the outgoing costs to AEG, they’ll have complete control of it and then they’ll continue with it.
The plan was always to make it focus on Britain?
Well, we always felt that it should reflect… There’s so much, so it should reflect the British music scene history, and those artists that had an effect on it, i.e. there are certain American acts who clearly cut their teeth in England, and we are their most important market, that would qualify. But you couldn’t do a catch-all, there just isn’t enough space. And because AEG wanted to earn some money back, I then agreed that we would open on the first floor – I always believed, and still believe, that if we can make it on the first floor then we can take the ground floor over. But at least that gave AEG a chance on the ground floor to rent it out for temporary exhibitions to get some money back, because they sunk a lot of money into this.
The exhibition was four years in the making. What thought went into what would be inside it, and how did that change as things started to happen?
It was a little bit ‘how long is a piece of string?’ and ‘where do you start?’ So we put together a team of quite unusual designers, because we wanted to be totally up-to-date state of the art. We wanted to have it so that people going round the museum, it isn’t static, so they could participate in it. So it became interactive. Then we had a sit-down with a creative team to see what goes in and what doesn’t go in, and that ain’t easy.
There’s such a wealth of British artists and material that we can’t even get to the point where we could think about other artists; there’s so much British stuff. The BME became a working title because we couldn’t buy The Hall Of Fame – somebody else owned it. Then we looked at Rock Hall Of Fame, Rock ‘N’ Roll Museum, all of those names had gone, and it [BME] just stuck, so it became the British Music Experience. Then we created the logo, which we think is a very strong logo and it will take on its own life.
So it was quite difficult to make that start, and it took a good nine months before we could even start to collate in all the potentials and then hone it down into how we were gonna do it. So what we’ve done is we’ve done it in periods of time around the edge, and then there’s an ongoing time zone that goes all the way through the exhibit, and then we looked at equipment that affected it. So you can go through from visual equipment to sound equipment – from the wind-up phonogram all the way through to an iPod – so you can see the different ways that you can listen or watch music, as well as seeing it live.
There’s also the Gibson Interactive Studio…
Then, the other thing is, I and some of the people from AEG, we started to go round all the existing museums in America, and we realised that an instrument room is something that everybody will want to go to. At the end of the day, you can listen to music, but part of it is really to understand what an instrument is and how to play it. The obvious place to go to was Gibson. I was on their advisory board, so I got in touch with the President of Gibson and started discussions about how to do it.
Gibson got on board, and then Sennheiser had always been involved in supporting the industry in one war or another, so they put together the vocal side of it. And then we went round the business, and PRS were changing their whole style of what they represented and were trying to get to a much broader audience, and thank goodness they came on board! They were our key initial partners – we’ve got others since. And then because Gibson make a complete range of equipment it was easy for them to put the instrument room together, and I think they’ve done it really nicely.
We just didn’t want to have like what they do at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame – static instruments sitting there that you can look at through glass – we actually wanted instruments you could pick up and play. And the interactive side of it is not only can you play it, but you can record it. When you get home you can watch yourself playing it.
Then we came up with what’s called Table Talk, which is four artists round a table, which you can watch and listen to, just talking about an event or a period in time or their lives, and we’re building up a whole cache of that so we can keep changing it. And the other part of it is we wanted people to feel, when they came out of going round the museum – we didn’t know how long they would stay there, we guessed about an hour and a half on average – they had something that would just make them feel good. So we created this whole film sequence which basically makes you feel you’re on stage in Wembley Stadium and it’s full. And then the final point of it is we felt that this is a dynamic business we’re in, so we got this ‘Futures’ section right at the end where we’re trying to keep that updated every three months and new acts coming through, because we can’t sit still.
So that’s really what the BME is at the moment, and then hopefully, as we start to expand – which won’t be immediately, but that is in our game plan – then we’ll start doing individual exhibitions, and also we can expand the artists, cos they’re all coming out of the woodwork saying, ‘Why aren’t I in there?’ (Laughs) Well, maybe they should be, but someone had to make a decision. They had a team of journalists and writers and people in that archival historic area, and they did all the creative stuff – I stayed out of it; they decided what went in and what didn’t.
You didn’t have any suggestions of your own?
I did; I think they ignored them all. (Laughs)
Is that a reflection of your tastes?
No, like I say, they had to make some pretty difficult decisions with what the space allows, but we’re building the archive up all the time. So, the counterbalance of it all is we’re starting to build this website, which is about eighty percent there – it’ll just get better as we go – and that we want to make into a definitive archive.
