“How do we build a bridge from today to where we need to be.”
Located in Toronto but leading a team in London, L. A. New York and Nashville, Tim’s group looks at the processes, people and tech needed to support the opportunities that come into the music industry. Tim is also a championship rally driver and was a drummer in the 80’s Brit (and hit) Band T’Pau.
More on Ford Keast Human Resources can be found here:
https://www.fordkeast.com/services/human-resource-consulting/
& for all the podcast and YouTube information visit our website:
https://www.career-resilience.com/
If you enjoyed this podcast or our YouTube video and need support in your own career resilience please do get in contact with Jann at HR@fordkeasthrc.ca
We would love to hear from you! Want to show your support?
Subscribe and leave a review! It means a lot! Thank you
Jann Danyluk,
Career Resilience.
“How do we build a bridge from today to where we need to be.”
Located in Toronto but leading a team in London, L. A. New York and Nashville, Tim’s group looks at the processes, people and tech needed to support the opportunities that come into the music industry. Tim is also a championship rally driver and was a drummer in the 80’s Brit (and hit) Band T’Pau.
More on Ford Keast Human Resources can be found here:
https://www.fordkeast.com/services/human-resource-consulting/
& for all the podcast and YouTube information visit our website:
https://www.career-resilience.com/
If you enjoyed this podcast or our YouTube video and need support in your own career resilience please do get in contact with Jann at HR@fordkeasthrc.ca
We would love to hear from you! Want to show your support?
Subscribe and leave a review! It means a lot! Thank you
Jann Danyluk,
Career Resilience.
| 00:12 | I'm so excited to welcome you to season three of Career Resilience. My name is Jan Danyluk, senior human resources consultant at Ford Keast, a progressive accounting firm in London, Ontario, Canada. Each week I get to talk with people about their career path and their career journey.
| 00:30 | And maybe we can all learn from each other how to be a little bit more resilient in the challenging world of work. Please check out my website, careerresilience.com, where you'll find season one and season two. And now season three. Welcome. Love what you do and do what you love. The best career advice I've received. All the fun. Those opportunities will just organically present themselves, establish those connections and maintain those connections.
| 01:01 | Acceptance just means accepting what is things. We should just put ourselves in a box. At the end of the day, it was always me that I said, I'm not doing good enough right now. I want it to always be movie night on Friday night. My guest today is Tim Burgess. Tim is a Brit who has spent most of his career in and around the music industry. He was part of a popular band called Tipau. Have I pronounced that right, Tim?
| 01:31 | That's correct, John? Yes. Okay. Along the way, Tim was a volunteer magistrate. I wanted to get that in because that gives you gravitas. And Tim worked for Virgin Records. And he is now with Universal Music. So that is such a little nutshell for all we want to unpack Tim. But welcome to career resilience. Thanks, Janet. It's an absolute pleasure to be here and talking to you. That's great.
| 01:59 | So I'd like to start with a fun fact about you, just so we can put you in a little bit of context other than those other things. So what is a fun fact that comes to mind about yourself? Good question. I think one of the other things that I love, and for a brief time in my life, I did something adjacent to this for a living, but one of the things I love is cars. And I love old cars in particular, and I love rallying, racing old cars.
| 02:31 | So amongst all the other crazy things I've done in my life, I've also been an amateur rally driver and won four championships. Actually, in Canada. I won the Ontario Championship twice. And I've won the BC championship twice. So that's an unusual fact about me. Nothing to do with my job. That is a definite sideline. So what kind of cars were you driving? I have my own 90 61 Trip Tr four.
| 03:01 | So a little British sports car. Okay. But I rallied that in Ontario and also took that from Seattle to Alaska on a competitive rally. And out in DC, I've rallied and again up to Alaska as well. I've rallied with an Audi Quatro and 82 Audi Quatro. So are these all stick shift cars? Yes, it must be stick shift. Yes. That's okay.
| 03:31 | And which side were the steering wheels on? Actually, they're both left hand drivers. I bought them both. Well, I bought the Triumph. The Audi doesn't belong to me, but both of them are North American cars. Okay, so you had to adapt. So not only did you have winning ways, you had to adapt to the opposites, or what we call the right side of the car. Yes, that's right. I did, yes. One of the I would say minor challenges, but one of the challenges of being an immigrant to Canada, coming from the UK.
| 04:05 | Yeah, I can't even imagine driving in the UK. So kudos to you for being able to drive in Canada. Although it's so much easier in Canada, right? Yeah, well, the roads are generally bigger. That certainly helps. Well, that's the point. That is the point. So you are from Britain. Can you give me a little bit of an idea of your background? Sure. I was born actually near Manchester, but I only lived there for the first six months of my life.
| 04:33 | Obviously, I don't remember that, but I was brought up just a little outside London, actually, exactly halfway between London and Oxford. My dad was a very good academically. He got a first in his degree and a PhD, and then went on to a very successful career in healthcare business. Ran the health department in the UK for a while for the government and had various chairs and that sort of thing. And he's actually been knighted by the Queen.
