Interview with Simon Frith

Famous musicians get mashed at these tables, Nationwide picks up the bill. I think we have our next victim of the recession.

Back in September, there was a fair bit of buzz about the Mercury Prize. No, there was. I talked to a guy in Fopp about it and everything. Anyway, I thought I'd have a chat with head judge Simon Frith, the man responsible for picking the champions of British music and, inevitably, snubbing countless token avant-garde jazz acts, leaving them to cry in the corner and stub out Café Crèmes into their thighs. My dictaphone recording includes him pausing to give out his entire home address over the phone, so Burial, if you're reading this, I'll sell you the details for three grand. Non-negotiable.

It's the first time I've done an interview; gies a break.

Published in Student, 30th September 2008:

When it comes to music, everyone’s a critic. Think of that friend, that one obsessive musical zealot who will only remove their headphones to eulogise or condemn your favourite band with a fervour that, applied to a more sensitive subject, would border on bigotry. As passionate as their opinions may be, they’re never going to spark soaring album sales, national acclaim and a £20,000 prize.

For Simon Frith, however, opinions are of a little more consequence. Having this month chaired the panel of judges for the Nationwide Mercury Prize (his duty since its inception in 1992), he recently returned to his professorship at Edinburgh University, where he draws on his experiences as a rock critic and influential musicology writer to lecture on the social forces behind music.

Since the Mercury shortlist was released in July, the decisions he has overseen have been the subject of endless speculation and scrutiny. Despite recent grumblings of dubstep conspiracists, he reveals the criteria for the strictly British/Irish prize to be disarmingly simple: “One, that the album should be good enough to recommend and two, that it should be somehow representative of music in the year in which it was nominated.”

Simple on paper, yes, but the whittling down of nominees to an eventual winner takes an astonishing amount of work. With twelve judges and around 240 submitted CDs in the mix this year, a quick and shamefully innumerate bash at the calculator in theory shows Elbow’s victory to be the outcome of around 2,800 opinions.

When Frith gets a box of new records, first impressions are what count: “If by the end of the first three tracks I can’t remember anything about them, I think ‘this record hasn’t moved me in any way’, and put them back… it’s got to grab you immediately.”

However, with the influence of the other judges and a whole summer to ruminate, Frith says, “your judgments can always be changed by context from other people. There are always at least three records nominated that when I hear them I’d never have believed they’d be on the shortlist and some of those I really grow to love.” So, future Mercury hopefuls take note – don’t immediately go blowing your load on the first three tunes.

With a panel consisting mainly of critics and journalists (music industry affiliates are not eligible), every year presents a swamp of egos and opinions to be filtered down to one result. According to Frith, this combination only acts to reinforce the final verdict.

“There are a lot of arguments,” he admits, “we don’t pretend that all twelve judges think all the short-listed records are great or that whoever wins should have won; our belief has always been that it’s always better to have a record that people passionately hate or love rather than one that people don’t care about.”

So how then, when concessions and compromises must be made within the panel, can a fair judgment be made?

“I don’t think judgments can be fair. I don’t think that would make any sense.”

Instead, it is the judges with the keenest ears and the sharpest tongues whose opinions hold the most sway. Frith says of his fellow judges, “They’ve got to persuade a lot of people to agree with them, so their skill isn’t knowing a lot about music; it’s being able to articulate a passionate belief in a record.”

As an Oxford PPE graduate with a PhD in Sociology and a wealth of influential writings on popular music culture to his name, it’s understandable that Frith should be able to articulate such a belief. Alongside stints as a rock critic for The Sunday Times and The Observer, his academic career has included, perhaps most controversially, an attempt to define ‘bad music’.

“In order to have a concept of good music, you have to have a concept of bad music. It’s not something we can all agree on. I once gave a lecture on that James Blunt song, ‘You’re Beautiful’, as an example of bad music. But then I read a very moving account of somebody who lost their child in a canoeing accident, and at the funeral that was one of the tracks played because it was her favourite. I think it’s kind of arrogant to say that’s crap music when it’s an emotional part of somebody’s life.”

A hugely simplified summary of this ‘bad music’, he says, is “Music that makes you ashamed to listen to it.” Surely, though, with an office stacked with vinyl, he indulges in the odd musical guilty pleasure.

“I’ve never had guilty pleasures. If you like something, you don’t need to feel guilty about it. I’ve always been a pop fan, even at the height of rock criticism.”

A copy of Blunt’s Back to Bedlam may well be lurking in that collection, then.

Before this treatise on bad music came Frith’s first book, The Sociology of Rock. Published in 1978, it explored the sociological intricacies of a burgeoning punk movement that, he says, has now well and truly withered.

“Thirty years later, people who were punks are now parents and grandparents, so now it’s very difficult to equate rock music with youth music. Today, it’s corporate, it makes lots of money.”

This begs the question of which contemporary record, artist or movement holds the potential to define this era in the way punk did for the late 70s and early 80s. In the early years of the Mercury Prize, Frith says, “I definitely would have said that (1995 winners) Portishead defined that decade, that they captured something about it, whereas this decade if you take something like the Burial album, which I don’t think is an interesting record, it’s clearly rooted in a very long history of dance music. It doesn’t seem to be strikingly 2008 in a way that it’s not 2001.”

Apart from dispelling rumours about the consequences of Burial’s absence at this year’s Mercury ceremony, it’s an almost disappointing evaluation of the new millennium’s offerings, although he speculates over what 2009 holds.

“Who knows, maybe next year we’ll have a record about which we’ll say ‘yep, that’s it, that sums it all up’.”

There seems to be no sign of it coming any time soon, since even the apparently unstoppable Glasvegas – a favourite of Frith’s and a likely candidate for next year’s Mercury Prize – he describes as ‘incredibly retrospective’.

“You can hear all the sounds from the past, which is one of them reasons I like them, but to say that’s the sound of now or of the future would be slightly odd.”

That’s not to say, though, that Frith believes that for music to look backward is a bad thing.

“I sometimes argue that the very notion of nostalgia is defined by musical experience - even The Beatles were nostalgic from the beginning. I think it may be something to do with how, when we settle down, we like reminiscing about how we once thought about the future.

“My musical interests – and it might sound odd coming from somebody who’s very much a populist – have always been in the avant-garde, in things that sound strange or different. I can be as nostalgic as everybody else but at the end of the day, I’d rather listen to something where I think ‘I’ve never heard anything like this before’.”

This musical nostalgia might be understood as a backlash against a music industry that is evolving, if not transforming, through the influence of technology. Frith, however, remains sceptical about the true level of impact this has.

“Technology does change things but central music experiences tend to stay the same. We’re being told that, with downloads and everything, it’s the end of the album. But talk to any musician, they want to make an album – that’s what music is. And despite everything, the most valuable section of the industry at the moment is live music.

“I often say to students ‘write down the most important musical experience you’ve ever had’, and 99 per cent will put down either playing or listening live. It’s not just about hearing it, it’s about hearing it in the circumstances, that is, while others are hearing it too. It’s an event, an experience, not just a noise – it’s everything that surrounds it.”

With judgments made purely on recordings, though, the growing importance of live music is yet to be demonstrated in the Mercury Prize. It’s an issue that will have to wait for now - Frith’s off to stock up on a rare treat for a Mercury judge: American music.

Photo credit Andy Wilkes