So when you get home… There’s a Smart chip in your ticket – this is the whole point; it’s called RFID – that registers all the things you’re interested in, and when you get home and go on the website, not only can you see yourself playing an instrument, or you’ve got that pod where you can do all the dances – which we thought was quite fun – but it also badges all the stuff that you’ve tagged that you’re interested in and then you can go into much more depth to find out about artists that maybe you haven’t heard of before.
And then, hopefully, the idea is that people will go out, buy the product, listen to it, and get more involved in some of the historic artists which are still as strong today as they always were.
I believe the BME is a charity, or a non-profit organisation…
Well, it’s a non-profit foundation so therefore it is a charity, yeah. That’s what owns the whole thing, and that’s the British Music Foundation.
Is there a cause that the charity supports?
It supports the BME, that’s what it does. It’s not really set up to support anything else but just to develop and protect the stuff that’s leant to us and promote the BME. That’s basically what it is. We want to expand and get better at it. Once it starts to build up a fund, I guess it will support… One thing it is supporting is a huge education programme.
Last year we had fifteen thousand students come through; this year we’re looking for twenty thousand. We’ve got a classroom there where people can go in and we have talks. And the other thing we’re doing is building up a whole event programme. Everybody wants to be in the business today, because they can’t get a real job, but they don’t really know enough about it.
So we’re doing a whole series of being record producers, A&R guys, publishers, PR guys, marketing people, promoters, managers and artists, just so that people can come and learn a little bit more about what the business is about. If anything, the whole idea for the foundation is to promote music, and we’ll do that through the BME and through the music programme.
Is that something that will go outwith the building – could you take it to schools?
We could eventually. We’re still just a year old and we’ve still got a long way to go. Initially we just want to develop, build up and make a success out of the BME as it is. Once we’ve done that, and once it really starts to take on its own life, then we can afford to do an outreach programme.
At the moment we want an inreach programme: we want people to come to us. Because it’s all there, and a lot of it can’t be moved, and a lot of the artifacts that are exhibited there are unique – we don’t have the luxury of being able to take them out anywhere else; they’re too valuable to do that.
How have you acquired the artifacts? Is it just a case of asking the artists?
We have acquired very, very little. Ninety-nine percent of everything there has been loaned, so we are the protectors of it. We look after it, it’s protected, and it’s in the right humidity environment, so it’s not going to deteriorate. We’ve got original song notes and instruments and a lot of clothes that are relevant to a particular point in time – they’re not just thrown in there; there will be a David Bowie lyric that’s relevant to whatever show was featured on the thing.
Generally the whole idea is to make it as interactive in a way that someone going there, whether you’re nine or ninety, you can participate in it, learn a bit more, and have a bit of fun with it. Because it’s not that serious – but it is. So part of it is the education and for schools to use it to learn and so on, but also it’s a fun place: you can go there and have a good laugh and try out a set of drums or a keyboard or a bass or a lead guitar… You could even, if you go there with a load of mates, you could actually put a little group together.
Do you have a favourite area, or a favourite of the decade rooms?
I probably like the earlier rooms, the Sixties onwards, really. That’s when I started and I’m quite close to it really. There’s some great stuff in there. What we’re trying to do is just to keep getting stuff, learning more, finding out where the holes are, and just putting more and more information in there.
The other thing that’s interesting is the timeline that runs all the way round the back on the wall links you into real events – it goes from the Vietnam war to the Korean war, to election times to the miner strikes and the Gulf war; what kind of music was being played in that era. Which is actually quite fascinating to see.
You’ll also have artists visiting the area – Solomon Burke is coming in July. What will they be doing and are there plans for others to do the same?
Yeah. The Faces have reformed; they’re gonna come down and play in August. They’re gonna do a masterclass first, and then they’re gonna come and play in the BME that night, the 11th of August. It’s great to do that. We’ve done one with Jeff Beck, and Jamie Cullum’s played there.
We want to get a lot more artists come down. We’re working on a whole package of some of the newer acts to come down… The idea is not just to play, but to talk about how they got to where they are, their experiences, how they’re recorded and so on. So it’s meant to be dynamic as well, it’s meant to be used. We’re talking to record companies because we want them to launch new acts there and promote stuff and just keep going.
It’s a good reason for people to keep coming back to the BME, even if they’ve seen the exhibition already.
We think the average dwell time is about an hour and a half – I know people that have been there for three or four hours. It’s too much to take in, so we’re quite happy for people to come back – if you want to come back a few times there’s a membership scheme where you can get discounts and all the rest of it.
But I think the idea is just to whet the appetite, make people intrigued, and then come back and start to learn a bit more – if they want to. Also, the idea is not only to learn about history, but also to stimulate people into thinking, ‘Well, that’s how he did it; I can do it better’. And that’s what we want – we want new people to come out of it who feel stimulated enough that they can have a go.