| 05:03 | So I come from sort of a dad who was very successful and very business oriented and very academic. My mom was also fairly academic. She studied maths and became a math teacher. And my sister, again, fairly academic. Two degrees in biology, in botany, and she was a biology teacher. So they were all kind of high flying university, highly educated, very good people like that.
| 05:34 | I'm not quite the same when I was at school, although my passion was music, and I guess my two passions were music and playing music, particularly, and painting. I was very good at maths and physics as well as art. At 18, with a family background like mine, going off to do something radical like go to art school or become a musician or something like that, was not really on the cards.
| 06:05 | And so everybody said, oh, art, physics and math, you should go and be an architect. So I thought, okay. Okay, I guess I should go be an architect. Went to university to study architecture and pretty quickly worked out that I didn't actually care very much about buildings or anything to do with architecture work. Okay. Yeah. And so kind of dropped out at that point. So that's kind of my early background and how I ended up not really following a standard course.
| 06:34 | Because you had this artist bent. Yes. It's interesting, isn't it? The jeans that came down to you sort of went over in that very interesting direction. Yes. And it is interesting because I'm not sure that I know where that side of me came from. My dad played piano when he was a kid, but only just like everybody else, to my knowledge.
| 07:03 | There's not actually any other sort of significant creative, artistic part of my family. Certainly two or three generations back, as far as I know. I have no idea where it came from. Jen but you're a drummer. Yeah. So perhaps not really a musician anyway. Right. I was going to say about that, that of course it's a musician, but is there not some sort of mathematical feel about the logic of being on the drums?
| 07:38 | Yes, there is. I think that's very true. It's very mathematical being a drummer. Yeah. So you came together in this perfect package. Yes. Okay. As I said, people thought that I should be an architect with that perfect package, but maybe being a drummer was the same blend, but just with a different outcome. Yeah. Were you at all ever considered a black sheep? Oh, yes, I think so.
| 08:08 | Not in a significant and all rebellious way, but just an unusual way all the way through my career. When I was in music as a musician, I think that my dad and I never really had a conversation about anything other than sport that made any sense to him. Okay. All right. So you know what I'm going to do?
| 08:33 | I'm going to leap forward to your current career and tell me what you do for a living on a day to day basis now. Sure. I have a position at Universal Music global position, where I'm head of and vice president of Process Innovation. And what that really means is I run a team, a global team, some people based in London, some in Los Angeles, New York, and so on that is responsible for trying to work out when new ideas come into the company and when new opportunities in the industry arise.
| 09:04 | Trying to work out, how are we going to deal with that? How are we going to make this work from a day to day point of view? What are the processes we need, what are the people we need to be involved in this? What sort of technology do we need to support it and try to build the capability within the company to go and take the opportunities of these new things coming into the industry? And so that's really what we do. I mostly run a team, which I like.
| 09:35 | I don't do much of the actual work. Typical manager. Right. I don't actually do very much of the work myself. I try to inspire and guide a team to do that kind of thing. But it's all about new and creative stuff coming into the industry. So can you give us an example of what would have been a new and creative thing that came into the industry that you were part of? Sure. Well, back in the early 2000s. I've been in this area for some time now, really?
| 10:05 | It was digital distribution with the whole internet revolution of the early 2000s when this started to attack the yeah, I would say attack the music industry because we didn't really know what we were doing and people were sharing our music for free over the Internet.
| 10:26 | We as an industry and certainly the company I was at the time EMI, we had to work out how on earth we were going to make money out of this and how we were going to take advantage of the opportunities to distribute our own music under our own control digitally over the Internet via itunes and Apple and what is now Spotify and those kinds of things. And so that was a huge challenge.
| 10:51 | We had no idea what we were doing and we just really headed into it thinking, okay, well, if the end result is this, what do we need to be able to do that and then kind of work from where we are today? How do we build a bridge from today to where we need to be? What are those things we need to put in place? Yeah, that was so throwing a bomb into the business model.
| 11:19 | Were those scary times, I think, for the industry they were, yes. For the industry, they weren't. For the company that I was at, they were scary times. But for me personally, it was a fantastic opportunity. It was a really, really interesting time. I love to I love to do new things. I love to try to understand how to do difficult things that are either inefficient or don't exist.
| 11:46 | And so for me, I found it exhilarating, really, because I was in a position where I got to make the change to make it work. So I was kind of not on the scary side of it. I was on the trying to fix the problem side of it, not really being subject to what the change. I was trying to adopt the change and embrace the change. Yes. There's something to be said for that, isn't there?
| 12:13 | For being immersed in what has to happen and maybe sort of getting rid of the noise on the other side and just focusing on what needs to happen and also because you're so interested in it. Yes. I think in any difficult situation or any crisis, I think being involved in it on the front lines is always going to feel more positive than the people who are watching it have a detrimental effect to what they're doing.
| 12:46 | Yeah. So is that the favorite aspect then, of your job? You said leading the team, dealing with innovative issues as they come up. So tell me about what it's like for you and why you're so adapted to leading a team. That's an interesting question. I don't really know what has made me good at this or I like to think I'm good at it.
