Sandie Shaw appears before parliament

Yesterday the Culture, Media & Sport select committee was doing some thinking about the creative industries, which included an appearance by Sandie Shaw.

It's been written up in some places as an attack on Mumford And Sons, but... well, not really:

Finance is the biggest barrier for emerging artists.

At the moment, unless you’re Mumford & Sons and come from a public school and have a rich family that can support you, you’re on the dole and you’re trying to work and by the time you get a sniff of a record contract you just grab anything that they might offer you.”

That's not so much an attack on Mumfords as the lack of support for people who don't have their private means of support, surely? (And the gap is going to get worse, again, as Duncan Smith's punish-the-poor measures kick in in a few days.)

Shaw's not impressed by the alternative, Cowell-driven model, either:

“So many artists are disadvantaged,” she said. “They cannot start because of their background and the best music comes from those in challenging backgrounds, it comes from Glasgow, Manchester, Essex, it comes from places and people that are really struggling to make some meaning out of their existence.

“So all we’re getting is a load of Simon Cowell-type stuff that is being paid for and owned by people and the artists are just mere puppets.”

Yes. What chance do artists who take their first steps through a mere talent show have of creating great art like Sandie Shaw? Remind me, Daily Telegraph, how did Sandie Shaw's early struggle shape itself?

Shaw, whose real name is Sandra Goodrich, was working at the Ford car plant in Dagenham and as a part time model when she took part in a talent contest at the age of 17. Coming second, she got to take part in a charity concert and was seen by Adam Faith, the singer, whose manager won her a contract and gave her the stage name and topped the charts that year – 1964 – with (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me.

But that was a totally different type of impressario sweeping up a talent show winner and giving them a recording contract.

Still, it's not like Faith was a Cowell-esque figure forcing Shaw to do work she didn't much care for, is it? Is it, Wikipedia?

Shaw had originally performed the song as one of five prospective numbers to represent the United Kingdom in the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest on The Rolf Harris Show. She had never been taken with the idea of taking part in the contest but her discoverer, Adam Faith, had talked her into it, saying it would keep her manager Eve Taylor happy. Taylor wanted to give Shaw a more cabaret appeal and felt that this was the right move - and also felt that it would get Shaw back in the public's good books as she had recently been involved in a divorce scandal.

Of the five songs performed, "Puppet on a String" was Shaw's least favourite. In her own words "I hated it from the very first oompah to the final bang on the big bass drum. I was instinctively repelled by its sexist drivel and cuckoo-clock tune." She was disappointed when it was selected as the song she would use to represent the country, but it won the contest hands down, though it has always been felt that this was partly due to her existing popularity on the continent (she had recorded most of her hit singles in French, Italian, German and Spanish).

Oh.

Still, none of that should distract us from her main, valid point: a lot of British creativity has been nurtured by young people using time on the dole to develop a voice. You could argue that a guitarist writing songs while out of work is doing something to help with his "job search" - but the system has no way of recognising that.

It's true that if you force a young Jarvis Cocker to work stacking shelves for nothing in Poundland, he'll get a lot of ideas for songs. But you'd need to give him some space to write the things down.

Thank you kindly, EMI and Me

The inspired BBC Business programmes department continues to turn out some cracking ideas; currently applying the "I Love" format to businesses to chart the British public's relationships with major brands.

Last night, James Bolam narrated us through 'EMI and Me', which was a wonderful opportunity to see just how mistakes being made today seem to have been constantly throughout the history of the label.

So, Cliff Richard was given a rubbish song to sing rather than the stuff he was good at; the executives believed that they knew better than Adam Faith how he should pronounce the word "baby", and so on.
Of course, being an EMI facing documentary, Malcolm McLaren had to pop up to tell us how he invented punk and everything. What was interesting this time, though, was the explanation of why the Sex Pistols were dropped - not so much because EMI couldn't handle them, but because the presence of the punks in the music division was causing Americans to pull out of their agreements to purchase the then-innovative CAT scanners from the electronics side of the business - it's apparent that but for that, the label would have been happy to keep the alleged anarchists on their books.

There was a lot that was left out - the humiliating merger with Thorn was covered, but there was no explanation as to how and why EMI became independent again; and although the acquisitiveness of EMI which led to the purchase of Bingo and Cinema chains was given space, no room could be found to explore the HMV shops adventures or the takeover of Waterstones.

But what we take away, mostly, is the image of men who clearly have and had no real understanding of the product they were selling, or the market they were selling to; through a mixture of luck and obstinancy on the part of the talent, they managed to make some profits. Which they then pissed away again and again - on developing medical equipment, on bingo halls, on Mariah Carey. The overriding impression is of a company that never quite got it.