Notes From The Underground

"You know I grew up in Four Winds and Pete still lives there,” says Darren Smyth of Fortune Cookie Music. “And when I think of all these people he’s had staying at his house. In twenty years they’ll be putting up a plaque.”

“I’ve had Bikini Kill, Kieran Hebden, Album Leaf…Jesus, so many,” begins Pete O’Neill, Darren’s partner in crime and, apparently, Belfast’s most hospitable man. “The Acid Mother’s Temple – I got up one morning and they were cleaning my living room.”
“Tell him about Meg White.”
“Meg White? Oh aye, she stayed in my spare room. We put on a show by The Soledad Brothers, and she was seeing the lead singer at the time. She flew over from Stockholm especially to see him play at Auntie Annie’s and ended up crashing back at our gaff. We sat up drinking into the early hours and then the next morning my wife and I got up and made breakfast for her. She was a lovely girl.”
“I told him he should have sold the bed-sheets on E-bay,” adds Darren with a devilish grin. “That was my business suggestion for the year.”
Formed three years ago – on Christmas Day – Fortune Cookie have, in the short time since, made a massive contribution to the overall musical commonwealth of their recurrently-philistine home town – promoting the kind of left-field and wilfully subterranean acts that often escape the attention of larger promoters. Did you manage to catch Four Tet in the (cough) intimate surroundings of The Menagerie? Were you part of the crowd seduced by Holly Golightly upstairs in The Pavillion? Converted by the Black Eyed Snakes in Auntie Annie’s? Perplexed by Cat Power at the same venue? Well, if you answered in the affirmative to any of the above – you have Darren and Pete to thank.
“Whatever artist we bring to Belfast we make sure that they’ve treated with respect and that we give them our time,” reveals Darren. “That’s why we have people like Devandra Banhart and Cat Power who keep coming back to us. We build relationships with them. We like to show them Belfast and give them a bit of hospitality. A lot of bigger promoters wouldn’t offer that kind of personal attention. But we think it’s important and enjoy doing it. It can be very interesting. You meet people from all over the world, meet a lot of smart, creative artists and you certainly meet characters. I spent a week in a car driving Cat Power around Ireland – which was an experience to say the least.”
All very glamorous you might think. Less sexy, however, is the prospect of operating at a level where two or three underwhelming shows can have dire financial implications. Neither Pete nor Darren are afraid of admitting to the many difficulties involved in trying to bridge the twilight zone that often stretches between acts that can draw 50 punters and those that draw 500. But they are adamant that hope lies in the ability of certain types of music to bring together a community of fanatical believers.
“We used to put up a white-board at the back of our gigs asking people to put down their details and we’d get back to them,” says Pete. “Our mailing list and email list is really healthy at the moment. I wouldn’t want to say we’ve created an audience – that’s a bit presumptuous on our part – but I think we’ve certainly given people who are into more obscure, leftfield kinds of music an outlet that wasn’t previously there. That’s the worthwhile thing. At the end of the day Darren and I don’t treat it as a business; we tried that and realised very quickly that we couldn’t. So now we just try to put on things that we ourselves would like to see and hope that enough people out there, by this stage of the game, trust our judgement.”
“Getting established was pretty easy;” he continues. “Keeping going is the hard thing. It’s a constant financial struggle. You do sometimes feel as if you’re banging your head against a brick wall. We’ve brought over some really fantastic acts during the last few years, and the level of apathy in Belfast is sometimes staggering. On top of that, you’re always having to keep your fingers crossed that the big promoters don’t step in. The reality is that we just can’t compete with them if they decide they want to put on an act we’re interested in.”
“Overall, we’re faced with the same kind of problems that Umack in Dublin and Bandicoot in Cork face,” adds Darren. “But I think they have bigger catchments areas to draw from. We don’t really have the same kind of infrastructure that exists in the South. There isn’t the same culture of fanzines, there aren’t as many radio stations or programmes that play the kind of music we promote and, most importantly, there simply isn’t that network of independent record shops. But we’re trying to keep our end up and we’ve been doing it for so long now, I think we always will.”

www.fcmusic.co.uk