In Conversation: The Music Men

Another day, another couple of music industry legends to grace the stage at The Cumberland. This time the turn of XL MD Richard Russell and Mute Records President Daniel Miller.

Both of them admitted that one of the ways of making their engagement with the business more interesting was to still make music themselves, or as Miller put it “I just like mucking about with synthesizers.”

Russell feels that in the time since XL began he's become more uncompromising about the people he works with, and in the past 10-15 years has got back to doing it largely on instinct.

Daniel Miller admitted that he doesn't like many different types of music and doesn't have a large record collection at home. In the mid nineties, he said he went through a fallow signing period, being disinterested in a lot of the music coming out then, until he signed latterly influential electronic act Add N To (X).

When the topic turned to dealing with the difficulty of getting an artist away in the face of a disinterested public and media, Richard cited MIA as an example of an artist who provoked an “overwhelmingly negative” reaction from media when she first surfaced.

“You've got to feel you're right in the face of evidence that you're wrong”, said Russell. And how right he was with MIA, whose single 'Paper Planes', he revealed is now the biggest selling single on XL ever, worldwide.

Miller cited Moby as an artist he had to let explore their own ambitions,even if it wasn't attuned to the rest of the music coming out at the same time. When artists like Prodigy were emerging, Moby went off and made a “lo-fi punk-rock album”, an effort when latterly enabled him to make the massive unit-shifting 'Play' album. “Sometimes doing nothing is the best input you can give” Miller said.

Miller also revealed that he passed on Nine Inch Nails even though Trent was desperate to be on Mute.