| 13:16 | I'm saying I'm good at it. The feedback I get seems to indicate that I'm not terrible at it. But I love to do it. I love to lead a team. I really do. I think even when I was a school kid, I love to play team games. I love to play basketball and rugby and played soccer when I was a bit younger. And I love to not only be in a team, I like to be captain or vice captain of the team.
| 13:41 | I want to try to bring the best out of people, to try to encourage them, and to try to think about what our strategy should be to win this particular game, those kinds of things. So I think right from an early when I was preteen, for sure, I enjoyed that aspect of being a part of a team. I never really enjoyed individual spots, I never really enjoyed tennis and athletics and that sort of thing.
| 14:11 | I didn't like being it's just me against everybody else. I wanted to be part of the team. It felt more collegiate, it felt more comfortable for me, it was a kind of family warm kind of thing. So leaping forward several rather too many decades to where we are now, I still love to do that.
| 14:35 | I still love to the thing that I try to think about is if I have good people around me, and I'm blessed with very good people around me, I feel like my job is to provide them with an environment where they can go and do great things. Yes, that's my job as a manager, is just to give them an environment where they can go and do their best stuff. Those are so words to live by as a team lead. So where is your team located, though, Tim?
| 15:08 | Yeah. That's interesting, because I love the team so much. I have three or four people in London, I have four people in New York, I have one in Nashville, and I have four in Los Angeles and I'm in Toronto. So we are a very distributed team internationally and on different continents, and we always have been like that.
| 15:37 | From when I started doing the digital stuff at the early 2000s. I've always managed teams and been part of teams that are global, where people are all over the place, and time zones are a challenge for that. But I would say when COVID came along and we all had to work remotely, it was no change at all for me, because I had always spent quite a lot of my job over the past 20 years working remotely with some key members of my team because we lived in different countries.
| 16:12 | I used to fly a lot more back then. We did undercover. I used to be in Los Angeles once a month, and I used to be in London probably four times a year. But obviously the vast amount of interaction was remote was over zoom, was over phone calls and that kind of thing. So I guess I found a way to be able to connect with my team remotely, even though we're not together.
| 16:43 | And I think that there is no question there are some things that are better done in person, but I do genuinely think that remote working that we've all had to do under COVID has some significant benefits. And one of the major benefits to me is that all distances are now equal. So somebody in a country or another continent in a day to day meeting is no further away than somebody who's in the next building.
| 17:17 | Yes, because this is our interaction. And that's really helped cement some of the way that our team works, because it's really broken down that continental divide or that big geographical divide, because we're all interacting in this way. Before COVID were you on screens like we're on right now? No. Okay. No, that's quite it like any other company and any other team, we would have conference calls from time to time.
| 17:50 | But on the basic day to day talking to my team four times a day or whatever, it was all done by phone. It's an interesting question because while the remote working and the remote connection with my team members and other people that I work with was no change for me, I was suddenly on screen all day, every day, which I was not used to.
| 18:15 | I know I did have a little bit of the same kind of zoom fatigue that everybody else did, because even though remote working was very familiar to me yes. On the screen all day. That was interesting. Was it easier to be on the phone all day or be on the screen all day? I think now I find it much easier to be on screen all day. Okay. Yeah.
| 18:48 | I like being able to see each other. It's not as good as being in person, but it is better than being just on the phone. You do get the facial expressions, you do get a certain amount of body language, and it breaks down the distance and the separation by having this, I mean, thank God we have this technology when we needed it. Really. So true. 1015 years ago. God only knows how companies would have survived.
| 19:14 | I don't know what would have happened. And we get to see such interesting backgrounds. Yes, that's right. I'm looking at your background right now, and what is behind you on the wall there that looks like a record? Well, it is. From my previous existence as a drummer.
| 19:39 | It's a four times platinum album award for our first album that sold, I think, 1.2 million copies in the UK, which was a lot in the UK. And it's a little bit of a sort of nod to that part of me and that part. So let's talk about that part of you, because that's quite fascinating to all of us, because we're all knowledgeable from our own angles about the business that you were in.
| 20:14 | So is it safe to say that you were a drummer in a rock and roll band? Yes, that's pretty much exactly what I want. Yeah. You know what? To be honest, Him, I've just always wanted to say that sentence. Okay. It's not quite as exciting as everyone thinks it is, but you know what? It's pretty darn good, actually. It's a pretty darn good way to earn a living, I will tell you. Yeah. So let me ask you some questions about that.
| 20:42 | So first of all, which is sort of an odd question, but are you an intense person or are you an easygoing person? That's a great question. I think I'm a little of both, actually. I think I am more easygoing now than I used to be, partly because I'm a lot older, and I realized that you can't necessarily change the world quite as much as you might like to.
| 21:09 | So you have to be a little bit more comfortable with things not being how you would wish them to be. Thank God some people are not like that. Some people are warriors for the right thing their entire life, and I applaud them for that. We're not all built that way. So I think I was pretty intense as a young person, particularly, and I would say this about anybody who's seriously looking at a career in the arts.
