About
WHERE SNOWSTORM CAME FROM
Snowstorm started out in the early months of 1999, only intending to release one single…
Theaudience, whom I was managing at the time, were dying a predictably protracted death at the hands of a record label with almost no understanding of the band’s music or how to market it (the idea of putting Sophie in Cleopatra eye make up and a Shirley Bassey dress hadn’t quite ocurred to anyone yet). By a happy coincidence Candidate bass player Ian Painter droped in for a coffee on my last day at the management office and gave me the first Candidate demo.
The next day saw an old record company friend phone me up at home with the news that he had, as Royal Tenenbaum would have put it, “a bad case of cancer”. The evening that followed involved a gig, two parties, being found in a skip, being mugged and waking up in a police cell.
Sitting at home nursing the bruises the next morning, I had little else to do but listen to the Candidate demos… and hatch a plan…
OK so the plan was only to put out a 7” E.P. by Candidate but this releasing records malarkey is addictive
Snowstorm is a way of plugging the yawning gap between artists and the “give me a hit today not tomorrow” world of major labels. While the music business seems keen to blame anyone but themselves for the state they’re in (“it’s those pesky kids with their computers hoovering up MP3s along with our shareholder dividend”), their own impatience and greed might be a more obvious scapegoat. Snowstorm believes in the old notion of artist development – the sort of thing that used to be practised as a matter of course, but is now rare as hen’s dentures.
Please feel free to get in touch, send me some music or just enjoy some MP3s of some uniquely talented bands.