The Art of Longevity Season 12, Episode 86: Guilty Pleasures, with Sean Rowley

I gave Sean Rowley a call after writing up an article on “Unguilty Pleasures” (see Chill Gonzales episode 64) - Gonzales' campaign against music snobbery and treatise on the pleasures of Enya's music. It became clear that the story of Rowley's own creation, Guilty Pleasures, was very much a candidate for the Art of Longevity. 

Guilty Pleasures became that wonderful thing - a content brand (before we called them that) that grew octopus arms. The club nights quickly grew by word-of-mouth, expanding to multiple venues, festivals, and international events, and becoming a fixture of the UK nightlife scene. Then came a series of successful compilation CDs, at a time when compilations still did big business in music. It went on to radio, live tours, and special events (including opening for George Michael at the new Wembley Stadium), helping to popularise nostalgia-driven and feel-good music culture. In Rowley’s own words “nostalgia is a fucking wonderful thing”. Well, he did make a career out of it, so he would understand. 

For an idea to build the way it has, and to last so long, it needed to be something deeper. With Guilty Pleasures, Rowley challenged prevailing ideas of musical “taste” and helped normalise the celebration of mainstream pop, even in alternative spaces. He gave music snobbery a good clobbering and in doing so, established a legacy on DJ culture and the wider acceptance of joyful, communal music experiences. 

The evidence is everywhere: the enormously popular Despacio Disco launched by James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem) and the Dewaele brothers (of Soulwax and 2ManyDJs). And then James Gunn of course, with the Guardians of The Galaxy soundtrack, which mined similar territory. The pandemic brought us Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco. Tik Tok has of course done wonders for the “genre”- famous for making Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride” a sensation, now with 500m streams on Spotify. 

And on it goes, the sprawling influence of a simple idea that is underpinned by the even simpler concept of the joy of music. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:42

DJ. And Shonen. 20 of years ago, and he's got a better memory than I have. Meeting when he was a bell. The reason I got back in touch with Shuman was because I was racing something on guilty face. A Your Surtout. He shouldn't feel guilty better. Liking any kind of music, and I was racing something about. So we had a quick call and shortly telling you all these stories. And he's a brilliant story that is a fantastic career. This is a speech show. The precious one. So we'll be back there for my foot launch soon. And I'll tell you more about that on Instagram. But for now, this is Sean Rider. Sean Rowley. Nearly said Sean Rider. This is Sean Rowley of Guilty Pleasures on the Art of Longevity. We'll see you soon. Sean Rowley, welcome to the Art of Longevity.

SPEAKER_02: 2:50

Nice to see you again. After 23 years, I think. Is it 23 years? No. Okay, so let's just put it in perspective. So I'm celebrating my 22nd year of running my club, Guilty Pleasures. You had a connection with uh someone who worked with me in the very early days on the marketing of it. So that would have been, I reckon, 20 years ago. I reckon we're twenty we're celebrating our 20th anniversary today.

SPEAKER_00: 3:23

Right. So that was Jack Horner at Fruct. I think they were they were helping you out with. When we met, it was a kind of afterwork beer, and I think you were about to release the first compilation C D. No.

SPEAKER_02: 3:38

Oh God, that was no. Okay. So it was the release of the C D that sparked that set off a chain of events that led it to becoming the behemoth that it became.

SPEAKER_00: 3:59

Yeah. And did you imagine that we'd be having this discussion twenty years on about guilty pleasures? This thing you created that became your job?

SPEAKER_02: 4:11

God, that's that stumped me slightly because there's part of me that goes that would give you the stock answer of God, no, I'd never believe it. But there's part of me that when I reflect on how it all began and the momentum that gathered pace and grew so quickly and became so big so quickly, I've got to say that actually in that moment there, I had a sense of, oh, this is gonna go on forever. It's so big, and everyone loves it so much. So there's that weird moment where you do actually, it's like believing your own hype moment of why wouldn't this go on forever? It's so good. You know, it's yeah, I'm saying that in a with hindsight and in a knowing sense. And I think that, you know, I know obviously through this podcast you talk to musicians and bands. And I can imagine bands having that sense, that sense of well, why wouldn't this go on forever? And of course it doesn't. I guess that's the key to it.

SPEAKER_00: 5:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't unless you work at it or wait for your time to come back around, all of that. So you we'll we'll get into all of that, the ups and downs of it. But I just love the fact that you I mean you had a career because you were you were a broadcaster and DJ at the time. But you hit on this idea and it wasn't like you created you created the idea, the concept, and that's what became this thing, this sort of multi-pronged CD compilation, DJ Knights uh a cultural good. It just came out of an idea. So take me back to the beginning of what the genesis of it.

