ABSTRACT
I first made contact with a record company in 1974 when, with an aspiring school friend, I mailed the only copy of a badly recorded reel-to-reel tape to Donald ‘Jumbo’ Vanrenen at Virgin Records. Thinking back on this long-lost recording, produced with acoustic guitars and keyboards in one ‘live’ take in the back room of my parents’ house, I am surprised that we even received a response, let alone the brief letter that accompanied the returned tape. I recall that our songs had ‘promise’ but that the vocals were ‘weak’, and we were advised to try and record using better-quality equipment. That was the beginning of a long association with the recording industry, during which I would spend many hours in the offices of record labels, production companies and song publishers, initially as one of the numerous musicians and songwriters attempting to ‘make it’ in the music business and then as an older and increasingly wiser sociologist attempting to understand the peculiar mixture of reckless abandon and cautious indecision that is such a feature of the music and entertainment industry.