| 21:43 | They say, if you can do something else, you should do something else. And while I don't fully subscribe to that, because I certainly could have done other things, I think you have to have such a passion for it because it's so hard. It's so hard to be successful. You've got to be absolutely passionate. In terms of your question, how intense am I? Intense person. About my passions. I really am. About drumming.
| 22:10 | I was absolutely obsessive about it. Okay, so when you started to get into this thought process, you said something along the lines of, I'm going to dedicate a period of time to this. How helpful was thinking of it that way? I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't thought of it that way. Okay. And I'll tell you how I got into it. And really it was the influence of somebody else.
| 22:41 | I've been to university, as we talked about, and I'd done a few other relatively uninteresting jobs. I mean, there were interesting bits in them, but they weren't going anywhere in particular, and I'd stopped doing one of those, and I was kind of thinking, Where am I going? What am I going to do? And a friend of mine said to me, what do you really want to do? And I said, I want to be a drummer. Almost dismissively, I said, I want to be a drummer. Because I thought, well, that's a ridiculous notion, you know, I've got to go get a job.
| 23:11 | I've got to think about building a career. I've got to do all those things. And this friend of mine said to me, well, then why don't you try that? He said, if you imagine yourself at 60, and I'm now 61, if you imagine yourself at 60, looking back on your life, what do you want to do? Do you want to say, I gave it a shot and failed or succeeded or I never gave it a shot? And I thought, that's exactly right, that's exactly right.
| 23:40 | I'd rather fail and say I tried than regretting having not given it a shot. And I think trying to be a professional musician is a ridiculous idea. There's so much competition, it's 90% luck, but it was the right thing for me to do and to say I said I'll give myself two years, and it actually took three years, but after two years, I thought, well, I'm not quitting now because I'm getting closer.
| 24:10 | Yes. But it was very important to me to kind of give myself a specific goal, I'm going to go give it a shot. I'm going to do absolutely everything I can possibly do to make this work, and if it doesn't work, okay, I'll move on. Was there a series of rejections in there as you went along that first year and so on? And if so, how heartrending are those?
| 24:37 | There's almost nothing but rejection from trying to be successful because there are so many bands and so many musicians all trying to get into this tiny little slot of success that it's almost all rejection. Now, when I say that I wasn't rejected as a player, very often there are many, you know, I went to many auditions and played in lots of bands, and most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time, people said, yes, we'd like you to come and join, or come and play on this.
| 25:09 | So from a personal, tiny little goal perspective, there was very little rejection, actually, but the big rejections, there's lots of those and they're much bigger. But I think that I was either ridiculously naive or stupid or very resilient in the sense that I thought, okay, we've been rejected, I don't care. There'll be another opportunity, keep going. There'll be another opportunity. Don't quit now, keep going.
| 25:39 | You've set yourself this target, you've given yourself this parameter of working. So to get knocked back, keep going, because this is your target, not this bit, right? If I get rejected in the first six months, okay, I said two years, let's keep going. Yes. I wonder how much the two year parameter were comforting to you. I think so, because I think that's a good question.
| 26:07 | I haven't really thought about it that way, but I do think that it allows you to allowed me I can't speak for others, but it allowed me to say I'm not done yet, just because I haven't been successful. Yes. I'm not done yet, because I had my own end point, which was not dictated by other people saying, no, you're not good enough.
| 26:37 | Go away. Now, this is a question. How important is it in what you were striving to do? And even when you became part of tapa, which we'll get into a little bit, how important was it for you to be the full package of not only a drummer, but a good looking guy? I don't know. That's interesting. I don't know.
| 27:06 | Really, all I wanted to be was a drummer. I didn't want to be a pop star. I didn't want to be famous. I didn't care about any of those things. I just wanted to be a drummer. I wanted to earn a living being a drummer. Okay? So, yeah, I don't think any of those things matter to me because it matters to me as being a drummer. I'm a fortunate person, right?
| 27:37 | I'm a middle class white guy, right? So I tick all the opportunity boxes. I don't come from a difficult background. I don't come from an ethnic minority. I'm not female. I'm not gay. I don't have any of the things that certainly back then may have been difficult to get, would have been potential things to make it harder. And somewhere along that path, you are also able to eat.
| 28:07 | You were able to put food on the table while you were looking to achieve this path. Yeah, that's right. I mean, what I did was I was trying to be a full time musician. But if you're a full time musician, it basically means you're out of work and you're not earning any money at all most of the time. That's true for most people. Most actors, everyone says this, so you always go off and do something else. And what I would do was, when I really ran out of money, I would go to an agency near me and say, what temporary work have you got?
| 28:41 | And I did a variety of things. I drove a truck, I picked up garbage, I painted warehouses. I did all sorts of things like that, because I knew that if I did that for three or four weeks, I could top up my bank account, and then I could do nothing all day but played runs for another maybe two or three months. If I was frugal, I could work for a little bit, then I could play music for a long time. Then I could work for a little bit and play music for a long time.
| 29:08 | So I was quite happy doing any job that would pay the bills, and I would find something that was interesting about the job. Although picking up garbage wasn't the one I would go back to, I will tell you that. Yes, we have to honor those people. That is for sure. That is a tough job. Yes, it is.