SPEAKER_02: 6:07

Okay. The I was working at the time I had a show on BBC Radio London and I'd been brought into the station and it was a dream gig. It was an absolute I couldn't believe the fortune that had come my way because it was the thing that I I dreamed of as a kid, you know, and I my connection with radio broadcasting and music and just being such a huge fan. And I'd managed to through the eighties work in various record companies, but then as we moved into the nineties, I worked in TV production, I was like a music booker on the Jonathan Ross show. I worked at MTV. So every everything had this connection to it. And through a set of uh circumstances, I I ended up connecting with quite a few big bands of the nineties. I went I DJed for Oasis at Nebworth. I went on tour with Paul Weller. So there was an element of you know, just being a chap about town that fortune was smiling on, to say. And then I got a the gift of like, would you like to host your own radio show? And that was really beautiful. And they they gave me they they said, you do what you want, we trust you. We'll give you the two hours. It was a slot that uh you know DJs like Giles Peterson, Ross Allen, very sort of respected music DJs had had been doing over the previous years, and and I got the shot at it. And I loved it, I absolutely loved it. It really was uh something that just fired up my absolute soul and passion. And then they uh the head of the station changed. And after a few months of him putting implementing some little structure changes within the station, he pulled me into the office and he said, Do you know what? I like what you do, but I'm gonna have to ask you to play a little bit more familiar music. And that was now it wasn't like I was like out on a limb in a John Peel sort of way. It was just, you know, he was head of station and he needed to sort of make sure that things were going in the direction that he wanted it to. That was not what I wanted to hear. He was basically saying, where you had this total free open space to play whatever you want. Now I'm asking you to play start putting, just just peppering it with. And I felt really deflated and I went away from that meeting thinking, well, that's it, really. I had no desire to become a daytime radio presenter. I was happy in this sort of specialist type slot. But something happened, and I think that this is pretty much how my how I'm wired in a way, where if I am pushed into a corner, if I spend time with that, instead of sort of having a knee-jerk reaction to, oh, it's odd that, I don't want to do that, if I could work it out, I'll find a way out. And my way out was to think, hang on a minute, I grew up listening to radio in the 70s, and like there was like Capitol Radio at the time had a drive time show that the DJ, his name was Roger Scott, and he was a total hero to me. I was obsessed by him. He used to tape his shows and everything like that. And he would, you know, it was the 70s, and there would be quite a lot of pop just out and out pop. And I just started thinking, well, I love those records. Why can't I just factor those in? And so it happened. And so I brought it in, and I remember playing the first tune on the next show that I was broadcasting on BBC London, and I'd heard this phrase. Another DJ had been on my show, and he had done a mix for me, and he had put into the mix the wings track, uh, Goodnight Tonight. And he said to me, I suppose you'd call that a guilty pleasure. And I thought that just connected. I thought that's a really good phrase. I totally understand it. It does everything that I have experienced with a lot of music that I have loved over my life, where I've had to I don't tend to shout it from the hills, but I love it still. So I factored in these tracks. And it with live radio, certainly back at that point, once you see your phone lines going, you know something's happening. And I played perhaps it was Cliff Richard Devil Woman, which I still hold is a great tune.

SPEAKER_00: 10:50

And it was a great Cliff Richard period. That's that few years. Yeah, the Alan Taney years. Yeah, brilliant. Might come back to that.

SPEAKER_02: 10:59

And uh and the the the listeners were coming on and they were going, I can't believe you're playing this. And I was thinking it was going to be, what are you doing playing this? But it was the exact opposite. And they and all of a sudden it was just a beautiful moment where the light bulb went off above my head, and I went, I think there's something here. And it snowballed and it grew, and we just ran with it. And pretty soon I was doing an all an all-request guilty pleasure show. Right. Then Sony came on board and said, This is great, let's do a compilation. Compilation came out. There you go. That's the beginning.

SPEAKER_00: 11:37

Okay. So what was that first track? Can you remember?

SPEAKER_02: 11:39

You we No, I what I do remember is uh it would have been uh the Alesi brothers, O'Lourie, which was a huge radio hit in about 1976. So there's for me, now this is where because this whole concept is completely subjective. Um one man's guilt is literally another man's pleasure. It's not there's no there's no rhyme or reason, it's just what it is, it's just how it lands for you and where how you feel comfortable within that space. So my stuff was very much in that 1976, as I'm sort of coming of age, and all my mates are listening to Genesis, Pink Floyd, etc. I'm dipping into a world of pilot, David Sowell. I mean, my very first record, and I have come clean on this on many occasions, was David Cassidy, Could It Be Forever. So it was always, always, always a massive thing for me. This seven this brand of 70s pop. So that was my thing, and that sort of what I brought to the radio audience at BBC London, which were like-minded and appropriately aged listeners that would have connected with that period.

SPEAKER_00: 13:00

Yeah, I mean, you cracked open a nut, didn't you? That's basically what happened. And I I mean, I think it's David Hepworth has this stock phrase, general a general truth about music that the decade after something's popular, it's gone. It happened to ABBA in the nineties, Queen in the nineties, probably, maybe queen in the two thousands. It was big in a in a decade, then it disappears, but then it comes back around. So I guess this has been a couple of decades since the 70s. But somehow people were ready to tap into that nostalgia, their childhood. I mean, I've I for one I remember those nights lying by the radio with a tape recorder, recording your favorites. And the thing about Guilty Pleasures is they were the songs in between Pink Floyd and Queen and all the you know big bands of the time, but songs that you really liked because they were good songs. A lot of them were one-offs, what one hit wonders, but they were always just great melodies. And that's what you've that's what that's the nut that you cracked open, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02: 14:06

