Were you to drag the kids from Fame into the 21st century, you’d best make
them British. Our bands may not dominate the charts the way they used to,
but Britain has become a world leader in Fame-style schools. The best known
is the British Record Industry Trust (Brit) School in south London, attended
by Amy Winehouse, Adele, Kate Nash, Katie Melua, Imogen Heap and Leona
Lewis. Its rock credentials come from having taught members of the Kooks,
the Feeling and Athlete.
Like the Brit School, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA)
teaches different arts disciplines, including dance, drama and theatre
design as well as music. The Brit School’s high-tech facilities include a
recording studio designed by the Beatles’ producer, George Martin; among
LIPA’s equally impressive amenities is the Paul McCartney Auditorium. Sandi
Thom and indie act the Wombats are LIPA alumni.
Whereas both the Brit School and LIPA positively encourage pupils to try
different disciplines - in the case of the Brit School, which takes pupils
from 14, they have to fit them in alongside the national curriculum - the
Academy of Contemporary Music (ACM) in Guildford, Surrey, is purely a pop
and rock college. And, while it is not yet as famous as its rivals, ACM is
changing the face of music tuition. In April, it won a Queen’s Award for
Enterprise for its innovative approach to teaching teenagers. Now, colleges
in America, Italy, Japan, South Africa and even South Korea are copying its
curriculum and adopting its ethos.
Step inside ACM’s multistorey main building and you could be in a nightclub.
The floors are metal, the walls are exposed brick and the dim lighting comes
from blue fluorescent tubes. There are bench seats in zebra-print fabric and
the heavy doors along long hallways are coated in sparkly pink or orange
plastic. Whenever one opens, the sound of music is deafening – except when
it leads to the drum room, supported by the Red Hot Chili Pepper Chad Smith,
in which 18 students sit side by side, pounding kits heard only in their
headphones like demented Duracell bunnies.
Started with a small grant from the Prince’s Trust in 1995, ACM is the
brain-child of Phil Brookes, a musician turned teacher. What began as a
course of evening classes has grown into a college for 1,200 full-time and
400 part-time students. It encompasses a business centre, a performance
venue and two record labels - and, crucially, it has direct links to every
sector of the music industry, from publishers, managers and promoters to A&Rs,
lawyers, radio stations and CD manufacturers.
“My vision for the school was to bridge the gap between the industry and
education,” Brookes explains. “We don’t just teach kids to be technically
proficient, we fully prepare them to go out and get a job, whether that be
as a singer, songwriter, session musician or studio producer.”
ACM’s success rate is striking - 76% of its students go on to work in music.
Its alumni include the Sugababe Amelle Berrabah and Newton Faulkner, whose
debut album, Hand Built by Robots, topped the charts last year. Faulkner
chose to attend ACM because of its former head guitar tutor, Eric Roche, who
died in 2005. The guitar rooms are now dedicated to him and adorned with
signed copies of Faulkner’s discs.
In the record industry’s current crisis, ACM’s teaching methods could provide
a crucial lifeline. When Guy Hands took over EMI, he was shocked to discover
that its recorded-music division was racking up millions in losses each year
from new signings, offset only by a healthy profit from back-catalogue
sales. Indeed, every label has only a handful of money-making acts that fund
the development of significantly more hopefuls, most of whom will never turn
a profit. So, as more big players leave traditional labels (Madonna, Jay-Z
and U2 to the promoter Live Nation, for example, or Radiohead to the
internet), who will pay to launch the next generation of stars?
ACM believes it has the answer. Its curriculum is purely practical and its
facilities - rooms are sponsored by the likes of Yamaha, Fender and
Marshall, which update the equipment every few years, and there are banks of
Apple Macs and fully equipped recording studios - are of a standard used by
major labels in developing new acts.