It’s perfect that it’s situated in the o2 music arena – the footfall must be great…
We’re still learning how to make that work, because basically people going to shows at the o2 are going to shows. But Bon Jovi is in the o2 at the moment, and on the floors going up to the BME, Bon Jovi’s people have put a fantastic photo exhibition together, and we’ve had fifteen hundred people a day coming early, going to see the photo exhibition, then going to see the show.
So we’re doing more of that. We’re just learning how to entice people to come a bit earlier to the o2, spend a bit of time round the BME, then go and have a bite or a drink or whatever they want before the show.
You mentioned earlier the development of the peninsula – is there anything else getting made around the o2?
Well, eventually there’s a whole town being built! The first thing that’s going up is actually a university, which opens in September. That building with all the funny shapes and spots all over it, that’s Ravensbourne University. That will also have a music course, so those students will use the BME as part of their course, and there will be a thousand students there. And then as it’s developing… There will eventually be ten thousand people living on the peninsula, so that will be their local.
There’s already over thirty bars and restaurants in the place. And then our partners are starting to use it – Gibson’s starting to use it, Sennheiser’s using it, and we’ve done a deal with iTunes, and we’re just closing a deal with Planet Rock…we’re just trying to get as many people involved in this thing as possible. We’re just in the middle of closing a deal with a high street outlet, which will really open the doors to us. I don’t think it’s been announced yet, so I can’t tell you what it is, but we’re really excited about it. AmEx have been really good to us as well; they’re supporting our live event programme.
So we’ve got a lot of goodwill and we want to just keep pushing it through. We just want more and more people to come, tell us they like it, criticise us if they don’t like it, and so far nearly everybody that’s been there wants to come back again because they haven’t been through it all! There is a lot there. I keep saying there’s a lot to learn, but it’s a lot of fun as well. It’s a chance to listen to some of the great music of our time, and also to buy it, and also to stimulate people to write and do better – that’s why PRS have got involved in it.
What do you think of other music venues in London in general? Do you think they’ve become more corporate?
Yes, they have. They’ve become a bit nice, I suppose. Maybe our expectation of artists playing there is a bit high. There’s still some down-and-dirty kind of standard pubs and upstairs venues that still work. There’s a lot going on.
You know, we focus on certain areas of the business, but underneath that there’s still a hell of a lot going on, and hopefully we’re gonna bring some new superacts out as soon as we can, because we need ’em; we need some fresh blood!
We need new bands, of course, but do you think the industry needs fresh blood behind the scenes as well?
A hundred percent. We need new agents, new promoters, with new ideas, working with new acts. That’s what we need. When I started, I was the new boy on the block and I had no idea what I was doing, I just did it. And we need a new generation of me’s. Because we know how to do it our way, and with the new acts and new bands that are coming up, they need their equivalent to do it their way, and I hope it’s different and better than what we’ve done.
But we need it. We all need competition – not that there isn’t any in England – but we just need new blood on both sides of it to really go out and push and do things differently. As long as they don’t get too greedy too quickly. It took me a long time to establish myself and to look at it, and I think the one thing that our business has got to do is it has got to think of the fans and think of their needs and their pocket, rather than testing their pocket and overcharging them all the time. We think that the whole thing about the British Music Experience is it’s good value, it’s interesting, and it’s stimulating.
You have been involved in some major band reunions – Led Zeppelin a few years ago, and now The Faces. Is it a difficult job getting everyone to agree to it?
Um, if they don’t want to do it, it’s hard! (Laughs) If the artists want to do it, it’s easy, because I just give them the pathway to come up with their aspirations. With Led Zeppelin, they didn’t know they wanted to do it until I suggested it to them! (Laughs) With The Faces thing, it was Ronnie [Wood] and Mac [Ian McLagan] and Kenney [Jones] who had got together and said, ‘We want to try and do something’.
The fact that Mick Hucknall came out, the their surprise, and told them that he was a huge Faces fan and that was his inspiration that got him in the business, and he ended up being just magic on it. And then Glen [Matlock], who was a friend of theirs, came up and said, ‘I want to play in this’. So it just came together organically, and hopefully it’s gonna stick together for a long time.
Are there any other bands you’d like to help put back together?
(Laughs) There’s not anyone left, is there? Look, to me, I haven’t done hundreds of them, but I did all the original Faces and Small Faces gigs, so to me, the opportunity for those artists to come together within the right mindset to go out and play again, they’re all just as good now.
I mean, I manage Jeff Beck – he’s not a spring chicken, but just look where he’s at: he’s playing better than ever before, he’s getting more accolades, he’s getting more enjoyment, he’s got a fantastic band, and he’s been around since I have!