That was definitely it. As I just mentioned, what I what what I looked at was I remember. So this is like, hang on, we're in 2003. So the internet was quite difficult to access stuff. So what I did was I went out and I bought a copy of um Do you remember the Tim Rice uh hit record, uh hit singles? That Mike Reed and Tim Rice and Paul Gambacini did that. Every year they'd produce the new volume of, didn't they? And I remember going on holiday with my family and just sitting there going, literally going through the charts, going through the charts and clocking them down, going, and just having that brilliant moment of recall. So you just see the name, Fox, Single Bed. Oh yeah, that was great. What a great tune that that was. Uh Pilot, January, Climax Blues Band, couldn't get it right. Ace, how long? These were all massive radio. I mean, that's what we're doing. That's what I was doing. I was going back to popular radio hits. That was where it it sort of sat. And in a way, without sounding too blooming pompous about it, trying to reclaim them and trying to go, remember this? Have a listen. Because the song is so good. Yeah. And that was really the essence of what I was trying to get to in that early period there. And of course, no one was playing these records in clubs. This is so beyond anything. And we are now in an age where, in certain places, obviously you're not going to get it in particular clubs, but in in sort of mainstream club nights, they're always going to play ABBA. They didn't do that. You know, it wasn't that wasn't the case. And people are just remember the the sense of just joy, the energy that would come that would that from the room that would happen because people were like, their eyes were alight. And if you were getting the tune right, you were seeing the connection. And the connection was really apparent because even if they hadn't heard the song for 20 years, they knew every word. So there was that was all happening in that same space as well.

SPEAKER_00: 16:21

Yeah. That's interesting. Tapping into the joy of it, because I think after the 90s, I mean the 90s was up its own arse a bit, right? I mean, it was it took itself quite seriously. Brit Pop was, you know, the envy of the world musically, um, but didn't have a lot of humour to it. That was one of the things it lacked. It had irony, but not humour. Uh, and and just these songs are all about the joy, aren't they?

SPEAKER_02: 16:50

Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting because I've just remembered when you s as you just described that there, and you used the word irony, that was a thing that I was really, really adamant about. Like, so as it took off, a lot of there was a lot of press came on board. There was a lot, I was all of a sudden there was a lot of interviews, a lot of people writing about it. And quite often there would be like this Oh, are you being ironic moment? And it's like, God, I used to think if I was being ironic, I think I would have gone insane by now. Because that means I'm playing music because I'm being ironic and I don't actually like it, so I'm gonna play it to be ironic.

SPEAKER_00: 17:33

Imagine Yeah, it it it's a fascinating area though, and I get it. And to some extent, I think some of the fandom of that music and I've of guilty pleasures, there is an element of irony to it, some of it, but it's a bit of a grey area. And I mean, funnily enough, because we we had this chat a couple of weeks ago when when you came to mind, because I was writing this um I write a column for the featured artist coalition on the art of listening. And I started off writing this column about unguilty pleasures, which is Chile Gonzalez's thing. He wrote a book about Enya a few years ago, about how much he loved Enya and delved into her mysterious character and all the rest of it, but also tapped into the fact that it was you don't usually admit to loving Enya's music. And so his take on it was there should never be guilty pleasures. It should never there should never be judgment placed on your fandom of of music. But you never really thought that in the first place.

SPEAKER_02: 18:42

No, I didn't no. So there was exactly that there was an attitude where people certainly fell into that camp of Well, there's either good music or bad music. You know, put it very simplistically, isn't it? That just to say, is either good music or bad music. A couple of examples of that. I remember uh Stuart McConey, he wrote a blum in a whole page of it in the Radio Times. How dare they call music guilty uh guilty pleasure? Like that that sort of sentiment. I also had a face-to-face experience with it, which was turned out to be like quite grueling. So the first album got released, and um I was invited on to well, the biggest radio show on national radio was Jonathan Ross on Saturday mornings on Radio 2. And Jonathan was away on Holland Day.

SPEAKER_00: 19:37

Yeah, that's the slot.

SPEAKER_02: 19:38

Yeah, yeah. I mean they've all gone through it. Yeah, it's it's massive, millions. So Mark Lamar was sitting in for Jonathan. I remember this. You remember it, I'm scarred by it. And uh and now I know Mark. I used to be a researcher on the word, so I go back quite a few. Years with Mark, and we've even DJ'd together. He's DJ'd at clubs that I was running in the 90s. So I get on really well with Mark. And I also know his sense of humour, and I know how provocative he can become. So he invited me onto the show to come and talk about it. And at the time, we just started up the live, like doing club nights under this man. And I'd huge hero of mine, Terry Hall, lead singer with the specials and Funboy 3. He was a massive fan, like unbelievable fan of all of this music. So he started DJing, like coming along and DJing at the Guilty Pleasures Nights. So I sort of knew that Mark was a huge fan of Terry's, and I invited Terry to come onto the show with me, almost like creating a chill department. So it's not going to attack. Surely he won't attack me with one of his heroes. It was just so provocative, and he was pushing every button. He was going, I mean, what's this? What's this? Carol Bayer Sager, the moving out song. He goes, he didn't swear. Obviously, he's on radio too.

SPEAKER_00: 21:11

I think you said it was a load of rubbish.

SPEAKER_02: 21:12

He said it was a load of rubbish. I think that was a very political.

SPEAKER_00: 21:18

Of course, she writes for other people and has had great success.

