Olly Murs - The Biography by Lewis Justin

Author:Lewis, Justin [Justin Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782190851
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2012-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

HEY MR SONGWRITER

Recording an album was a dream come true for Olly Murs – a project he’d been awaiting for so long. But this would be no time for complacency – in fact, the pressure was even more pronounced. ‘Expectations are high and you’ll have to learn on the job,’ he was warned by the boss of his record company. Epic Records’ Nick Raphael explained the sheer cost and commitment a record company had to make to an artist. ‘To launch an album in the current market, it costs a million pounds – a pretty significant commitment from a record company.’ Fortunately, Raphael was convinced that £1 million would be money well spent on Olly Murs. Equally fortunately, Olly seemed to thrive on challenges like this one. ‘They wouldn’t be investing that kind of money if they didn’t believe in me. It’s gonna be a bit of pressure but it’s pressure that I love and pressure that I want.’

Like many X Factor contestants since 2006, Olly had become a client of Modest! – an artist management company founded by Richard Griffiths and Harry Magee. Griffiths and Magee had guided the careers of Leona Lewis, Alexandra Burke, JLS and others to long-term international success. As of 2012, nearly a decade after it was formed, Modest! still represented many of the most popular X Factor contestants, including JLS, Leona Lewis, One Direction and the 2011 series winners, Little Mix. It was also steering the careers of Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts and even the brilliant Basildon-born singer Alison Moyet, 30 years after she had made a striking debut as one half of the duo Yazoo.

Richard Griffiths, one of Modest!’s co-founders, began as an international booking agent for the Australian heavy-rock band AC/DC in the 1970s, before becoming a head of A&R (Artists and Repertoire), a job that involved overseeing the seeking out of music talent. The A&R department of a record company exists to unearth the stars of tomorrow by listening to demo recordings and attending live gigs by artists. In the 1980s, Griffiths had worked in music publishing at Virgin and launched 10 Records, home to artists like Soul II Soul. As the 1990s dawned, he relocated to the USA where, at Sony Music, he nurtured rock acts like Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam. Back in the UK in 1998, he joined forces with Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh to sign Westlife to the BMG label. Then in 2000, he made the deal with Cowell which would bring about the creation of Syco Music and Television. In other words, the mighty world of The X Factor, where pop and TV would co-exist.

Griffiths’s business partner Harry Magee also had a long and illustrious career in the music industry. He had worked in record company marketing, before heading Big Life Records and, from 1994, A&M Records. Along the way, he had dealt with artists ranging from Lisa Stansfield, Sting and Bryan Adams to Sheryl Crow and Whitney Houston. As

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