THE PAST IS BLACK BUT THE FUTURE'S BRIGHT

Colin Vearncombe has an unusual and hi-tech way of ensuring a wonderful life, Mike Davies discovers

The artist formerly known as Black (as the sticker said on his last album), best known for international classic hit (and jeans commercial music) Wonderful Life, Colin Vearncombe has just had an unusual experience for a record artist.

Having just completed his next album, Seeding, he’s dropped his record company rather than the other way round.
Not that he didn’t like the people, he explains in his articulate Liverpool tones, it was just that they’d started acting like a major label, talking about taking a single to radio.
“People say it’s the best album I’ve ever made but frankly there isn’t a single on it. And if you’re trying to get something of mine played on main-stream radio then you’re going to come a cropper. Because they won’t. “
Not because Colin’s no good. He has a voice designed to melt the hearts of any passing Scott Walker fan.
And last year’s The Accused was as fine an album as you could wish to hear.
But because, well, because he’s not young or fashionable and, having been off the scene for seven years, hasn’t gigged constantly to build the live audience necessary to be taken up as criminally ignored cause of the month like David Gray.
So, in a business that’s increasingly chasing clones of whatever’s this week’s hit, where if your first two singles don’t get on Radio 1 your record label turns their attentions to another signing, Vearncombe’s come to understand that the only person he can really rely on to keep his career in motion is himself.
“When your video budget goes from £70,000 on the first single to to £12,000 on the next, you don’t need to be told about prioritisation! “ he laughs.
“The future for people like me has got be areas where you can’t be blocked by the existing machinery because you don’t fit by their rules. So the problem is finding the market and the means.”
Which, as many others have realised, leads you to the Internet. Colin’s just released Abbey Road Live, a sparsely-recorded nine-track collection of old songs and a couple of new ones.
But it will only be available to order from his website.
“The truth is I didn’t want to release it because I couldn’t see the point,” he says with disarming frankness. “I’m not sure people are even prepared to accept an album like this from me. I’m not John Martyn or Bob Dylan. But the studio experience is fascinating and I really liked a lot of it so I thought I’d turn it into something that could exist out there in the real world.
“If people want to check it out that’s great. And the beauty of the Internet is that, with a lot of leg work and passion, you can find people out there who will be interested. And you don’t need to find as many to make a living. You only need 25per cent of your previous volume of sales to create the same money. Sell 5,000 and you’ve got a £50,000 turnover. And you get the money immediately.
“I’m actually about to re-record Wonderful Life and post it on the net for free. It makes more sense than pressing 1000 copies to send to radio so they can say they won’t play it. “
It’s certainly changing times.
The last tour was his first as Colin Vearncombe rather than Black and the first time he’d done a largely acoustic show.
Not, he confesses, without a certain sense of trepidation.
“The solo acoustic thing was a necessary trial by ordeal. It had to be done because I was frightened of it. To be honest, I’m still intimidated. There’s nothing to hide behind. But the upside is that people get the chance to hear things clearer.
“I had audiences saying how great it was to hear the words for the first time. I even had people laughing at lines where I was being funny. I’d never had that before. And if I’d had, I’d never have heard them.”
Back out touring again, once more stripped down to solo acoustic mode, he admits that the experience has also changed him as a writer. And as I’ll Give You Something To Cry About on the live album proves, clearly for the better.
“What I really get fired up about in music is singers and songs. I don’t care where the music comes from. Good is good. Doing that tour made me realise there were lots of areas where I’d been bluffing. I looked back at my albums and there was a good 30 per cent on each one where I was gilding rubbish. Now my criteria for excellence is more sharply defined.
“I’ve realised you can only go so far with autobiographical writing. If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to see as other people do.
“That takes you to stories and stories are what changed the world. So I’ve been working hard to liberate myself from the way I used to write. Trying more to touch on the words. Because that’s really where the songs are made.”

Abbey Road Live is available at http://www.colinvearncombe.com/

19 October 2000, Birmingham Post