The crucial thing to remember about the music business is that it’s a business. If you happen to be creating great art as well, that’s a bonus, but it has never been compulsory. Only in the music business could someone who hates music as much as Simon Cowell clearly does become so rich and powerful. And for a group like Westlife to have enjoyed a 15-year career of uninterrupted chart success without recording a single song anyone can remember, or even name, is something we have to admire. It was only ever about the money. To be fair to them, they have never pretended otherwise.
At the same time, though, where would we be without the ‘record men’, the entrepreneurs and executives who live and breathe music, eat and drink it? Such men —and they are almost always men — look for the next big thing not just to make money out of it, but for the sheer joy of finding and developing it. They have been the midwives of every significant musical advance of the past century. Potential stars will always need to be discovered, and for that to happen, someone needs to be out there searching for them.
Cowboys and Indies is a history of popular music told through the work of these record men. Artists come and go in these pages, but the people who signed them and nurtured them linger on. We’re talking about John Hammond, who discovered Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen; about Sam Phillips of Sun Records; about George Martin, the fifth Beatle; Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic; Berry Gordy at Motown, Jac Holzman at Elektra, Chris Blackwell at Island and several others. There’s a great Australian phrase for people who are obsessed with cricket to the exclusion of all else: cricket tragics.
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