Route to Fame: The Band Demo Tape

In the UK, we might today be tempted to think of the delusional pop star dream as something that was manufactured in some truly evil phonecall between Nigel Lythgoe and Simon Fuller – cunningly wiretapped by Simon Cowell.

But it’s a dream that goes back a lot further than the early 2000s. Right through the heyday of audio tape cassettes, it was possible to find hopeless hopefuls throwing good money at the dartboard of fame, and missing not just the bullseye, or indeed the board, but the entire wall. And actually, if anyone, or anything, sparked that delusion, it was probably punk…

Punk, you see, had broken down the rules of chart entry. For a time, beginning around the winter of 1977, the music industry had lost control of its output. With the arrival of punk, everything the record companies had known and trusted as a success forumla in the mid 1970s, was suddenly labelled “dinosaur”. The record buying teens would no longer touch it. Almost overnight, the ‘hit factory’ songwriting teams had become a laughing stock. The educated and reliable bands and artists had become “elitist snobs”.

So, now that the old formulae no longer worked, what was the new formula for chart success? That was just it. No one in the mainstream record business had a clue. And that meant they had no control. They would just have to let punk and its aftermath go directly to the fans. There could be no shaping, manipulation or industry manufacture of ideas, because there was no template. Punk’s targeted ridicule of ‘dinosaur culture’ was the perfect storm that shut down not just record industry interference – but media interference too.

The result was that literally anyone could be famous. Couldn’t sing? Didn’t matter. Couldn’t play? Didn’t matter. Never went to school? Even better!

The audiences were bored with people who could sing, play and went to school. This influx of DIY recording, street-relevant lyrics and genuinely spontaneous ideas, from real people who lived in real council flats, was a breath of fresh air for teens and twenty-somethings.

Feisty feminists could perform, write and direct hits. A physically disabled lead vocalist could become a pop/rock idol. Gay singers could sing about being gay. Racial harmony could not only become a core record label theme, but could drive a domination the mainstream pop charts. The question was: why had this national celebration of diversity not happened before? And the answer was: the industry had second-guessed the public and assumed they didn’t want diversity.

The young audience was additionally courted by the inclusiveness of the culture. A culture in which the artists mingled with audience members, as friends – not superiors. The industry hated it. They’d been comprehensively outwitted by “guttersnipes”, to use The Clash’s terminology. But they had to accept it. This, for big time A&R, was the new normal.

For a while, local bands and artists really could go into a recording studio, slap a couple of roughly-recorded songs onto a reel to reel, run off some cassette tapes, and start a career, purely on artistic merit. Career might not last a full six months, but it could at least feasibly begin.

Unfortunately, though, this climate didn’t last. It couldn’t last. It hit record companies in the pocket, and that set the industry on a warpath with the punk and post-punk ethos. Anything related to punk and its aftermath was sidelined, sabotaged, snubbed. Initially, this played into the hands of the movement and made the youth even more committed to supporting it.

But by the early 1980s, the climate was fertile for the industry to hit back and regain control. Audiences were getting bored with post-punk. And the proud poverty of punk was losing its appeal to artists, who were re-adopting commercialism – retaining punk cred only as a veneer.

The subsequent arrival of sophistipop was the opportunity A&R had been looking for. An image, and a brand of music, your parents could like. Not to mention your boss. This was something the heads of corporate marketing understood. And they used it to reset a formula for chart entry, which still prevailed twenty years later when Fuller, Lythgoe and Cowell turned it into a reality concept.

By the mid ’80s, industry control was much greater than ever before, because bosses understood the risks of letting something like punk dismantle their comfy gravy train, and they were not about to let it happen again.

For 99% of local bands, this effectively ended the era of realistic hope. But no sign went up. There was no board outside recording studios that said:

“The record industry is back at the helm of the ship. If you don’t look like this, wear this, sound like this, sell your soul to the media and agree to demands X, Y and Z, your chances of ‘making it’ in music are basically nil.”

So a new realm of delusion swept across the scene. Unknown hopefuls still scurried into local studios with cash in hand, thinking all that stood between them and national notoriety was the cheap demo cassette they were about to make.

In truth, they – or we, since I was party to this delusion myself – never had a chance. But we were gonna do this anyway, right? Of course we were. And there was an unwritten plan of action that we, the 99-percenters, would follow. To the letter. Unwritten, that is, until now. Here’s how the plan of action worked… Talk to almost anyone who recorded one or more band demo tapes in the 1980s, and they’ll tell you this is true…

STEPS IN ‘BECOMING FAMOUS’ VIA A DEMO TAPE, CIRCA 1980s…

Record the demo.

Get massively over-excited as the finished mix played back at full volume in an expensive, acoustically perfect control room, through amazingly good speakers.

Duplicate approximately fifty-eight times more copies than the band had actual fans.

Discuss with bandmates the idea of selling some of the tapes, at an extortionate price, and becoming rich from cassette sales even before the record industry had discovered you.

Play a copy of the demo on a home stereo the next morning and realise it had several irreparable flaws.

Give some copies to friends. For free. Obviously.

After a week, ask the friends if they’d managed to listen to the tape. To which the answer would inevitably be some variation on the phrase “no”.

Corner one friend and force them to listen to the tape while you stood over them making excuses for the flaws.

Fail to get any convincing reaction.

Abort the idea of sending the cassettes to record companies, radio stations or any other places with the means to transmit the music beyond your bedroom. Because hey, if your best friend won’t enthuse about it at virtual gunpoint, Polydor and EMI were probably not gonna respond with a two hundred grand advance. And Noel Edmonds was probs not gonna be binning off his Matt Bianco and Sade singles to wedge you into the playlist, right?

To remotely justify the investment, send one tape for review to the most low-end, desperate, cheap magazine in your city, ideally with a reach of about 350 readers.