| 29:28 | Tell me about the TPO coming together and going up in the world yeah, we came together, I guess, from a lot of people we knew, really. I joined the band early on. The band was really a duo, a songwriting duo, and I joined them very early on because we shared a manager.
| 29:57 | I was in another band that had the same manager that they did okay. My band was another one that I've been in that I thought we were very good, but we're not quite there, we're not quite going to make it. We've had several rejections of people saying, well, the songs aren't quite that good, or the singer isn't that great, although he was great, so it wasn't his fault. But we obviously weren't going to get across the line and earn a living doing this. So the manager said, I've got this other duo and I think they're fantastic.
| 30:27 | You should come and play drums for them. So I did. I met them and I played on one of their recordings and we just clicked and we worked really well together. And then we kind of pulled in other people from other places that we knew. Most were not kind of Cold auditions. Our guitarist, eventual guitarist, was a cold audition and we were very fortunate because he's a great player, but they were mostly people we knew through some other band or something like that.
| 30:55 | So we came together and had, as usual, sent out demo tapes. And they were tapes back then, cassette tapes out to all the record companies. And most of them said no. And one company said, well, we'd like to hear you. Are you playing any live shows? We said, Actually, no, because we haven't got a keyboard player yet. So they said, well, how about a rehearsal room? And so we went to the rehearsal room.
| 31:21 | They came along and listened to three or four songs and said, yeah, we'll sign you, we'll sign you and we'll put you on a retainer and go and record your first album. We'll send you into a studio with a famous producer in a big studio in America. And it was very exciting. It was very exciting and it came along and just blossomed. But as most people will tell you, at that stage, all you've really done is you've got in through the front door.
| 31:51 | You have no career, you have no path, you have no following. All you've got is the opportunity now to actually do something. I won't go into it all right now. But it took a long time to be successful. We recorded the album, we put out singles, did all the things that every band does and they got nowhere, didn't get much radio play, nothing really happened.
| 32:20 | And eventually one of our singles got picked up in the States, in America, and we had success in America first, and then because it was in America, it got picked up in the UK. And then we went on to big success on our first album and kind. Of declined from that point on. So you found some success in the US and you said, then it was picked up in the UK. Maybe the other way around. Weren't you a UK band? We were a UK band.
| 32:50 | We were just fortunate, I think, that we did get picked up in the US. We got picked up by Pepe Jeans ad and they put our song as the backing track to the music track to the Pepe Jeans ad. And that helped us have success in America. And then, because this is how the UK is, basically, they go, Hang on, they're us, they're British. What's going on? How can the Americans know all about them and we don't?
| 33:19 | So they kind of chased us down and we kind of had success in the UK on the back of being a British band who were big in the States for a brief time. So your bigger success, though, was in the UK? Yes, ultimately it was. It's kind of funny in the UK to power, even now. I mean, not me, but the band is massively well known, famous band. Everybody has heard of them.
| 33:49 | Everybody knows several of the songs in the US. We're a one hit one day. Isn't that interesting? An absolute one hit one day. It's hilarious. Yeah. Not even the same song. So our song, Heart And Soul, is the one hit in the States. Whereas it wasn't a hit, it was number four in the UK. But our subsequent single, China In Your Hand, was number one for five weeks. And so in the UK, we're known, really for a different song than we are in the States.
| 34:19 | What a crazy world I know so, as I listened to you speak, obviously, you must have been on tour, you must have been looking out at crowds. How typically bigger crowd would you have been looking out at? Well, waxes and wanes during your career? We started off playing, obviously, small places and so on.
| 34:45 | And even when we had our first success in the charts, we were playing theaters and mostly fairly small theaters, two 30, that sort of thing. But as our career progressed, we moved on to playing Ukize arenas and that sort of thing. So we're playing to 10120 people, something like that, those kinds of things. Our big tour in 1988 was through that kind of thing.
| 35:12 | So it's ten to 15,000, I would say, most nights. How did it feel to look out onto that kind of a group, a big crowd? It felt absolutely phenomenal. Genuinely, it really did. It was such a privilege to do that. It was unbelievable to begin with. The first time I played a big place like that, we were the opening act for Brian Adams in London.
| 35:44 | And I remember sitting on stage, seeing you have the exit signs all round an arena, and I remember looking up and seeing these exit signs, what seemed to be 5 miles away at the back of the arena and thinking, there are people. I was going to say there are people all the way back there. They probably weren't they probably in the bar because we were only in the opening act, but theoretically, there were people all the way up there, right, miles away, and this place could have been full. So it really is a phenomenal thing.
| 36:13 | It's such an honor and a privilege to play to people like that. And the noise that they make when you come on stage or when you play one of the big songs, the noise they make is amazing. It's amazing. But I would also say, I mean, I think I feel this more looking back, because when you're doing something, it seems almost normal, because I'm normal to me.
