Martin Ross-Hall: I wanted to ask, firstly, about your years with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and your sudden departure in mid-2017.
Philip Powers: Oh, they were great years. There have been many great years but those were the best. So many incredible talents. I was lucky. Really lucky.
MRH: But then at the end, I take it there was some, how can I describe it, resentment?
PP: Not from me. Do you mean there’s resent from them? You know, I have only the greatest respect for the orchestra and its musicians. I’ve worked on probably – close to a hundred – actually, I have no idea, it might only be eight or ninety projects with them and this is an orchestra which on its best day is almost as good as the very best in the world.
MRH: So, why did you leave?
PP: I’d been there almost nine years, a new Director of Artistic Planning took over, they looked at my role – as Technical Media Producer – and decided that when balancing all of the things the orchestra was likely to want to emphasize in the next three years, while moving out of the Opera House, my role was now redundant.
MRH: And there’s no resentment on your part?
PP: No, no, no. You are mixing up two completely different things. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra is completely different from the people who manage the SSO. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra – at least in my mind – is the collective of players who comprise the orchestra. The SSO is a brand. It’s a recognizable brand which has marketers and support staff, and box office staff and administrators keeping it alive. The conductors and the players have always been completely – 100% – supportive of my role. I wouldn’t describe the administrators in the latter years the same way. [pause] Can we move on?
MRH: I can sense your need to move beyond this, so I’d like to know more about your years as a Music Producer with the orchestra.
PP: Okay, firstly, if I could still be working for the orchestra, I would be. I love this orchestra and I have done everything to represent them, audio-wise, as best I can, audibly, you know, with sound. Administrators come and go and their priorities change. Hell, I worked for 6 years on annual contracts, renewable based on my annual performance, then I worked without a contract for seven or eight months and signed a new contract in 2015 with them for three years. Then they decided after 16-months to terminate it with 20-months still to run. That’s their call. Secondly…
MRH: Sorry, sorry. I’ve got to interrupt. How can you have a three year contract and then have your organisation say that it’s over after 16 months.
PP: That’s the world in which we live these day. I answered an add for a permanent part-time position as Recording Enterprise Executive and they gave me a job on a contract, renewable or not, on December 31 each and every year. It is a great way to incentivise someone.
MRH: And that doesn’t rankle?
PP: Anytime you lose a job, whether it is through not being renewed or being fired, of course, it pisses you off. What really pissed me off was the fact that I couldn’t finish my two Foxtel projects. I even offered to work on them for free just so that I could take them to completion. They offered me three months pay for severing my contract when they only need to give me four weeks, and I said “Well, why not let me work for those 12 weeks and complete these contracts. They took 10 weeks to get back to me to say ‘No’.”
MRH: Ouch.
PP: Ouch.
MRH: Backtracking then, to get a sense of what you achieved in those years, how do you see your productivity?
PP: Well, finally a question I can answer. The productivity speaks for itself. I honestly have no idea how many CDs I produced for the orchestra, but it’s more than fifty and probably less than a hundred. I did around thirty or forty for SSO Live, seven to ten which ABC Classics or ABC Music released, another twenty which Exton released, give or take, and CDs for Melba, BIS and, oh, I honestly forget, some other labels. I know, Universal Music, the Dream of Gerontius and Elgar Cello Concerto, and some others.
MRH: And ARIA Awards?
PP: Twice I sat in the audience for ARIA-nominated albums. The first was the Brett Dean disc that was produced before I started at the SSO and the second was Kalkadungu, which won. William Barton on winning thanked everyone except for the orchestra. It was an oversight. Afterwards, the producer, Virginia Read was given many congratulations, but it was like William Barton and ABC Classics had made this recording without the Sydney Symphony Orchestra who were co-performers with Barton. I said to Laura Bell, the ABC label manager, “Actually, this was a win for the SSO as well.”
“Oh”, shamed-face, “of course.”
These people think its all about them despite the fact there’s an-eighty-piece orchestra who are co-performers with William Barton. That sucks. Still, that wasn’t my recording. I wasn’t even there when that was made.