SPEAKER_02: 21:22

Massive, huge songwriter across the decades. But yeah. So it's like it's just attack after attack. You know, he's just literally coating off the whole concept, and dude, this is just rubbish and everything like that. And me and Terry get in the lift afterwards coming out, and we both exasperated. And he looked at me and he went, that was like being in the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy. And I was like, yeah. The irony of the whole thing was about three weeks later, Mark's on the radio. He's obviously been, you know, he scripted like the tracks that some of the tracks that he's got playing. He plays Charles and Eddie, Would I Lie to You? And he comes out of it by saying, I don't think I'm supposed to like that sort of music, but that's actually a really good song. He's compounding the whole concept of this is something that I shouldn't like, but I really do like, because it's a good song. So there's that. So that was that was my practical uh that was very much an experience that I had of people saying, Well, there's no such thing. I've got to be truthful. It was a phrase that I really liked, that summed it all up, that made me just think of all those beautiful songs that I had loved as a kid that I wasn't able to tell my classmates that I loved. And that was it.

SPEAKER_00: 22:50

I mean, that that name has got so much to do with the ongoing success of it. I think people just tapped into that phrase.

SPEAKER_02: 22:59

I couldn't agree more. You you you really have hit the nail on the head. It just worked. I did end up at some point, I thought, where the hell did that come from then? And I I I looked back and it was discovered that it was used by a uh film reviewer in a San Francisco newspaper in 1969, and that's where it was born. And it had been floating around for a number of years. Anne Rice had written one of her interviews with the vampire sagas and called it Guilty Pleasures. So it appeared there, but no one had sort of grasped onto it and gone, actually, I'll have this. And the reason why that happened was because I'd had an experience a few years before where I'd had another concept that I was working on, and it was called All Back to Mind.

SPEAKER_00: 23:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 23:58

And I had pitched it as a radio idea to Radio One. They had commissioned it, so I ran with a set of shows on Radio One and where I went round to a music-loving celebrities and we went house and we went through their record collection. First episode, Noel Gallagher, right? So it's a winner straight away. And then I've done Chemical Brothers, Paul Weller, I've done all the big 90s blur, I've done them all. And it was running, but always in the back of my mind, the initial concept was this is a compilation series. This is when compilations were king. You know, they really were selling by the bucket loads. So I had this idea. So I ran with it, pitched it, and I thought, kept thinking in the back of my mind, I'm gonna go back to that, that idea, and I'm gonna I'm gonna do that compil. I'm now running it as a radio show. Then channel four got on board and said, we're commissioning this, and I did a two series for channel four. So all the time I'm thinking, this compilation series is gonna kill it when it comes out. And I go and I start working on the compilation series, and I get a notification, someone's fucking trademarked it. They've trademarked the name and I missed out on the name. But the gift was that I ended up as soon as Guilty Pleasures connected, as soon as it connected, I trademarked. Right, right. You learned your lesson hard way. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But there's a good lesson.

SPEAKER_00: 25:29

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02: 25:30

Without without that little moment, that would have I would have just drifted around and gone, oh yeah, I've got this really good idea.

SPEAKER_00: 25:36

Yeah, and I mean that idea all back to mind as well. Great idea. Again, could have gone on to to bigger things, didn't need it in the end, because you moved on to 42. So when you took Terry Hall onto the Jonathan Ross Mark Lamar show, that's when it was pretty huge. Yeah. Right? Because you had a lot of other celebrity fans. Didn't George Michael get you to DJ at was it Wembley? Some big thing.

SPEAKER_02: 26:01

It was a pretty big thing. The idea behind that was that the new Wembley Stadium had just opened. George Michael was booked in as the first musical artist to appear at the new Wembley Stadium. He wanted his name to go in the Guinness Book of Records as being the first artist to appear at the New Wembley Stadium. He was on tour. His support act was Sophie Ellis Baxter. He dropped her for the first night so that he could say, I'm the first act to play Wembley Stadium. But they knew they had they had four hours to fill. So we got the call. Do you want to DJ at the new the brand new Wembley Stadium opening for George Michael? So my claim to fame is I'm the guy who was the first musical. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 26:53

And Sophie Ellis Becks has done all right. She's done all right. She's stuck at it.

SPEAKER_02: 26:57

She came and DJed for us.

SPEAKER_00: 26:58

Another art of longevity story. I've got to get I've got to get Sophie on. You're right there, actually. Well, and also part of her current success is because of the channels of now, right? And you know, going big on TikTok and all the rest of it. And that's one of the amazing things about this guilty pleasures concept. Because back in the day when you created it, bands like Toto, for example, were a guilty pleasure. They fell into the category beautifully. You wouldn't quite admit to being a fan of Africa then. I mean, you might to your friends, but you wouldn't you wouldn't shout about it being your favourite song. It is a lot of people's favourite song. But now it's fine. Because it's gone big on the internet and it's gone big on TikTok and everywhere else. So what's been your experience with Guilty Pleasures of seeing all of that come back around on social media and TikTok and Spotify?