| 36:41 | I'm the most normal person in the world to me, so anything that I do feels normal to me. Every now and then you do something and this is a moment, I shouldn't remember this, but most of the time it's just normal. And it was just my job. It was an unusual job, but it was just my job. So it was kind of when it was a massive privilege, it was also normal. I was doing it every day.
| 37:07 | I was going on TV and I was doing these things and playing in front of these huge crowds of people, which was fantastic, but it was also seemed not as amazing as it does from the outside when I'd seen other bands play. Yeah, well, I think the thing with you is, you know yourself, you know your foibles and that you're human and everything it took to get to that moment. Right.
| 37:35 | Whereas we on the outside just, oh, my gosh, look at him, look at him, he's amazing. Yeah. I certainly had a certain level of I always have had a certain level of imposter syndrome, and I definitely did then some days it felt very odd that I had that opportunity. Did you sign autographs? Oh, yeah. And how did that feel?
| 38:05 | That's a good question, because that didn't feel normal. That felt unusual. Even though we did it a lot, it always felt slightly unusual that people would want me to sign a picture or sign a piece of paper or sign them on leg or something like that.
| 38:26 | That was unusual again, because I was never interested in being famous. That was not why I wanted to be in. I just wanted to play drums for a living. Yes. So kind of being in a famous band was a very unusual thing. But the great thing was I was the drummer and so I never got recognized in the street, so I wasn't famous.
| 38:49 | The band I was in was famous and I think that made signing autographs a little bit odd, because I didn't feel like I was famous, I was just a guy. So let's just morph into talk a little bit about groupies and this is what I want to say. I grew up with brothers who were always in bands, and I'm from Nova Scotia.
| 39:15 | In Nova Scotia, we have very old place, and I'm just embarrassed to say this, but I think I will for you and for our listeners. My brothers were in a band called the Runex Stones. Okay? Because in Nova Scotia, we have something called the Runic Stone, which had scribe on it from Viking days or so on.
| 39:42 | So they went up and down Nova Scotia and they had a hearse, and that's where all their stuff was. And, you know, they would bring the strangest people home. And of course, I was the young one in the family, so I got to observe all this. But even they have this dynamic of groupies, and I don't even know if they're still called that or if that's even a polite phrase, but it certainly puts across the point.
| 40:11 | What was that like for someone who wanted to be a drummer? Because I think it might be different for someone who wants to be famous. Well, the first thing to say is we didn't have very many, or even, as I recall, any. I think it's partly that we had a female singer in the band, so I think that helps. But, yeah, we didn't seem to attract that at all.
| 40:36 | I don't honestly remember ever being I mean, maybe I was foolish and just missed the signs, but I don't recall ever having somebody who was clearly interested in that side of me. Should I say I watched a documentary about the Eagles once. I don't know if you've seen it, but it was pretty candid. And I found it difficult to watch because it felt very sad to me about the fans and the way they would react.
| 41:10 | But perhaps that's because that was overthetop mega band. And I think that you were saying that you were very popular in a niche for a period of time. But I did want to talk, actually, just briefly, about what it was like to have a female lead singer in the band, how that would change the dynamic, in your opinion.
| 41:34 | Well, I think one of the obvious things is to not be a boys club quite in the same way that some of the other bands that we have in history motley Crew and those kinds of things, those sorts of stories that you hear about those people, which apparently are all true, so I understand from people who work with them. But I think having a female thing, we also had a female road manager to a manager who organized everything on their own.
| 42:02 | So I think that dynamic, while there was clearly this was years and years before me, too, and even feminism was a bit different then than it is now. It's much more true to say we assume and strive for equality today than we did back then in real terms. But I think that dynamic really helped.
| 42:29 | It stopped us being too much of an old boys club and old boys together and all that sort of locker room talk and all that kind of thing. I'm sure that there was plenty of what you previously is called locker room talk, but we didn't really get into that kind of what you could think of as a toxic group of males altogether getting a little out of hand. We didn't really do that. I think the dynamic of Carol, the singer and Jenny, our tour manager, probably really did help that.
| 42:58 | Yeah. So do you think that Carol Decker had quite a different experience in being that person that's out front? Absolutely. Yeah. She did massively. She was famous, she was instantly recognizable with massive red hair, for a start, but she certainly was famous and she had a very different experience from us and also just from a day to day point of view of she had to take much more care of her health than the rest of us did.
| 43:34 | We all drank far too much beer and stayed up far too late and smoke far too many cigarettes. We were not a druggie band, so we didn't do any of that stuff, but we drank too much and we stayed up too late. And Carol couldn't because she had to sing and so she would be first to bed and not drink as much as the rest of us and always feel like she was missing out and always complain about not being able to party like the rest of us. But I think her experience, her experience at the time and subsequently has been very different from mine.
| 44:04 | As I said, I was literally recognized twice, once in a supermarket in the checkout queue, which was massively embarrassing because nobody had any clue who I was except for the young woman who was doing the checkout. So she was beside herself that I was in there buying my frozen peas or whatever, and everyone else is going, who is he? I don't recognize him. So that was hugely embarrassing. But outside of that, I could do anything.
