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Good golly, Miss Hollie

By Russell Brown, 2007-07-11 23:00:00
Originally published in Idealog #10, page 34
Magazine layout

Idealog July/August, page 34. Photographs by Stephen Langdon @ Reload

Hollie Smith’s debut album is probably the most anticipated Kiwi release this year. Sassy, smart and local, good golly, could Miss Hollie go global? The first step: turn down iconic label Blue Note and pick a subsidiary instead. Idealog talks to Northcote’s next big thing

So, Hollie Smith: did you have an Oh my God, I’ve just turned down Blue Note Records moment?

“Oh yeah,” she chuckles. “Fuck yeah. I had that exact thought!”

Smith is at home in Raumati Beach on the Kapiti Coast, musing over the past two weeks, when her life and her career have taken a profoundly new course. No wonder she can’t maintain the serious and careful tone she usually takes into interviews.

The day after Idealog’s first interview with her in Wellington, she was in Auckland staying with her managers, Morgan and Nicky Donoghue, to work on plans for the release of her debut album, Long Player. Then the life-changing missive arrived from New York.

“Morgan and Nicky came in and jumped on my bed and woke me up with the email,” she recalls. “And then I rang my boyfriend, and then I rang my mama and then I rang my Dad. I tried to get hold of people, but I was a bit shell-shocked for half a day. I was just sort of blinking.”

The email was forwarded from a music business legend, Bruce Lundvall—the president and CEO of EMI’s Blue Note Label Group, and the man who signed Norah Jones after hearing her sing for 30 seconds.

EMI New Zealand chief Chris Caddick, having inked a production and distribution licence for Long Player, had, on a hunch, sent a three-track sampler to Lundvall. And Lundvall was saying to Caddick in his email: I love this—I want to sign her for the world.

It could have gone astray. Lundvall wasn’t in the office when the sampler arrived—his wife was in hospital and he’d taken time off to care for her. But one of his A&R people picked it up, copied it and couriered it to his boss at home. Lundvall set out for the hospital, popped the disc in his car stereo and, as he told it later, “nearly drove off the road”.

Lundvall wanted to see the artist and her management. Caddick suggested they could join him in New York by the end of the month. The reply came back: couldn’t it be sooner?

“I said ‘We’ll fly out on Friday!’” says Morgan Donoghue, who picked up Smith’s management in February after his own ten-year career with EMI. “It’s Blue Note, it’s Bruce Lundvall! They’re absolute legends of music.”

So, Friday it was. Smith and Donoghue flew out spent the weekend in Los Angeles with Greg Johnson and Dave Cooley, the celebrated mastering engineer who worked on Long Player, then flew on to New York.

“We got in at midnight on Sunday and got off the plane,” Donoghue says. “We got there and there was this stretch limo waiting! We pissed ourselves laughing and made the driver take photos of us.”

Magazine layout

Stephen Langdon photographed Hollie Smith at Crystal Palace in Mt Eden. Dress by Zambesi

They had lunch booked the next day with Lundvall and A&R man Ian Ralfini, but the die was cast before entrées. On their tour of the Blue Note Group’s offices they were warmly greeted by staff at Manhattan Records, an imprint within the group that Ralfini runs like an indie. (In the way of these things, Lundvall set up Manhattan as a pop label after he came from Columbia to revive the Blue Note imprint in 1985, and for a time Blue Note was part of EMI-Manhattan. EMI-Manhattan was dismantled in 1992, revived in 2001 by veteran producer Arif Mardin and is now part of the Blue Note Label Group.)

Ralfini himself is quite the industry player. For years, he ran Warner Music internationally, and signed Frank Sinatra and Eric Clapton. But it was his staff—marketing, promotions, radio—who sold Manhattan to the two New Zealanders.

“It was just one of those moments, where I immediately felt comfortable with the Manhattan crew,” says Smith, who frequently gives the impression that she places great stock in people and friendships. “They just felt very fresh and new and they were saying I could do whatever I chose to do artistically—that I could call the shots.”

And so it came to be that Hollie Smith, having been summoned by the chief of Blue Note, weighed up that legendary name and chose instead to go with Ralfini’s Manhattan imprint, home to an eclectic catalogue that ranges from Van Morrison and Tim Finn to the Irish vocal ensemble Celtic Woman.

“I’d maintain a lot more creative control and be a part of it in a much bigger way than I would if I’d chosen Blue Note—just because they’ve been around for a long time and they’re definitely accustomed to a particular way of doing things. I’m not a jazz artist, and I can do what I want on this label without having to conform to any particular sort of format.”

