World HQ.
An e-mail from a singer of long personal & professional acquaintance…
I hope you won't mind me telling you that I am coldly furious with one of our ex- managers, having recently learnt that he has personally been receiving the (paltry, but none the less ours) album sales royalties for the last 35 years and never once has he accounted to us for them. I am trying to persuade him to make an educated guess at how much this might have been and send cheques to myself and JA and at least he has now had to admit that he has had them, because Sanctuary Records have sent him the royalty statements going back to 1993.
From my reply…
no reasonable person in the mainstream would believe that the treatment you describe is standard operating procedure - for all of us. so, whenever this happens to any of us, better the info is made public. this supports the case for all artists.
you require:
1. full accounting;
2. compound interest (on small sums over 35 years this becomes useful);
3. an explanation: it is possible that he "forgot" for the first 28 years but not since sanctuary has been rendering accounting.
4. if the explanation is not credible, an apology.
5. if there is any hesitation or delay, you will contact the MU legal department, and the BPI and the metropolitan fraud squad.
6. contact sanctuary, tell them the position & request that they send duplicates of the accounting in future.
do not be apologetic. do not be fobbed off. do not give up fighting - managers rely on that. this character has been stealing your money, and it was not an accident. it may be that he says he can't produce full accounting. in which case you will make your own best guess of the sales for the first 3-5 years (the key period) & get an accountant to compound it up…
when the manager gets difficult, you produce your accountant's figure and say this is what it will take you to settle. otherwise, you make your complaints to the official bodies.
… don't waste your energy in anger: direct it towards redressing the grievance. the most powerful weapon you have is making the information public.
From an another correspondent, an academic & musician, who attended the NY Ethical Soundscapes…
… I am sure you're familiar with the untranslatable Brazilian term "saudade." It's sometimes translated as "melancholy," but really it is a term for a paradoxical and complex emotion. The harmonica player Toots Thielemans called it that moment between a tear and a smile. I am fascinated by these kinds of paradoxical emotions. Some comedians--Richard Pryor at his best, and the South-African play Zizwe Banzi is Dead, for instance--manage to capture the horror of a situation while one is laughing--and yet one is both laughing and deeply moved at once. One can also experience both sorrow at the loss of a loved one and gratitude for their existence at the same time. Held at the same time, the resulting experience is different then sorrow OR gratitude.
You spoke of hope and faith in the creative impulse, despite the despicable state of the business. I think there is a complexity that emerges once one goes beyond naive optimism, then to the letdown of "this business sucks" that might evolve into "the business is what it is, with all its disappointments" and yet one can keep faith in the creative impulse, as you suggested…
13.05 A visitor from London was unable to get here. He walked to Paddington from his hotel south of Hyde Park, bought a rail ticket, the train was then posted delayed, then the station was evacuated.
Toyah's sister Nicky, who works in a massive new NHS building on the Euston Road, is not answering her cellphone.
15.35 Toyah called to say she had seen Uncle Bill (RAF POW & now 91) on BBCtv national news in a report on this morning's Event.
Scaffolders. The most foul-mouthed of any construction or building workers I have known in 33 years of building work, have been putting up scaffolding around World HQ in preparation for a new roof. More f-words per sentence than any other occupational group I have ever known.
21.17 We turned on BBCtv news at 21.07 hoping to see Uncle Bill. Then, at 21.08 there he was! The report was on people caught up in London & stuck without public transport. Uncle Bill was in a 'bus queue, holding a placard -Veteran. The reporter mentioned the veteran who was unable to get to his reunion & then put the microphone in front of Uncle Bill, who declared: We've been here before. Nil desperandum! A wonderfully measured, dignified, positive & unflapped response from an old serviceman who actually had been there before. This time, as last time, he had no intention of allowing The Event to diminish him.
