Bring The Noise
After some unpleasant wrangling with their former record label, Noisettes are back, better than ever before...
Ed Power, 12 Sep 2012
It’s an old story. Band has breakthrough hit. Record company demands more of same. Band demurs. Everything goes shit-shaped.
Such was the fate that befell Noisettes after they had announced themselves to the world with 2009’s Wild Young Hearts, a rollicking soul record that established the London duo as one of the UK’s pre-eminent R&B outfits. The album should have been a springboard. Instead, it threatened to drag them under.
In the wake of their unexpected success, the understanding, so far as their label Universal was concerned, was that singer Shingai Shoniwa and multi-instrumentalist Dan Smith would crank out Wild Young Hearts 2.0. Noisettes had different ideas and relations with their (now ex-) corporate sugar-daddy took a predictable turn for the worse.
“There was definitely an expectation on us to deliver the goods,” Smith sighs. “Our A&R guy was great. He really appreciated what we wanted to achieve. He was on our side. At the level above him, I’m not sure people quite understand us. They had their own ideas.”
Noisettes’ goal, says Smith, was an LP that would help them crack the United States, to which they had always looked for inspiration. However, Universal didn’t share the band’s confidence in their ability to gain a toe-hold in America. They would have been perfectly happy with another album that had the potential to do well in Europe. To that end, they suggested Smith and Shoniwa work with some hand-picked co-writers. Things got tense.
“Everyone was coming up to us saying, ‘You should target this or that audience’. Everybody thinks they have the secret to success. The truth is, the industry is changing so quickly, audiences’ tastes are moving so fast, the old way of looking at the world won’t do you any good. Everybody wants you to tick all these boxes. The thing is, you’re the one who is going to have to go out and perform it. So you have to be happy with it. In the first instance, you have to make it for yourself.
“We told the label we wanted to develop a more international sound. Not just one popular in a corner of Europe. The idea was to capitalise on all our interests, for all the rhythm ‘n’ blues and dance and funk influences in us to come out. We tried writing with a few people. It wasn’t working.”
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