SPEAKER_02: 27:58

Yeah, I mean I think that there was definitely uh there was something that I noticed early on. So So we started in 2004. So the advent of streaming was a little bit further down the line, okay. But we'd gone from Walkman's to iPods, yeah. So iPods were in. That was the big moment in technology, wasn't it? As far as musical consumption went. So we're moving into we were moving into the period of downloading, having the music all contained on your device. And what became apparent was people didn't have to go into record shops and buy albums. Now, when you went into a record shop when you bought an album, you're putting yourself up for judgment. You are pulling it out of the racks, you're taking it up. There's that brilliant sequence in uh the old Woody Allen movie, uh Take Money and Run, where he's he's trying to buy pornography in a shop in the in New York, and he's pulled the pornography off the top shelf and he's sort of sandwiched it between like three or four other magazines, and he takes it up to the counter and he puts it on the counter in the shop assistant. Hey Joe, how much for big and busty? And that was in a way, it felt like you know, you go into a shop, you're putting it, yeah, record shops, and no two, you know, let's you know, we're talking about decades ago. You know, notorious for the snobbery that existed. Absolutely, and the music pressed.

SPEAKER_00: 29:39

I think this is kind of what Chile Gonzalez was driving at. More than having a pop at guilty pleasures, he was having a pop at music snobbery, which does exist, it still exists.

SPEAKER_02: 29:51

Well, in a way, although I've used this phrase, I was that was exactly what I was trying to break down. That was that was it. It was like come together in a space, play this music that we all love and enjoy it. Ain't no snobbery in that. You know, that's that's that's pretty much setting out your store. It's just that there was this phrase, and this phrase just suited it so well. What I was trying to do as well. You know, my favourite it traverses the other thing as well, you know, going the all back to mind thing. My favourite part of a of going out in the 90s was going back to someone's house. That was the best bit. That's the bit where you're standing there, and if you know, someone with a good record collection or see, and just searching for those records and go, oh, you got that. Oh, you got that, pull that out.

SPEAKER_00: 30:48

Yeah. I mean, this is part of my new agenda is to somehow bring some of that back. Because it it's just odd now with music. Well, we're getting a little bit off track here, and I don't I don't want to do that. But I'll come back, yeah, come back to to to your story in a minute. But we've got to a point where uh music is massive, bigger than ever, you could argue. Certainly in industry value terms it is with streaming and with live. But there's not a lot of that listening party culture to it anymore. It's very it's either very individualized on your headphones commuting to work, or it's very social when you're at the gig. And and and a part of that, I think, is going to the party, saying you were there, saying you you know were at the Taylor Swift or the you know, on the Earus Tour, whatever. There's a bit sort of a bit conspicuous in that sense as well. But there isn't a lot of just uh talking about enjoying what you're listening to at home. And that's strange to me, because that seems to have changed from 70s, 80s, 90s college.

SPEAKER_02: 32:04

Well, being the father of older kids, 16 and 22, I have that experience certainly with my son. He's 16, he loves the game. That's his thing. But he loves music as well. He really loves music. And so I bought him a record deck. And I also, by way of a a new venture that I got involved with, I've I've got a record shop. Yeah. So I've got right, I've got a lot of people. Which opened just last week.

SPEAKER_00: 32:34

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_02: 32:34

Thank you. So he's got his records there, he's got his deck there. But he's gaming and he's not, you know, so it's it that's his thing. And music is his thing, and it is but it's oh God, I I do worry that I start to sound really old. Because it's like what we were saying before, it's like the Victorian day.

SPEAKER_00: 32:54

It's like Yeah, well, you don't remember him. He's halfway there. In fact, he's more than halfway there, because young people are back into vinyl, and there's this statistic that goes around saying only 50% of them have a anything to play it on, but they're still buying it. But in the case of your son, same with my eldest as well, she got my gear when I upgraded. She was blown away by the technology. You've got you you what you drop you drop you put a needle onto that spins around and it sounds like that. She was absolutely blown away by it, you know, as opposed to getting whatever you want for a few taps on a phone.

SPEAKER_02: 33:34

Okay, let me just sorry, just just jump in because as you've as you've mentioned, I've now got a record shop. I've got a deck in the record shop, I've put records on. So when dads come in and they've brought brought in their kids, you do the thing where you go, look, and then you put the needle on. And then it's all these little bumps in the needle, and it and they look at you wide out eyed, like you, like you're talking gibberish. It's like what? And then you lift the needle off and it stops. And they give like there's a little sh moment where they go, I can't believe. Because you know what? It is magic.

SPEAKER_00: 34:09

It is, it is magic.

SPEAKER_02: 34:10

Really? Even now, as I sit here and talk to you about it, I know it's magic. Yeah, yeah. Because I've experienced it all my life, and I know that feeling of when it kicks in.

SPEAKER_00: 34:24

It's like, oh see, I just want them to go one step further now, which is actually listen to the record. But you've bought the record, you've got the deck, now you just have to find 40 minutes or 20 minutes just for one side. That's the challenging bit. That's the bit that that's impossible.

SPEAKER_02: 34:45

Yeah, I think they're very much under the influence of. I mean, you know, have you are you noticing how many moments appear in like a Netflix drama where someone's in their apartment and they decide to put a record on?

SPEAKER_00: 34:57

It's always a vinyl record.

SPEAKER_02: 34:58

Vinyl record. Very attractive person putting a vinyl record on. That's what our kids are seeing, and they're going, all right, okay, so yeah, I get that. That's it's aspir it's it's become an aspirational lifestyle choice to have a record player and a record.