| 44:35 | I was just a regular guy when I wasn't doing my job and Carol was not. I mean, so much so that there were times when we would go out shopping if we were on tour and had to go do something, and maybe she'd go out with me and somebody else, and we'd pretend to be her security because they recognized her and didn't recognize us. So we'd pretend to be security and just kind of go out. You need to space and that sort of thing.
| 45:03 | So, yeah, I think whether that's there's no doubt there would be an angle on that, that is part of her being a woman, but mostly it's part of her being a lead singer. She was the lead singer and we were the guys in the background. Yeah, I think there is an interesting dynamic between the audience and the lead singer. The singer. And this is from my incredible background, watching my brothers.
| 45:33 | Okay, so how do you parallel how do you parallel band life and real life? What are the lessons from one to the other? Yes, I've never been asked that before, so I'm going to have to think about that. I think that the teamwork aspect is very important to me.
| 46:02 | When the band broke up, I had a choice. I could have stayed in music as a performer, as a musician, and there were opportunities, particularly opportunities to be a session player, a drummer for hire, and I just never wanted to do that. I didn't like the idea of turning up, doing my thing and leaving, because to me, it was always all about the teamwork, of building something and working together to create something.
| 46:32 | So I think the teamwork is just a theme that matters to me and has always been important to me all the way through. But I think that what else do I think? I think that always trying to be your best is really important to me. And I think where there's a contrast, but there's a little bit in there that is the same, is that people say you should follow your passions, and I 100% agree with that.
| 47:04 | The problem for me was, by the time I was in my early 30s, my passion was behind me, right? Because I'd stopped my passion was being a drama. That was it. That's all I wanted to do. And I was now no longer a drummer, so my real, genuine passion was behind me. So the notion of you should always follow your passion well, I can't follow my passion because I just stopped my passion. That doesn't work for me anymore.
| 47:34 | But I think that what I've tried to do in every job I've had, even picking up garbage and driving trucks when I was trying to do it, just to pay the bills, is to find in whatever it is you're doing, find the bit that excites you, find the bit that you enjoy, and follow that bit. Because every job, including being a drummer in a famous band, every job has its bad days and its downsides and it's boring bits and it's things you'd much rather not have to do.
| 48:07 | But every job I've ever done has bits that have interested me and that I've enjoyed and that I can really get passionate about and I really get my teeth into every single job I've ever done. I find that peace. You can't always do the things that you're really passionate about. You can't always get the job in the industry or in the company or in the role that you wish you could have.
| 48:35 | But the key for me has always been to find the bit in there that feels like that. What's the bit in there that really excites me. What's the bit there that makes me want to come to work. What's the bit? That I can go home and go, that was a good day, because that happened. I did this thing. Well, that's great. Yeah, that's so true. Are you ever surprised by your career?
| 49:00 | If you've had quite the career and you continue to have quite the career, do you ever just say to yourself, tim, wow, this has been continues to be a really interesting career? I do, but only because I have it pointed out to me, genuinely, genuinely, this is true, because again, back to what I was saying before, it feels completely normal to me. I've run my career, really, by trying to say yes to opportunities.
| 49:34 | So if I see an opportunity that looks interesting, I try to follow it and try to try to take advantage of it, try to get into that role. Like being a magistrate. That was something that somebody said to me completely left field. And I thought, that's an interesting idea. That's a great deal, I'd love to do that. And I had no idea how to do that. And I applied and followed it through and kept going.
| 49:57 | And I've done that with a number of other jobs, the kind of more ordinary jobs within the industry that I've done over the last 25 years, that if there's an opportunity or something, looks like somebody goes, oh, Tim might be the person for this, say yes. Say yes to those opportunities. Keep following them. So my career progression has been a series of little decisions or little opportunities and saying yes to things, and it kind of has bumbled along like it is.
| 50:31 | And it has always felt completely normal to me because that's what it's me, therefore it's normal. But, yeah, I mean, a couple of people, my partner again, who's far, far smarter than me and far more perceptive than I am, and she said to me, you know, you really have had a series of interesting lives in this one life that you've had. You've been in a band, you've been a magistrate, you've rallied cars, you've worked as an executive in the music industry, you've lived in two different countries and two different continents, all of these kinds of things.
| 51:05 | And when it's pointed out to me, I kind of go, actually, yeah, it is kind of interesting. It is. From this side, it feels a little bit of a mess, a little bit of a kind of like, I did this weird thing for a while, and now I did this weird thing for a while, and now I do this thing, which is weird. It's not like that to me, but it's interesting. It's not conventional.
| 51:36 | And coming from my family, who were not dull people, very interesting people, super bright people, but much more conventional, more linear and more kind of more sensible, more understandable. It's definitely been a bit weird from that angle, but, you know, there's not much of it that I would go back and do differently, to be honest.
| 52:05 | Well, and you know what? There's no question that a lot of paddling under the surface at the same time. And we're all aware of how we paddle under the surface and how sometimes we do have that imposter syndrome, and sometimes it's just 1ft in front of the other, and interesting things happen, or sometimes we go backwards, but that's living a life. I want to ask you my three questions very quickly.
