Progress Report Three

I’ve finally conducted my ‘expert’ interview and it couldn’t of gone better. I’ve emailed countless music management companies, promoters and university courses over the past few weeks and hardly anyone got back to me, which was beginning to be a bit of a worry. Thankfully, when someone did show an interest in being part of my documentary it was worth the wait.

My interview was with Doctor Mike Jones, a music lecturer at The University of Liverpool. I felt that alone was enough to make him a worthwhile part of my documentary as he’s clearly knowledgeable about the music industry. However, over the course of the interview he told me about his almost half century experience working in various parts of popular music. He was in a top 20 UK band in the 1980s and played Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, his lifelong friend now manages Oasis and involved Mike in the process of signing them, and after his band broke up he used his in-depth industry knowledge to gain his doctorate and set up the first masters university music course in the country. As you can imagine, speaking to him was incredibly interesting and what he had to say was so valuable to my documentary. To have someone with such hands-on knowledge of the industry over such a long period of time will add a lot of weight to some of the points I’m hoping to make and being able to compare the industry today to how it was before through the experiences of someone who was in a successful band themselves will give some much needed context to the actual state of the industry today.

I’m really, really happy with the interview and now that I have the final piece of my documentary I can begin the editing process and hopefully get it all done before I go home for Christmas. The only downside is that I now have a 25 minute long interview to cut down into effectively a minute and a half’s worth of quotes. It will be difficult to choose the best quotes to use because everything Mike told me was so interesting and relevant.