“We put all of our students through the same process a record company would,”
explains Mark Bounds, ACM’s A&R consultant, who works with labels
in Britain and abroad. “But, whereas it could cost them upwards of £100,000
to develop one act, we do that development for free. Once labels have made a
financial commitment, they are under tremendous pressure to recoup their
costs, which means they need an album out as soon as possible. A lot of
potentially great careers end up over before they’ve started because the act
needed more time to develop. Here, we can get songs to top-quality demo in
eight weeks, but if they aren’t right, we just do them again. The students
perform 40 or 50 live shows a year, either at the school or in local venues.
The point is to f*** up here before they go to London for an A&R fest.”
Several times each year, ACM invites a panel of about 15 industry insiders to
assess its talent and offer advice. For the past three years, Dougie Bruce,
a senior A&R at Universal Publishing who signed Adele, Kate Nash and
MGMT, has been among them. “ACM students graduate with an in-depth knowledge
of the process of making music and how to get it out there,” he says. “They
also leave with good-quality demos. Last summer, I went up to the school to
help out and came back with an incredible demo from a singer-songwriter
called Nick Harri-son. He is now signed to A&M and is a big hope for
Universal next year.”
Other industry contacts include DJs from Xfm and 6 Music, who regularly play
the students’ demos on their shows, and the management company that picked
up Berrabah and recently signed ACM graduate Rokhsan Heydari, a feisty pop
singer and songwriter who, thanks to ACM’s contacts, played at last month’s
Glastonbury festival.
“Roxy is a great example of what the school can do,” Bounds says. “She came
here too timid to sing in front of her classmates, but within a term was a
natural-born performer. A radio-plugger contact of ours who does Scouting
for Girls and Ray LaMontagne, was so amazed when he saw her, he mentioned
her to BBC Introducing. They came to check her out four days before
Glastonbury and were so blown away, they offered her a slot on the Park
stage.”
On cue, Heydari bounces into the bar next door to ACM, babbling about her
Glasto experience. If she was ever shy, it doesn’t show. “By the end of my
first term here, I was gigging all over,” she says. “I had my own band and I
couldn’t stop writing songs. The Glastonbury slot came out of the blue, but
it was the best experience of my life. My backing vocalist was away at a
wedding, so I had to call in my auntie to replace her. I was shitting my
pants, but I loved every minute of it. I’m not scared to be part of the
industry now - after two years here, I feel like I’m in it already”.
Brian May, Jimmy Page and Dave Stewart are among the ACM supporters who come
in to give masterclasses. Genesis provide free use of their nearby,
state-of-the-art studio; and, on the day I visited, the producer Mike Stock
was among those holding auditions. There was also a buzz about ACM’s gospel
choir - put together at one of the school’s extracurricular classes - which
has made it through to the final stages of BBC1’s Saturday-night
entertainment series Last Choir Standing.
“We don’t have the answer to all the record industry’s problems,” Bounds
admits. “But we are in a position to help. If De Beers needs to find a new
diamond mine, they don’t choose a spot blind and start digging. They do
their research and go somewhere that looks likely to yield success. If
you’re after a top chart act, ACM is a pretty good place to start digging.”
I am a '98 graduate of the BRIT school and I have nothing but praise & admiration for the acts that were nurtured there. We were never told we would be famous, but were taught how to handle all aspects of the industry from enthusiastic teachers who kept our egos in check and our feet on the ground!
Natalie, George Town, Grand Cayman
I find this the most worrying trend in modern music. Whilst there is much to be said about experts helping people along and providing spaces for practice and production, the essence of what comes out is a pastiche of prior sounds and styles that make them seem like they came from a focus group.
Matt, Southampton, England
Fame School in Croydon is supposed to be excellent also. In the 1930's the Croydon Rep turned out all our great comedy starts like DENIS PRICE, JOHN LE MESURIER, RICHARD WATTIS, JON PERTWEE, etc !!!!
REPS were the precursors to the so called FAME school !!!!
Ian Payne, walsall,
Thanks to the "Fame" schools there is no more revoltuion to be had in music. The judgement of 'talent' needs nothing as obtrusive as public popularity to make it famous but the opinion of appointed 'experts' who can feed the machinery of the media and music industries in bite-size marketable lumps.
Rowg, LONDON, UK