MSH: That’s twice. But there was the third, when you won.
PP: That would be the Josh Pyke album. I – the Recording Manager for the SSO and the Music Producer of the album – wasn’t invited. In fact, I didn’t even know the awards were being announced and presented that day. A lovely girl, Christie, from work, the designer of the artwork, sent me a text congratulating me. I received it simultaneously with a text from Josh Pyke, which he’d sent me – as a joke – sitting in the audience – ‘from the future’, congratulating me on our win. I didn’t understand it. I thought he was telling me that in two months time, November, we were going to win.
MSH: That would have been cool.
PP: It would have been cool if I’d known that the ceremony was happening that day. I thought it was Josh celebrating a win – from the future – at another date. I turned up in the office and everyone was standing around congratulating me for a win that I didn’t even know I’d achieved. I’m saying, “But that was the nominations, right?” They’re saying, “No, that was the award.” It was weird.
MSH: Was that the highlight for you?
PP: Not of my life. No. The highlight would have been meeting Bruce Smeaton, talking with Richard Franklin on the phone, and having people like Simon Wincer, Tim Burstall, Patricia Lovell and Brian May, support my label, without a thought of putting a monetary value on the project. Add to that Garry McDonald, Tony Buckley and Simon Walker and Nigel Westlake, Guy Gross, Mark Isaacs.
This was smell-of-an-oily-rag productions – which was, incidentally, how I pitched the Josh Pyke album to Bob Scott, the engineer.
My entire life has been working on pet projects for fuck-all and lots of people assuming I made money out of it. I can count the 1M! CDs I was paid to produce without using either hand and the rest of them using my fingers and toes. I did almost everything for the love of the business.
MSH: Why would you work for free on so many albums?
PP: Aargh. There lies the rub.
MSH: Meaning?
PP: Some people have talent, are recognized, paid, and produce the right product at the right time. Offers roll in. Other people have a bit less talent – or even the same – but, they are not recognised, do it for free, and produce a product that hardly anyone wants.
MSH: Meaning?
PP: Derr.
MSH: For instance?
PP: Josh Pyke with the SSO. The budget went down from $80,000 to $35,000 and everyone dropped out. It was dead in the water. He had a studio album in the pipe and everyone – his management and label – thought ‘lets not confuse people by recording another album for release at the same time’. So, I said to Greg, ‘What if we record the concerts and release it when there’s no competing Josh Pyke album?’ Greg went back to Sony.
“No.” Sony didn’t want anything else from anyone and had no interest in Josh doing a Classical album with the SSO. And this is the strange thing. This entire project was Josh’s idea – playing his music – arranged as classical music – in front of an audience at the Opera House, like Lior and Gurrumul did, and he couldn’t convince anyone to even pay $25,000 to record it. It was $12,000 just to get the SOH Recording Studio to record two concerts. Post-production, conservatively, was $20-50,000.
This album was dead in the water. The SSO had no money for it, nor did Wonderlick or Sony.
A good question to ask right now, would be why did I give a flying fuck about this Meet the Music concert which I had nothing to do with?
MSH: So, why?
PP: History. [And that’s anther story about why history has always been important to me.]
MSH: Okay, let’s leave the other thing alone.
PP: Alright, this is the scenario: Josh Pyke is going to perform twelve, fourteen songs with arrangements for the SSO and him. It’s going to be performed without a recording. ABC FM won’t record it for broadcast because it’s not classical music. There is going to be no historical record of these two concerts.
So, I got creative and made a few deals, which only happened because of two great guys (and Des, I am so sorry that you never got your proper credit for your part in this. But then, seriously, proper credit is the wish of people who believe in fairies and I didn’t get it either).
MSH: And?
PP: Well, now I’m on a roll. This is a lesson in the money involved to produce an album. We’ve – I mean – SSO – have done albums with Burt Bacharach, Warner Bros (with Bugs Bunny), Lalo and other superstars and the buyout is in the tens of thousands for us, the SSO, for the secondary rights. Then there’s the studio, the engineers, the record company. It’s a lot of money.