Have you managed people before?
Yeah. I started off in the Seventies managing Van Morrison, and just went from there.
It must give you a full perspective of what’s going on if you’ve been a manager and a promoter…
Well, I’m doing less promoting and I’m enjoying the management side, and I can use all the knowledge that I’ve had and all the contacts and so on, and the experience of how to pick an act that’s got great talent that’s either under-exploited or badly exploited. That’s what I saw with Jeff. He wasn’t badly managed, he was just under-exploited. He just needed a new lease of life, really.
I gave him that pathway and he’s having a ball at the moment; playing everywhere, having a great time, selling lots of records, and in a great space. Every review is better than the one before. I can see that show every night and not tire of it. And there are other people like that around who can do that. I feel now I can really help those artists out that want that attention. Not just in England, but globally.
Is there anyone you’d like to work with that you haven’t before?
I suppose there’s a whole list really. But there’s not many artists I haven’t worked with before. Most of them I have worked with, so it’s just they’ve gone through a phase – they’ve split up or gone in a different direction and want to get back to their roots – and there’s no reason not to. I mean, we don’t seem to be in a time frame where, you know… Artists don’t have to retire; it’s only when it doesn’t work that they stop, or they just want to stop. There’s no time limit for it.
Also, working in the classical field, most classical artists don’t come into their own until they’re fifty-five or sixty anyway. It’s exciting to see those bands. But equally, we’ve got to have new blood! We’ve got to have new artists, new ideas, and new people doing it a different way.
So if there’s someone out there that wants to be the next Harvey Goldsmith, what advice would you give them, and what qualities do they need to succeed?
Start from the floor, work it up your way, don’t take any prisoners, never take no for an answer, and just try something different. But always, always be mindful of the fan – you have to give them value. You gotta learn how to market and you gotta entice people. If you see an act or a band that you really have fallen in love with… I found one in New Orleans.
Jeff played at the New Orleans Festival, and afterwards we were invited to a party. There was some people there who said, ‘Come to this club’, so we went to this club which opened at two o’ clock in the morning, and we didn’t know what to expect. We saw this guy called Trombone Shorty, and I’ve just fallen in love with him, because he’s got everything that I think is what today is all about: he’s young, he’s keen, he’s attractive, he sings, he plays weird instruments – he plays trombone and trumpet – he’s a front man, and he’s got the hippest band I’ve ever seen.
I just got completely turned on by him. When you see artists that really turn you on, you gotta think, look, stick with those acts, and just find ways of developing and helping to bring them out, where you can build up a fan base for them, and you gotta go out and promote those acts. That’s what promoting is about. And stick with them. The two things that have to happen is: one, don’t rip the audience off, and two, make sure your relationship with the band means they’ll stick with you. And don’t get too greedy.
Unfortunately today, too many acts come up – particularly in the pop world – they come out of nowhere, they’re all hyped up and pushed like fury, they become huge, and they forget their roots, they forget their audience, and then they just go out and rip them off. And I think that’s terrible, I think that’s awful.
Growing up in the rock business, it’s not quite that way – I don’t know whether the rock business is gonna stay the same way forever, but it does need a new way of doing it, and at the end of the day the success of any artist, in whatever genre they’re in, is about the song. That’s what it’s about. Come up with a great song, people buy it, they come and see it, and they love it. That’s the end of it. That’s where it starts: a great song and a great performer.
Will you be going to any of the major events this summer?
I’m going to Wimbledon tomorrow. (Laughs)
Well, that’s rock and roll these days!
(Laughs) I mean, I’ve been to quite a lot of festivals in America, and I’m gonna go to a few in Europe. Here, in England? Not really.
I was at Hard Rock Calling this weekend, that was great.
I personally have a view on Hyde Park, which is a bit different from everyone else. I think it should be used very frugally, because I don’t think it’s a particularly good regular venue for an audience. I think it should be used for special events, but, you know, they’re doing it in a different way. But I’m gonna go to quite a few different festivals this year in Europe.
Working with Jeff?
Yeah. We’re doing things like the Pori Jazz Festival in Finland and Molde in Norway, which we’ve never been to, and we’re going to Moscow and stuff like that, and quite a lot of festivals in America. I don’t go to many of the others. We’re doing the World Cup, so I’m going down there to do the closing gala, which is a bit more up-market and classical – I’m doing Andrea Bocelli there. So that’s between the semis and the final. I spend eight months of the year out of the country anyway, so when I’m home I want to do home comfort things.
Interview by Simon Harper
The BME is in the o2 Arena, Greenwich, London. For more info, see www.britishmusicexperience.com
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Clash Magazine Issue 53
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