Wednesday, February 02, 2005

WEAR HIGH HEELS, AND GET A RECORD DEAL: We've just had Street Signs [pdf download] brought to our attention, notable for an article on the mighty Kenickie written by someone who knows the story from within: Emma Jackson. Now she's an undergraduate; back then, she was Emma Kate-Montrose. It's a too-familiar tale of a record company that doesn't know what to do with what it's got, and the tendency to treat anywhere north of Hatfield as terribly exotic by London-based writers:

There is a tendency in the music press sometimes to write the speech of people from ‘Oop North’ phonetically - I have never heard anyone say ‘oop’. This was matched with the annoying habit of following a quote from one of us, with the something like ‘squealed Marie’ or ‘screamed Lauren’. Whilst we were very noisy, we did not squeal. This had the power to totally transform an accurate quote into something quite different. When these two journalistic devices were used together, what had seemed to be a successful interview could be transformed into a slightly embarrassing feature. Although our status as ‘northern lasses’ was a novelty for the media, it became a problem for the record company.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

well, that was bloody depressing.

as an aside: having heard it again yesterday, their cover of "letter to memphis" is simply wonderful. a 'mark radcliffe sessions' cd to go with the john peel one would be quite splendid (even if about ten people would end up buying it).

Anonymous said...

Odd that some five years later I would get such of thrill from finally learning their real names.

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