It’s a hundred thousand dollars unless the orchestra throws in for a percentage – you know, waiving their fee.
If you’re a little person – like me, far down the food chain, you can have conversations with various people who are directors within the SSO and appeal to their sense of duty, or the importance of the project.
I appealed to a bunch of people – through emotional reasoning – and convinced everyone who required enormous fees to waive them. Sony agreed, SSO agreed, Josh agreed and I excluded the SOH recording studio by bypassing them. The last thing, was to lock in an engineer who would commit to a ridiculous fee for two hundred hours of work. The one last thing, after the other last thing, was to get some dumb sucker to producer the album, from the downbeat of the opening chord until the last word was corrected in the notes on the slick. I found the previous person in the form of Bob Scott and I found the dumb-sucker in the form of myself.
The givens in the record industry is that 1,000 CDs cost $2,000 – with all the hidden costs. Then there’s the artwork. That’s costly. Just delivering artwork ready for printing is significant. All of those costs amount to $4,000. That’s the fee – the undeniable cost – for any album to be produced for release.
I’ve produced maybe sixty CDs – seventy – eighty – a hundred – I have no idea – for printing and I know that’s the cost.
So this was the deal:
I offered Des $800 to do a multi-track recording from the output of the mixing desk for amplification in the auditorium. He wasn’t happy with the coverage with those mikes – God Bless him – and asked for another few hundred to rent extra mikes. [Thank you Des.]
I offered Bob $3,000 for 30 hours works, and if he chose to spend more time than that, it was his decision.
I offered myself the challenge of doing more, on top of a heavily mandated contract which was goal oriented, and I didn’t even ask myself if I would work for free – yet again.
Any interpretation of my contract with the SSO will support these claims, and any examination of the CD release of SSO performances will show that I’m erring on the side of caution, rather than overstatement.
I offered myself the opportunity to work for free on arrangements of music I’d never heard.
Why?
Gurrumul (which the SSO wouldn’t give me two tickets, so I didn’t see) and Lior, (which they did which didn’t make sense because I was in the recording alcove with Bob Scott and didn’t need a seat) were successes. I thought the importance of the act of recording by ABC was important. The fact that ABC considered Josh Pyke unimportant, annoyed me.
[CONSIDER THESE FACTS:
1. THE ABC CAN PAINT A PICTURE OF ME AS A DISGRUNTLED PERSON WHO REPEATEDLY APPLIED FOR JOBS AND WAS REJECTED – TRUE.
2. NO ONE CAN DENY THAT I WORKED FOR THE SSO FOR 8-YEARS WITH VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY, ZIMMERMANN, EHNES, OHLSSON, AMY DICKSON, ROSS EDWARDS, PETER SCULTHORPE, DAVID ROBERTSON, JOSH PYKE, AS A PRODUCER.
[FULL DISCOLSURE: I APPLIED FOR AN ABC CLASSICS JOB IN 1989 and 2013-14-15-16 AND DIDN’T GET IT. I DON’T HAVE REGRETS. IN FACT I CAN VIEW THESE FAILURES AS TIMES WHERE I DIDN’T GET MY WAY AND I STILL GOT TO DO OTHER THINGS – SOME OF WHICH WERE NOT WHAT I COULD HAVE ACHIEVED – ELSEWHERE – IN DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES..]
The hint of something equally important with Pyke, like Gurrumul and Lior, made me pursue this. What if this was equally ground-breaking?
And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul and I asked myself, What’s next?
Someone who is on a salary can add things in to their schedule, knowing they’re being paid no matter what they do.
Someone who is being paid to start and finish projects can only do extra work if they’re considered an employee, and can ask other employees to do extra work, beyond what they’re asked, and be denied. If they ask and they’re accepted its okay.
I was working on deliverables but achieving those and then creating new projects every year on top of that. You look at my contracts and what I was responsible for and you look at what I delivered, and it is nothing short of remarkable.