Lundvall doesn’t mind. The 73-year-old is calling Smith “my new adopted daughter” and, in an electronic press kit quickly compiled for the signing, declared that Smith “has, for a young person, a depth and a passion that I hadn’t heard for a long time.

“I think that Hollie has a great future in the music business and the kind of music that she is doing needs to be taken to as wide an audience as one can reach.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that this all began—”this” being Hollie Smith’s career in a serious sense—with ‘Bathe in the River’, the theme for the film No. 2, an unlikely radio hit (after the programmers gave up insisting that it’d never work), a Silver Scroll winner for Don McGlashan and the second most successful New Zealand single ever. It was a tune that found its moment, and is still the reason most people know who Hollie Smith is.

But you’d be wrong.

“The business side started becoming apparent probably about three years ago,” she says. “Doing all the collaborations I’ve done, most of which involved me writing, as soon as you do that it definitely drops into the business sense. You’ve got to establish songwriting splits and make sure that it’s all covered.

“And although I loved everything about ‘Bathe in the River’ and it was great working with Don, I literally got paid a session fee, walked into the studio, sang it five times and that was it. And then it became what it was, and people thought that was my song. And in my opinion it was never even remotely close to being my song—I hardly even sang it.”

“With most young singers, you can still see some of the scaffolding—the influences, the insecurities, all the bits and pieces that make up who they are on stage. With Hollie, you just get Hollie—entirely centred in her craft, and entirely sure of her reasons for being there”

She says the best thing she took away from that session was her friendship with McGlashan. She still leans on him for advice and support, and pays tribute to his creative focus.

“With most young singers, you can still see some of the scaffolding—the influences, the insecurities, all the bits and pieces that make up who they are on stage,” says McGlashan. “With Hollie, you just get Hollie—entirely centred in her craft, and entirely sure of her reasons for being there.

“In the business sense, I think she’s just realistic. She knows that good choices and good allies are going to be essential, and she certainly doesn’t waste time pretending not to care about it.”

She’s serious, but she always has been. In her sixth-form year at Northcote College, the school accommodated her intense focus on music performance by giving her an extra study period to spend in the music room, working. She was there most lunchtimes and after school too. She was a star pupil. And then, facing a bursary year dominated by music theory, and feeling unable to commit to that to the same degree, she left.

Over the past year, for the first time since those school lunchtimes and study periods, Smith found herself “sitting in a room for five hours a day, developing and writing these songs, and really thinking about what I was hearing in my head and how I was going to get that out. That’s the hardest thing—especially seeing as I don’t write music. It was a new discipline for me to explore.”

The result is Long Player, which sees her trying to establish herself as an artist. “I’ve been planning it for a long time, but we’ve finally got to that point where I can finally put my music to my name and let that sit for a while.”

Ironically, it was another session job that gave her the space to spend months writing. When the funk group Solaa got a commission from Max Fashion to write a tune, they asked Smith to write some vocals and sing.

“And that was basically their thing, where they wanted to associate music with the brand, so they did a video with Max models and their clothing quite heavily featured in it. But that wasn’t too bad actually.”

Again, she refers to McGlashan: “Me and Don have got the whole moral approach. I get very cautious about what I’m associated with—what products I’m working with and things like that. There’s the old saying about selling out, and it’s totally true, but it’s worth it—because that’s the way you get paid in this industry. And you’ve got to accept that occasionally you’ve got to bend the rules to live.”

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She’s not an easy sell. Most young singers would leap at the chance to travel to Brazil and record and play with local musicians for Loop Recordings’ OE Brazil project, but Smith was wary because the trip was sponsored by Bacardi. “One of my first worries about that was how the product was going to be marketed throughout the project, and I wasn’t prepared to be hugely associated with an alcohol brand. So there was a lot of discussion within the opening meetings of that project about how the marketing was going to be placed, and what our roles were within the project about promoting the product and things like that. And when we got that sorted out I was quite happy to continue. You’ve got to be careful of what you’re getting involved with—morally and otherwise.”

It’s not the first run-in she’s had with Loop and she says it never entered her head to make her debut album with the Wellington indie, but relations are still cordial enough (“we’re all good friends”) for her to use the Loop boardroom for our interview. She also navigated the boundaries between personal and professional relationships earlier this year when she parted company with her manager of two years, Toby Larmer—too much friends for it to work, she explains.

Smith met Larmer when he was managing the now-defunct Trinity Roots, and that band’s collaborator Darren Mathiassen is part of the core band that plays on the album and accompanies her live, along with Crete Haami (bass) and the OpenSouls’ Jeremy Toy on guitar and production duties. Also playing on the album are Jonathan Crayford and Mark de Clive Lowe, along with other members of OpenSouls. A stellar list of backing vocalists includes Deva Mahal (Rhombus), Lisa Tomlins (Fat Freddy’s Drop), Rio Hemopo (Trinity Roots and Breaks Co-Op), P Diggs (Shapeshifter) and Kilbirnie’s own Mission Community Choir.