SPEAKER_00: 35:15

Very aesthetically.

SPEAKER_02: 35:16

As opposed to we had to have that. We didn't have too much else, so we needed that.

SPEAKER_00: 35:22

Yeah, yeah. All right, well, that was a that was the digression. Yeah, sorry. Let's get back to the to the thread here. Because the art of longevity is kind of about the ups and downs. That's the whole point of why I said this. Sub is based on Brett Anderson's own take on a band's career, which at some point you struggle to break through, then you are put on a pedestal, you have the stratospheric rise, and then it all comes crashing down. I mean, at what point in the last 20 years did you think, well, guilty pleasures has kind of had its day?

SPEAKER_02: 35:52

Yeah. Okay, so there is a beautiful thing that happens, and this is a massive part of the success of Guilty Pleasures over the years, which was the connection that I had with uh the venue that we actually transferred to after about a year of running the events. So it started as a live DJ experience at in Islington at the Academy. And um, and then Coco, the old Camden Palace, had sort of been run up and running for a couple of years. And the guy who was head of music there, David Phillips, he came down to one of our Friday nights at the Academy, and he just said to me after he just pulled me in and he went, We're the perfect venue for you. We want you, it'll work. Trust me on this, it's just gonna hit. So we went in there as a monthly and we went to the last Saturday of every month, and on the first, the opening night at Coco, which would have been 2005, the Guardian newspaper came down to write a review, which was great. We're gonna get a review in The Guardian. We woke up on Monday morning and we were on the front page of The Guardian. It was it was beyond anything, I couldn't believe it. And it was the whole sort of concept was the super club rule book has just been torn up. Welcome to the new age of clubbing, welcome to guilty pleasures, and it was a whole column, and it went on to the second page. Wow. On the front page of the newspaper, not the inside inside, the newspaper, the guardian. And it was just this moment, and that was it. It was the connection with what we were doing with the perfect venue for what we needed to do. And that was the beginning of the success story. So that uh whilst everything else had been building up to this, and we'd had load of coverage. That was like a foundation that was being built. That was like a band that's getting great reviews, and put out a couple of singles, and everyone's chomping at the bit, and then the album drops, and everyone goes, This is great. That's the experience that I felt like we were now in hindsight. I could look back at it. So for that was it for the next 15 years, that was our home. That was that and everything that happened outside of that sort of residency, that monthly residency, was fantastic, whether it was festivals, getting to do Glastonbury, and then going off and doing festivals in Australia, like this whole beautiful journey that happened. And so Coco, at the end of 15 years, had decided they were going to do a massive refurb, so they were closing the venue, and it was gonna be big, it was gonna be massive, they were spending millions. And um, I thought, right, okay, well, that's that. Um, that was great. Why don't we just go off and do it elsewhere? And it didn't work. And I knew that it was that magical combination of that venue and our brand. And it it it just happens that if you look at a lot of other, I talked to other promoters, and once you find your home, it's just beautiful and you're locked in. So I we was we struggled for a year.

SPEAKER_00: 39:19

Um and by this time the compilations were done, right? They were really volumes and all of that moved on through streaming. So that was less of a thing. That wasn't going to be a thing.

SPEAKER_02: 39:32

Yes, you're you're absolutely right. So we dabbled with uh we went down the road to the electric ballroom. It was hard work. And I just thought, do you know what? This is probably coming to an end now. Just had that thing. And then COVID hit. You know, it was obviously all bets were off. We it was just the end of the line for uh for everything. What had happened was as guilty pleasures was. Let's say tapering down in that period after Coco. There was this other venture that I had started up with some mates, which was the Mighty Hoopla Festival, which sort of took what we did as Guilty Pleasures, connected with other pop events and clubs like Sink the Pink and various other very pop-dominating clubs, and decided to do a festival, which started actually as a weekender at Butlins in Bogna Regis. And then morphed into uh Victoria Park, and then we were down in Brockwell Park, and it was just flying. So it was like I just thought, well, that's on its way down, but look at what's going over on over here. So it's like all energy. Yeah, it was great. Yes, it was. Yeah, it's funny that there is something in me that definitely works when very careful not to blow my own fucking smoke up my ass on this. But I think what I've got, there's something inbuilt in me that says, How can I get out of this situation that doesn't so whether it was the head of the radio station saying, We like what you do, but you've got to start playing familiar stuff, or Coco going, do you know what? We're gonna close, so we're gonna let you go off and do and that's that not working. It just something kicks in for me that says, That's all right, I'll I can move on from that.

SPEAKER_00: 41:31

That's what Well uh this is very much part of one of the discoveries of the art of longevity, is that it's almost a gift to creative people to box them in somewhere, give them a boundary, or something that initially looks like it's a barrier. That's it. And they'll they'll work or corner, they'll work their way out.

