The business of music
JONATHAN CORBETT TALKS TO THE ORIGINAL NORTH EAST MUSIC ‘GENERATOR’ – JIM MAWDSLEY
JIM Mawdsley promoted his first gig in Newcastle way back in October 1987 and has since established some of the region’s pioneering live music gatherings including the legendary club night Shindig and the region’s largest music festival, Evolution.
Nowadays, in his role as CEO of Generator – the UK’s only national music development agency – Jim continues to support and nurture the artists of tomorrow and has helped hundreds of the region’s music businesses perform on a global scale.
Today we take a look at his career and why the Liverpool-born Jim can never leave the region he is now proud to call home. Tell me about your memories of your first official show that you promoted featuring The Ramones.
I was running the stage crew at Newcastle Poly in the mid-80s and doing work like standing on doors at other new venues at the time like Riverside. As I was a student, I was able to stand for election as the Entertainments officer at the Student Union.
It was already earning a reputation as a live music venue on the circuit and a lot of the people I worked with reckoned I could take the step up and be a promoter which effectively is what the job entailed. I threw my hat into the ring and the rest as they say…. I had great help from Steve Forster who had held the post the previous two years and he gave me great guidance.
I’d always wanted to promote, an ambition that used to draw laughs from my mates until they twigged that I could get them free gig tickets and I wanted to use the two-year stint as an apprenticeship, really find my feet and aim as high as possible.
So I went about booking high-profile acts. The first real gig and first career milestone came about when I put The Ramones on at the Poly on October 16, 1987, I was 21 at the time, finding my feet and I’m putting on one of the most revered bands of the era on in Newcastle.
It’s funny as I don’t remember a lot about the actual gig but I walked through the bar in the afternoon before sound check and Joey Ramone was playing Space Invaders. He asked his tour manager for 10 pence to play but he didn’t have change so I said I’d pay if I could play with him. It would be great to learn a little more about your background at that time and why / how you became a promoter.
I’d got into the band scene in Liverpool mainly through the crowd that I would go with to watch Liverpool FC play.
It was all part of the same culture but I’d always been a massive music fan and had been going to gigs since I was 11. I always wanted to get into promoting, following the realisation that I wasn’t a very good singer and thought behind the scenes is where I need to be.
You could see from reading NME at the time that Newcastle had a growing live scene and appetite for live music so I thought I might get a chance if I go and study there. Can you talk us through some of your promotional career highlights, your memories of them, when they happened and how they make you feel looking back?
Apparently, I was the first Entertainment officer to make money. It wasn’t just the live shows we did but the student club nights we put on that were packed every week. I was very proud of that at the time.
With the Shindig club event, it was amazing to take that from a Thursday night event predominantly student crowd and alongside Scott Bradford, Lee Melrose (Scooby) and Rob Cameron to one of the leading club nights in the UK. It was with Shindig that I did my first outdoor event in 2001. We were looking to do something different, something special and Baltic Square had just been completed in Gateshead. The Baltic wasn’t even open and I persuaded the council to let us put a dance event on for 3,000 people. The thrill of it selling out and the buzz around the event was unbelievable.
With Shindig we won the Underground Club of The Year at the Muzik Magazine awards in the same year (2001). At the time it was like the Oscars of Dance music and this was the really cool accolade of all the prizes. I got so drunk I broke the award!
One of the most amazing things we did with Shindig was when we were invited to co-present a show on Radio One on a Friday night.
I went on to found Evolution with Adam Collerton, Graham Anderson, and Sue Wilkinson but it was the introduction of Dave Stone to the festival and his marketing and booking nouse that really took a free outdoor quayside event into a major festival.
It won best event at the North East Tourist awards in 2008. It was a proud moment to be recognised as producing the best event in the North East.
I’m immensely proud of the work we did to build Evolution into the event it was and looking back at the artists who played it and have gone on to global stardom including Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding and I will never forget the monumental efforts we had to go to put Deadmau5 on the quayside.
We had to build a stage twice the size of anything we had done before just to get his stage set cubes on stage but they were stunning and easily one of the biggest spectacles ever seen on the waterfront.
More recently I’ve been working with promoters such as Mike Hesketh (Northern Lights) and Steve Davis (Live from Times Square) in developing Times Square into an inner city outdoor venue that can be used every summer. What about some career lows or maybe some events that you tried to make happen and didn’t quite come off? The big one has to be the 2001 BBC