Fierce Panda founder and former NME journalist Simon Williams has spoken to NME about his book, Pandamonium! How Not To Run A Record Company, missing out on signing Coldplay and Keane, and playing football with a pre-fame Green Day.
Pandamonium! is released in paperback this week (August 17) following a hardback release last year and shares some of Williams’ stories from a life in the music industry.
In the early ’90s, Williams launched his legendary indie label from the NME office, going on to release singles by the likes of Coldplay, Supergrass, Death Cab For Cutie, Ash, Keane, The Maccabees and many more. “No one sets up a record company for fame and fortune,” he told NME. “We weren’t thinking, but subconsciously looking back on it, that’s what all my favourite bands did. They started off on some tiny label.
“Whether it be Joy Division, New Order, Orange Juice, Farmers Boys, Aztec Camera, through to the Wild Swans, The Teardrop Explodes, you name them – virtually every single one of those bands started off on a Factory or a Zoo or a Fierce Panda or whatever. I just thought that’s what bands did, and that’s what labels did.”
Released in paperback this week, Pandamonium!… follows Williams’ thirty years of heroic endeavours at the cutting-edge of underground music: playing five-a-side with Green Day, plucking household names aplenty from Camden bog-holes, venturing into radio and the major label scrum and gradually building one of the most highly respected businesses in – unashamedly – indie rock, putting out proper albums and everything.
Yet it’s shot through with intense trauma, as Williams details an extended suicide attempt around New Year 2019 and his uphill recovery from psychologically becoming – to borrow his famous phrase – a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs. He spoke to NME about the decision to write a book, running Fierce Panda, putting on a young Arctic Monkeys at a club night and more.
Why write a book?
“It was during COVID, and it was all timed beautifully. We call it the Grand Malarkey, the episode on New Year’s Eve Eve of 2019 because it makes it sound a bit more socially acceptable, and then we were just slightly ahead of the curve. I was in hospital for the first two weeks of January recovering, thankfully, at the Royal Free, and then I was sent home. And then the conversation was ‘We don’t know when you’re going to be going to gigs again, or if we ever should, and obviously, we’re going to put Fierce Panda into hibernation and shut down the office’. I was in a medically induced haze at this point.
“These things didn’t really register, but then, of course, within a month, nobody was going to an office. Nobody was going to gigs. Nobody was doing anything. Once again, we’d set the agenda. I’d been trying to finish off a book on Johnny Moped, and then I did a tiny little diary about my dad for the psychotherapist, and off we went. Fortuitously, I spotted that Miki from Lush was doing her book and I was thinking, ‘Well, some publisher’s got good taste’. And then I found out about Nine Eight books and became part of this new wave of new wave of new wave of publishing with all these people that have suddenly, at the same time, all decided that there’s gold in those music journalist stories. If you want to kill yourself, then my timing was absolutely brilliant.”
Do you think it was also time to celebrate the panda legend?
“I think that might come next year because we turn 30. This is more like a genuine celebration of indie. It was just my diary; it gets it out of the system, catharsis, whatever fucking phrase you want to use.”
Your retelling of the Grand Malarkey is harrowing stuff – was it difficult to publish?
“You’ve got to be as truthful as possible, although about a week before it came out, I thought, ‘Oh, holy shit, what have I just done here?’ Ian Winwood’s book [Bodies] is especially appropriate because it’s basically a Kerrang! version of mine. We even ended up on the same hospital ward – it must be like, ‘Are you a music journalist? Ah yes, seventh floor, turn left, bed four’. He’s describing doing exactly the same thing as me. So it gave me great comfort to know that I wasn’t the only lunatic out there exposing far too much of myself.”
As one of the cheerier figures in NME history, you’re diagnosed in the book as a “happy depressive”…
“I didn’t know these things existed. There’s nothing in there that a million people don’t experience every day. There’s nothing unique. You don’t want to be a burden. Don’t want to be a moaner. You’ve still got a job to do. You’ve got to enthuse all the bands on the label. Every time you go to a gig, you’re performing, aren’t you? My whole point was if it stops one person from doing what I did, then I’ve done a good thing.”
What was it like playing football with a pre-fame Green Day?
“I lived in a nursing home – literally a house full of nurses. Essentially bedsit-land. There were two Americans in there, and they had these American touring bands coming over. They had a big, shitty old van, and they’d drive the bands around Europe. You’d have Christ On A Crutch, and we had Green Day and various other names, and they’re all terribly, terribly, terribly smelly, crusty people but incredibly polite.
“They would arrive, and they do some terribly scuzzy gigs, and then they’d fuck off to Europe for six weeks and then come back, even tattier and scruffier with even more tattoos and scabies and god knows what else. It was just the norm, and it just so happened with Green Day, we ended up taking them to Epping Forest and playing football with them. People say, ‘Have you got footage of it’ and you say, Well, last week we were doing five-aside with Christ On A Crutch. You can’t film everything!’ They were absolute charmers, real sweethearts.”
Was it financially ruinous during those early one-off singles?
“No, because we weren’t giving people £10,000 to give us one song. The Coldplay EP [‘Brothers & Sisters’] cost us £450. We’d got enough of a fan base, 7” and CD… I suppose if I sat down and looked at it now, I’d go, ‘Jesus, what the fuck were we doing?’ But I look back more on the noughties when we did stuff like Shit Disco. I’m looking through the accounts, and there’s £120,000 fucking pounds. How the fuck did we manage that?
“We’ve had moments of excruciating agony and pain and misery, but we’ve never ever gone full throttle and had that ‘if this doesn’t work, we’re completely fucked’. Actually, no, we’ve had five of those but never on a massive scale. Not the Happy Mondays recording in the Caribbean moment…We never had the money or the compulsion to suddenly think we can just womble in there and sign bands up for five albums or anything. It wasn’t the point. It was just a little hobby more than anything else.”