SPEAKER_02: 41:51

I am a massive fan of the badly wrapped gift. When it lands, and you go, oh shit, I've got to deal with this, and then you spend time with it and you really, really allow it to become what it is. Everything just falls into place. We sit here in hindsight and we can go, yeah, and then that happened, and that happened, and that felt like it was a bit of a knock, but oh, look what happened there, look what came out of there. Well, this is now moving into sort of life lessons that I can apply not just to work but to pretty much at every aspect of my life, is the key for me is just to pause and accept and not become a victim. Because if I become a victim within, I'm just I'm just gonna wallow in it. So I really made a point when Coco, when it when it did close down, and then they and then they came back when they reopened after everything, and they said, sorry guys, we're not having you back because we're doing in-house promotions. So it's they've rewritten their whole business model. It's like there's no no outside promoters, which is what I was. It is just completely down to them running their nights, booking DJs running their nights, very EDM. So when they notified me you're not coming back, it sort of was like a little bit of a moment of like, oh, oh, that's not a brief internal dialogue that went, oh, that's not fair, because you said that I was coming back in internal. But then I thought I sat and I thought about it and I went, do you know what? I had 15 years of like one of the most amaz in one of the most amazing spaces in London, and now look Well, this was in a way the the roller coaster going down. This is it, it was it was going down. So so it did feel like it was all over. And then what basically happened was the connection that I was getting through being involved with Mighty Hoopla was just giving me so much, and I was loving it, absolutely loving it, and it it never went away. So it was transferred from guilty pleasures into that, and I think that just something very natural happened, and my enthusiasm never waned, and I was able to sort of carry on that riding that that wave of like this is great, this is we're just having fun, this is great, and being involved in such a vibrant uh event that was hoopla. And all of a sudden, it was I was looking at it and going, oh blind, it's our 20th anniversary next year, like back in back then. We should really do something. And knowing that Coco was a closed door and I wasn't going back there on Saturday nights or Friday nights or anything like that, but it sort of coincided with that little moment where daytime events started to take off. And I just looked at those and went, well, that's just made for us. And we put it out there, and I was approached by uh another record company who said, Your initial compilation that only came out on CD. Do you want to do it on vinyl as a 20th anniversary thing? So all of a sudden we're releasing, we've it's like we're back at square one. We're releasing an album again, and I'm able to go to Coco and go, how about a daytime party? And they went, Yeah, let's give that a go. And it was beautiful. And that's the sort of model that's been running ever since. So the the resurgence, the the popping back moment, couldn't have scripted it, but just what I'm connecting with, even as I'm talking to you about it, is the fact that I felt the enthusiasm rise up backing me. It came back. It was something that I could get excited about again. And if I'm gonna get excited about something, hopefully that's gonna transfer into the whole thing that I'm doing. If I'm sitting there thinking, oh, I suppose I better do that, or or not even oh, I can't be asked. It's not, it's nothing's gonna work. Nothing's gonna work. It has to be that. And literally what's happening now is we're running daytime events, sold-out events over at Coco, and I've been approached by two major London venues to go in and this is where I'm at now. Um, there's uh Big Penny Social Club, which is over in Walthamstow, and there's the Clapham Grand, which is down in South London. And it looks like next year we'll be running Saturday nights in both of those venues as well. So, good lord, it's gone mental again.

SPEAKER_00: 46:50

Well, it found a new vessel with the, as you say, initially the daytime stuff coming back, but also with vinyl.

SPEAKER_02: 46:56

That's right. Yeah, yeah. If something fits, it fits, isn't it? And it falls into place. You can't really force it. You can't force it.

SPEAKER_00: 47:06

So, yeah, um, I think maybe the difference with your story a little bit from a lot of the bands I've talked to is you didn't really have to do anything. It kind of came back around to you, uh just gift-wrapped in a different way. Yeah. But you you reacted to it, obviously.

SPEAKER_02: 47:24

You know, it was I I d I do I I I'm very, very aware and through the work that I do and have done over the years, of you sometimes really need a peg to hack hang something on. So big anniversaries, they mean a lot. I mean, I'm sure a lot of the bands that you're that you deal with. More than ever.

SPEAKER_00: 47:48

In fact, you know, I've I've noticed recently that bands are now going for the tenth anniversary of the first album, or the fifteenth anniversary of the first album. They'll do anything really to keep the longevity story going. And sometimes it is. It's just let's just go back and celebrate the beginning and keep that going. And it's to some extent, it's staying on the boss and just letting people know you're still on the boss. It most definitely is.

SPEAKER_02: 48:16

Nostalgia is a fucking wonderful thing. I mean, I I've had this experience recently where I'm a massive Bruce Springsteen fan, right? I've been to see him a lot. Now, I first saw him back in I think about '82 on the River Tour. And I went to see him in San Sebastian in the summer, uh, which was just one of the greatest gigs I've literally ever been to in my life. And um I was standing there and he's on stage and he's singing The River. Right? That's me 19 years old. I'm at Wembley, I'm watching Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing The River. It's 2025. I'm in San Sebastian with my best mate, and we're watching Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band sing the river. And it's beyond nostalgia. It's something so powerful because it's a connection with myself. It's a connection, it's he's the same guy, I'm the same guy. I'm having that connection. It feels like I'm in a time slip, I'm floating through dimensions. I cannot believe that I'm still there and still literally loving this moment as much as I loved it then. It's never gone away.

SPEAKER_00: 49:36

Yeah. Do you think that is a little bit unique to Bruce? Yeah. It's a lot of uniqueness to Bruce, I can tell you. Because I've heard people talk about this. It's it's a poignancy, isn't it, of just uh something about his shows and the fact that a lot of the people in the audience have have been to a lot of them. You know, throughout their entire lives. Um so I think it's music, yeah, but it's it's also Bruce.