| 52:36 | What has been the best career advice you have received? Honestly, I can't remember ever getting any career advice. So maybe that's because I wasn't listening or I wasn't asking for it. I don't know. I got some career advice when I was at school, just before I left school, where everybody knew I was passionate about music, and my homeroom teacher, as we would call them here, who was also my physics teacher, said to me, dismissively once, you'll never make it in the music industry.
| 53:11 | Don't be ridiculous. Right. So that's about the worst career advice I've ever had in my life, because that was really deflating at the time, and I think that helped push me into things that I shouldn't have been doing. But I think if I think about things that have mattered to me from a career idea point of view, when I finally got to talk to my dad about something that he understood when I had a real job as he would call it when I first moved into the business side of the music industry.
| 53:45 | And I talked to him about his career, and he said, I've just done a whole load of things that I really enjoyed, and I've really been very fortunate to do things that I've enjoyed and to try to choose things that I thought I would enjoy. And while it wasn't direct career advice, I didn't say, dad, what should I do? How do I go on from here now that I've been a drummer and I'm not anymore? What do I do? It wasn't that kind of a conversation.
| 54:13 | But I think him telling me about his own experience stuck with me for a long time. That kind of try to do things you enjoy, trying to find the enjoyment and the job. Yeah, excellent. So the second question is, is there a book, a podcast or something that you streamed on wherever, a streaming service that you just found influenced you, helped you move forward, or you just found interesting and entertaining?
| 54:43 | I think the one that sticks out to me again, I was thinking about the question and the one that sticks out to me, because I thought, do I read books about business? Do I read books about career? Do I listen to things like that? And I mostly don't. But there's a great book that I read a few years ago by Lucy Kellaway, who is a columnist in the Financial Times, great business columnist in the Financial Times, who is also now become a teacher and does a whole bunch of other things.
| 55:12 | But she wrote this hilarious novel called Who Moved My BlackBerry? And it's written in the first person. Actually, it's not written in the first person. It's written as a series of emails from this executive in a big company. It's a marketing executive, and it's the most hilarious book because he's such an ass. He's such an ass. He's so pompous.
| 55:41 | He talks in ridiculous management speak. I've got to be 10% better than my best this week. What does that mean? So it's a hilarious book, and I think as I came out in the mid two thousand s, I think, and I was sort of becoming a vice president at that time, at that sort of level in the company. And I loved it because it's just all the things you should never do.
| 56:11 | It's a wonderful book about all the things you should never do. And of course, I think I've never done any of them, which is probably not true at all, right? I'm sure we all have a bit of that in it, but it was a great thing to sort of say, whatever you do, don't do that. Don't be that guy. What a great book. It's a great book. Who moved my BlackBerry? It's a fantastic book. I recommend it. Very funny. Take a look for that. And finally, what are you most proud about related to your career?
| 56:41 | Can you answer that question? I can. I think I can. And it's really about the feedback I've had from people who worked on my team. I've had people when I was at EMI, when we were building, how we were going to do this in a digital world, and nobody knew what they were doing.
| 57:05 | I had a great team of people, really talented, great, positive people around me, and we just kind of forged forwards literally every day, making decisions on, well, we don't know how to do this. What do we think? We'll probably do that. Let's make that decision and go in that direction. We were doing that every day for about five years, and it was wonderful and worked with great people. And some years later, after we'd stopped doing that and we'd all moved off to other things, we'd still go out for dinner whenever we're in the same city, which is something I'm proud of, first of all, because we're all friends, and I like that some distance.
| 57:42 | Well, it's now well over ten years, and we're still all friends. But the nicest thing was, one of the people who worked for me had gone on to a vice president position in another company. And he was just talking about what they were going through as we were sitting around having dinner. And he was talking about what they were going through, and he talked about what he was doing with his team and how he was getting his team through this particular transition in the company. And he turned around and said, I learned all that from you. And that was huge.
| 58:13 | That was such a thing for me, to have somebody who I could hear was doing a great job and turn around and say, that was you. Yes. That was massive for me. I'm more proud of that than anything else, I think. Oh, that's lovely. Okay, I think that is everything. Is there anything that you wanted to add before we wrapped up Tim?
| 58:38 | No, I think other than this has been thoughtprovoking, very
thoughtprovoking for me, because I don't think of a career like, I don't I've never thought of me having a career. So it's kind of interesting to have to look at parts of it like that. So it's been great. It's been a real joy. Jan, it's been fantastic. It's great fun. You're delightful to talk to. So thank you very much ever so much for asking me.
| 59:08 | To our viewers and listeners, I hope that you find us delightful to listen to. This has been a great conversation with Tim. I've enjoyed every minute of it. I'm going to listen to it, unpack some of it, again, because it was so fascinating. It's so many tips and things for us to think about. So just been a great conversation. If you're a podcast listener, find us wherever you get your podcast. We're also on YouTube if you want to take a look at Tim's gold record, platinum record or gold record.
| 59:40 | Yeah, that was four times platinum. Four times platinum record behind him on the wall. Until we meet again, thank you so much. Thanks, Jen.