There’s a crisis in the music industry (as you all know too well) and it’s testing the mettle of many of your favourite musicians. Indeed, when discussing the future of music some musos curl into a foetal position, start muttering curses about downloads and wailing about their livelihoods. Others see it as a potentially golden era of self-determination, creative freedom and musical entrepreneurialism.
Dave Browne, the former Picturehouse pop-star and singer of such radio-friendly numbers as ‘Sunburst’ and ‘Hang My Hat’, is in the latter camp. Indeed, his creative rebirth as a solo artist with a mellow new record Windows To The Soul is as likely to be celebrated by an appearance on the Dragon’s Den as on Later... With Jools Holland.
“We’ve a label called Kompass Records,” he says. “We were lucky enough to get BES [Business Enterprise Scheme] clearance and Denis Desmond put €70,000 into the label, which was an absolute endorsement for us.”
“That’s as maybe?” I say, trying to sound like Duncan Bannatyne from Dragon’s Den. “But what’s your unique selling point? How do you disambiguate your ‘product’ in a noisy market? What’s the blue-sky thinking?”
“Well, the record’s coming out exclusively in HMV on credit card USB as well as CD,” Dave proffers. “It’s a credit card and you slip a little chip out of the end of it and put it straight into a USB port. We think it’s the future and I think HMV think so as well because it makes things smaller racking wise. And what’s cool about it for me is that it gets the music to more people, because they’ll pass it around and show it to each other.”
More intriguing still is the fact that the record is a collaboration with visual artist Brock Butler.
“Before I even met him, I had this idea of doing a separate piece of art for each song,” Browne Dave. “He was actually going to call his collection Windows To The Soul before we ever met, which was too good a coincidence to miss. So we decided to collaborate.”
But business, technology and artistic collaboration are all really beside the point, because Dave has learned to love music again.
“Picturehouse had become a chore,” he admits. “I’d be lying if I said otherwise. We weren’t writing any new stuff and we were tired. We just got bored. When you’re a pop band the pressure is on to write hit singles and sometimes you’re just not in the mood to do that. There was nothing acrimonious about it. Then I got asked to play piano at Lillie’s Bordello. I don’t like to think of it as cabaret, but I just played songs that I really loved and found that a lot of people liked the same kind of things. I’d play anything from U2 to Johnny Cash to Crowded House. It was a big learning curve. It got me playing the piano again and I gained a newfound respect for songs and songwriting.”
So he wrote songs that he knew he could never do with Picturehouse and began the slow process of recording a solo album. A process which featured some time-honoured techniques.
“There’s a couple of tunes on it with the Czechoslovakian orchestra,” he says. “I got to spend the day in Prague watching them sitting reading my sheets of music, while the conductor had his dog sitting happily at his feet.”
As well as some newfangled ones.
“I didn’t have a block of money, so it was amazing to see how musicians can just go off and put lines down on their own Pro Tools setups. The technology is amazing now. There’s a lot of speculation about what the music industry will turn into. But it can only be good from a creative point of view to be able to make your own music and take your time over it, without the hassle of a major label looking over your shoulder. All the technology has got to be good for music. The world has turned into a musical village.”