SPEAKER_02: 50:08

It is also Bruce. I've got give you a quick one on that. I went to uh I was at Glastonbury, uh McCartney headlining, and I got right down. I'm in there, I'm I'm no, I'm not moving. And and I knew Bruce was coming out, I'd had words. And he comes out and he's got his guitar and he's standing on it. And they kick in with um I Wanna Be Your Man. That's on the first official Beatles album that gets released in America. It's on the with the Beatles, it's on Meet the Beatles in America, right? So it's on the track listen to that. Now I know that Bruce bought that record when he was 13. And I know that he put that record on in his bedroom and he strapped a guitar around his neck and he stood in front of a mirror and he played along to that song. So I'm standing, I'm getting a shiver just telling you now. I'm standing there watching him alongside McCartney singing the song that he played in front of the mirror as a kid to the record that I listened to insensely as a kid in my mum and dad's front room with the speakers there. Right. So I'm 13, he's 13, Paul's 21. It was like a fucking force of nature pretty cosmic. It was totally cosmic. And I swear to you, no alcohol or class A's were involved in that. It was off the scale. I knew what was happening. And that, if you can tap into that, and that's what so if you've been in a band for that long and you're go still going out and still pulling it off, and still got those fans that were with you in those early days, and they're coming along, and hopefully they're br there's fresh blood in the room as well, because that's a whole nother thing. You know, you want that energy of people coming into a room, and this is stuff that I when I'm doing my thing on a Saturday night, you know, it's like I don't want, I really don't want a room full of people my age. I want younger.

SPEAKER_00: 52:16

Correct, yeah, and it's important as well. And the lineage is there, so you can bring new stuff in, and it's a great way to frame the you know, new music, whether it's made by old bands or brand new artists.

SPEAKER_02: 52:28

But this is the stuff that we and it's with your this project here that you've been running now, you know, this this is a stuff that this is magic. Yeah if you can get that experience that I've had with those gigs, and it's cosmic, as it's absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 52:45

Uh and beyond nostalgia, I love nostalgia. That's because that's a new theme. I think you've tapped into a new theme. Well, we've got to wrap it up. I mean, uh I could go on for the rest of the afternoon. I mean, let's just let's do something fun. Go. You know, you mentioned Bruce, uh the ultimate real artist, the the real deal, all of that. God knows how many albums he's on now, maybe it's 30. I write about him in my latest book about the album. Everything you can relate to Bruce in any kind of big statement you want to make. Would you ever put a track on Guilty Pleasures? Have you?

SPEAKER_02: 53:22

Dancing in the Dark has made an appearance over the years, but yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. I listen, that's the one thing I've got I've got to cover really clean with you here. And it's like, I'm playing pop, and that's that was always the essence of of what the night began as and still continues as. Is it a good pop tune?

SPEAKER_00: 53:45

It's a cracking pop tune. And it's of course, I mean, he's on Columbia Records, right? So that would have been funny to see Sony's reaction and trying to get that one on the compilation. I I guess that would have been an interesting reaction. I'll give you a quick one on that. But you can play it live.

SPEAKER_02: 54:00

Give you a quick one on that. So it what with us being on Sony. So we we were on Sony. I w Guilty Pleasures, as you know, as I've already said, it was trademarked. Uh, and we were about we'd already released one, if not two, compilations. Barbara Streisen recorded the follow-up to her hugely successful and stunning album, Guilty, as produced by Barry Gibb. And uh in America it got released as Guilty Pleasures. Well, it was you had to change it to Guilty Two. It got changed to Guilty Two, right? Yeah. So that was because, God bless him, Robin. Stringer, who is now head of Sony worldwide and has been for a number of years, he he was the guy who signed Guilty Pleasures to Sony. So we had to go to myself and my brother-in-law Dean, who was working with me at the time, we went to Rob and we went, she can't, she can't release it. She can't. So he had to, and now that was all fine, and it got released in the UK as Guilty Two, but the punchline is I'm sitting at home watching Jonathan Ross on a Saturday night. Guest is Barbara Streisand, and he says to her, So your new album, Guilty Two, and she looks at him going, What? He says, The album, Guilty Two. She says, It's not called that. He says, It is. And he held up a copy and he went, it's called Guilty Two. She went, That's the first I've seen of it.

SPEAKER_00: 55:36

And that was on the Jonathan Ross show. I wonder if that's on YouTube. I'll I'll I'll look it up. Fantastic. More exposure via Jonathan Ross for Guilty.

SPEAKER_02: 55:46

I love the concept of bobstrizing. I mean, too.

SPEAKER_00: 55:50

Completely.

SPEAKER_02: 55:51

These articles have told me I can't release my album in the UK. Somewhere in my lovely sort of mind, it's like I want to know who these guys are. She's fancy and my brother in the house.

SPEAKER_00: 56:04

Absolutely. I mean, if that's not a claim to fame, I don't know what it is. Uh Sean, it's been a pleasure to have you on the launch every day. I wish you all the best for guilty pleasures for the next. Certainly up to 25. I'm sure you're planning a big celebration at 25. You must be. If I get there. You'll get there. Let's get there for the next. Alright, cheers. See you soon. Thank you.