There was the romance of being in at the beginning?
“Nowadays that it’s all down to stats. I’ve spoken to some good A&R people, they’ve been moving from an indie to a major, and they’re going, ‘It’s marvellous to be an indie, but there’s only three of us. Now I’m going to a major, there’ll be loads of us, we’re all going to be out night after night going to see bands’. And then a month later, you bump into them and they’re like, ‘I just spend all day staring at computer screens like scout bots’. Maybe that’s why you end up now where it’s a very passive live environment where the blander you are, you can still get away with it. Whereas the way I worked is if you’re terribly bland at the Dublin Castle, you wouldn’t get a record deal. Now it’s different. The tastemakers aren’t journalists and DJs – there was a terrible phase where basically the tastemakers were lawyers.”
What are your fondest memories from Fierce Panda’s many, many club nights?
“Still one of my favourite memories is when Arctic Monkeys played for us at the Dublin Castle. I was doing the lights. It was weird because you had the MySpace kids that had heard about them at the front, and you had the music industry. Like the Peruvian football shirt, there was a perfect slash from the door to the bar, which I just wombled up and down the entire gig. And we almost signed Charlie Busted when Fightstar were happening. We put Fightstar on at the Dublin Castle, and he had his two brothers supporting. We’re literally in Simpsons land. I walked in, and there was no one in the bar; literally everyone was in the back room. Yeah, but I’m sure that you get 200 people in there.”
The book details how you narrowly missed out on signing Coldplay and Keane. How haunted were you by those near misses?
“Coldplay I was never bothered by because they took us to the pub in Walthamstow and said, ‘Look, we’re gonna sign to Parlophone’ and in 1999, I’d have signed to Parlophone. They were absolutely sensational. Keane was a lot more painful because we were fucked over by Island. When we first sat down with Universal/Island, I’m there with a couple of dudes who run the entire business, and they’re saying, ‘Right, so what we want you to do is find us the new Coldplay’. And obviously, we all have a good old laugh. And then six months later, I give them Keane.
“We do the first single by Keane, which does pretty well, and then we do the second single by Keane, and it gets on the Radio One A list, and then we just ended up getting fucked over. That hurt for about eight years. That was the only thing that infuriated me because I did feel robbed. And I did think, ‘For once in my life, I did a really good job, and you fucked me because I did a really good job’. That was 2003, so three years later, bang, I’m 41 years old, bang, we get to 41 in the charts with Art Brut, bang, streaming occurs – everything just happened so fast.”
Streaming hammered alternative music back underground – what effect did it have on indie labels?
“We could fairly routinely get in the top 75, certainly the top 200. Coldplay went in at 98 or something, Ultrasound when in the top 100, Apartment went Top 75. Then with Art Brut when he got to 41, we said, ‘OK, we’ve learned how to do this’. We were two sales away from a Top 40 hit. And then downloads impacted, and within six months, 100 to 200 was stuck week after week. The Killers, Snow Patrol, Coldplay. Now, I haven’t seen the numbers 100 to 200 for some time, but I suspect it might involve a lot of Bruno Mars.
“With streaming, the label is completely irrelevant. You can have your own playlist, but at least for the charts, it says it’s on this label – Spotify doesn’t give a fuck. Our strength has always been radio, whether it’s Jack Saunders or Amazing or John Kennedy or Huw Stephens or Lammo or Janice Long as was or John Peel as was. That’s always been our thing, and hearing our song on the radio, there’s nothing better. It’s the greatest moment of all time. But Spotify resent it. If you’ve got too much radio, then Spotify just pulls back – ‘Fuck off then, we didn’t discover it’.”
How do labels like Fierce Panda adapt?
“There’s no massive marketing meetings about it. You’re constantly just going with the flow. Most of the time, it’s when we just go, ‘No, that press thing doesn’t work, that radio thing doesn’t work, so fuck that’. It’s getting so hard; it really, really, really, really, really, really is.”
Yet we appear to be in a boom time for indie labels, with Speedy Wunderground and so forth.
“As much as I was denigrating the lack of tastemakers earlier on, you’ve got Speedy Wunderground, Nice Swan, you have got that generation of super-super-hot-cool new labels who frankly piss on Fierce Panda. Although, obviously, a lot of the time, we’re going after the same bands. Permanent Creeps is another one. Lloyd at Permanent Creeps is a modern A&R marvel. But even then, the grass is always greener because it’s made of astroturf.”
You’ve signed Ash now, in association with So Recordings – is the future looking bright for the Panda?
“One doesn’t want to go about turning into some cosmic rebirth. Since 2019, certainly, you create your own luck. When you’re really, really down and miserable, nothing ever happens because you can’t see the good things in anything. When you’re upbeat, and you’ve got the momentum… I thought if we signed to So Recordings with the Manatees and with Neon Waltz, that’s really good. That’s really good, solid stuff. But then, to actually sign with Ash, straight away that changes everything. I don’t know where it goes from here…Three years ago, we were literally going into hibernation, it was all over. And now we’ve gone from near ashes to ashes to being on the cusp of getting Ash literally into the charts. The book has been the saviour. All it takes is 80,000 words to save your life.”
Which Fierce Panda song does everyone need to hear?
“Apartment, anything by Apartment. “Everyone Says I’m Paranoid’. Of all the bands, they’re the one – dressed in black, U2 meets Interpol, beautifully constructed.”
Simon Williams’ Pandamonium! How Not To Run A Record Company is published in paperback on August 17 via Nine Eight Books