So Long Player is, like Smith herself, a joint venture between hometown Auckland and her adopted home, Wellington. But it would be fair to say that Wellington was the making of her.

“Auckland, I just found it difficult,” she says. “I think the one thing for me in Wellington is that there are all these little clubs and bars that don’t pay fantastically well, but pay enough to make it worthwhile. And you can just ring up a few people and say, hey, do you wanna do a gig this Wednesday?

“You just ring up whoever’s available—you don’t have a set list and you don’t have specific songs. You just turn up and you make it all up on the spot. In Auckland, that’s just not doable—you’ve got to have an established band with demo tapes and do all these things to get a gig. Whereas, here, you do a gig and someone turns up—and it’s oh, hey, have a beer and have a jam—you take a couple of songs off and let them have a play. Sweet.”

It’s also fair to say that with her debut album Manhattan has got itself—as expressed through Smith’s distinctive blues-gospel vision—the ‘Wellington Sound’. Although Smith finds the label “frustrating”, it couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

But Manhattan has shown its mettle with new sounds and Smith won’t necessarily have to listen to complaints from hidebound radio programmers. The label discovered that PBS TV concert specials reached a key audience when Celtic Woman recorded a PBS special and sold 150,000 albums in the following three weeks (and kept on selling—sales recently passed two million). So this year Lundvall bankrolled a hi-def video shoot for three of his new artists and handed it to PBS to screen. The artists actively promoted the PBS angle. The man knows how to reach a grown-up audience.

Long Player won’t be released worldwide until next year, by which time it will probably include some new tracks with American producers but recorded, like the rest of the album, at Trident Studios in Taranaki Street, Wellington.

“I get very cautious about what I’m associated with—what products I’m working with and things like that. There’s the old saying about selling out, and it’s totally true, but that’s the way you get paid in this industry. And occasionally you’ve got to bend the rules to live”

There are some clouds to the silver lining. Only days after Smith said yes to Manhattan the troubled parent company, EMI Music, received an offer from private equity group Terra Firma. Opinions vary on what a sale would mean.

“Bruce is one of the good guys, real old school,” says industry-watcher Simon Grigg. “He survived the slash and burn of recent years simply because he signed Norah Jones. However, since [Jones’ third] album flopped he must be at risk. And that puts any signings at risk.”

Grigg says the sale would be “not good for any artist signed to EMI. These guys have bought a catalogue, not a risky artist development company. I reckon, like Warners is being now slowly gutted, the same will happen here. EMI is just a passive, no-risk money earner now for the buyers—it’s about The Beatles and The Beach Boys and Dark Side of The Moon.”

Donoghue is, as you might expect, more optimistic: “There are advantages to not being on the stock market too,” he notes. “I don’t think it will affect the Hollie record because the Blue Note Group has had the biggest rise in market share of anyone in America this year, and they’ve got the biggest selling album with Norah Jones. If anyone is the golden kids of the EMI world, it’s Bruce Lundvall and his people.”

Indeed, Jones’ Not Too Late album has sold four million copies worldwide, reaching number one in 20 countries. That’s a pretty good flop.

And it might also have been a useful experiment in the new realities of the music business—the first single from Not Too Late, ‘Thinking About You’, was one of the first songs by a major artist to be released as a non-copy protected MP3 file (it also became her first chart single since 2003) and the whole album was streamed for a week on VH1.com.

Moreover, Jones was working on a long leash. She wrote or co-wrote all the songs, many of them darker in tone than her previous work, and recorded it at home. For a while Blue Note didn’t even know she was making an album.

That sounds like the kind of freedom Hollie Smith might like.

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2 comments

Spelling B

2007-07-13 13:02:33

few names got totally mangled in there... Dave Cooley was the engineer, not Mark Cooley (hes done lots with Open Souls) - Toby Larmer not Lama was Trinity Roots manager; there is a funk group Solaa, not Solaar, and "Smith met Lama when he was managing the now-defunct Trinity Roots, and that band’s Darren Mathiassen is part of the core band that plays on the album..." Mathiassen is best known as a member of Rhombus, not Trinity Roots (he did guest with them, but was not a core member). Perhaps a quick edit????

Matt Cooney

Matt Cooney

2007-07-13 13:13:58

Thanks B. It's a fairly slow edit, since the story has been on newsstands for a month ... but thank you for keeping the record straight (and apologies to the once-misspelt).

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