MIDEM is the biggest music trade fair in the world but before you get any fancy ideas about sex'n'drugs and stuff, consider its real title: "the international record music publishing and video music market". In the multi-billion pound music there is room here for the "verse, chorus, verses" (the musicians themselves) as rights, contracts, distribution, publishing, cataloguing and licensing deals are sledge-hammered out courtesy of fax, modem and mobile phone.
There are 20,000-odd delegates here in Cannes, along with a bilingual Greek chorus of press, TV and radio. When the delegates aren't discussing, negotiating and haggling, they're "taking" seminars where they hear big nobs say things like (and I quote) "the working order of the international industry is to be unleashed in new world markets". Like they say, it's one for the money and two for the show.
There's an Irish night at this year's MIDEM for the first time, organised by International Event Management (which is run by two affable young Dubliners, Keith Williams and Karl Hannigan) with a lot of help from those wild, rock'n'roll party animals who go under the name of An Bord Trachtala (crazy name, crazy guys). The whole raison detre, to use the vernacular, is to get a whole bunch of record company bosses, publishing company people, booking agents, promoters, etc to cast their eyes over the Irish bands on show and hopefully launch them on to the European record-buying and gig-going populace.
Up in the Palm Beach Casino, a big, impressive venue, which incidentally has palm trees outside and is on the beach (fancy that), three new contenders in the shape of Sinead Lohan (described in the programme as "progressive folk" (which really should read "acoustic singer-songwriter"), The Ultra Montanes (described as "alt.pop" which really should read indie-pop) and Tripswitch (described as "rock" which really should be spelt "rawk") all give it I 10 per cent. Remarkably, it was Tripswitch's first gig - but all becomes clear when you find out they used to be called My Little Funhouse. Cue story.
From Kilkenny, My Little Funhouse were so young when they signed their massive record deal with Geffen in 1991 that some of their parents had to sign on their behalf. At the time Geffen were one of the coolest labels in the world; they had Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, Guns N' Roses (one of the biggest bands in the world at that time) and were about to sign The Stone Roses. Geffen put a small mountain of money into the Kilkenny band, relocated them to Los Angeles, got them the same management team as Guns N' Roses and then waited for a return on its investment. The band's debut album, Standunder, sold reasonably well around Europe and in the US and for the follow-up, the band had Slash playing on a few tracks.
When it was finished, Geffen didn't release it. Band and record company soon parted company and the five-piece went home to Kilkenny in August of last year. Their drummer went off and joined Therapy? their bass player joined The Frames and the remaining three got in two new members, changed their name and arrived in Cannes (with an average age of 21), war-weary veterans of the music industry.
As opposed to most Dublin bands who sit around Grogan's, (or wherever) moaning about "how the record company never understood us" when they are dropped, Tripswitch merely shrugged their shoulders. Remarkably untainted by their experiences(one day being driven around LA in a stretch limo, next day back in Kilkenny with no record deal) they remain some of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. Tripswitch's sound is not radically different from My Little Funhouse's, although guitarist Brendan Morrissey says that they're a bit more "alt.rock" than "metal" these days - which basically means that the band have taken full account of what happened when Nirvana et al took the concept of metal, dragged it up an alleyway and gave it a good punk rock hammering. Despite the fact that most "metal/alt.rock" practitioners and fans are written off as no more than white thrash, it remains, alongside country, one of the biggest markets within the industry - consider that Metallica have sold about 50 million albums worldwide.
For their first gig, Tripswitch displayed a real grasp of the dynamics of alt.rock. Whether Cannes can do for them what L.A. couldn't, we'll find out over the next few weeks. Stranger things have happened - as they well know.
