John Mostyn | |
---|---|
Origin | Cheshire, England (Based in Birmingham) |
Website | Mostyn.net |
John Mostyn is a prominent music industry figure in the West Midlands, most notable for managing The Beat and later, Fine Young Cannibals. [1]
Mostyn discovered Detroit based group Inner City, who under his direction had the hits 'Big Fun' and 'Good Life'.[ citation needed ]
Arguably, Mostyn's most notable success was with Fine Young Cannibals, whom he managed after The Beat separated. With Mostyn as manager the band enjoyed huge success, including a Billboard number 1 album with their album The Raw & the Cooked , which has been certified Platinum 11 times around the world. The band initially had great difficulty securing a recording contract. As described in an interview [2] with John Mostyn : -
"We'd gone, in three months, from every record company rejecting them to every record company wanting them; that's what managers do."
Mostyn is also credited with launching Ocean Colour Scene, via his own Phffft label. [3]
Though not originally from Birmingham [4] Mostyn has spent most of his professional life in Birmingham.[ citation needed ] He has had considerable influence in the area's music industry, reportedly bringing over £30 million into the local economy. [1] Mostyn was also involved in the launch of 2 Tone Records, as referenced in his biography at mostyn.net : -
"Gerry Dammers of the then unheard of ‘Specials’ bought a copy of their first single to John and announced that he was concerned that they would be able to sell their first pressing of a thousand. John immediately booked the band on a national tour and Chrysalis records picked up the band and the ‘Two Tone’ label. The Two Tone explosion was under way." [5]
Mostyn has recently been working as tour manager for James Hunter.
Mostyn is now running Bob Lamb's (ex-UB40 producer) studio in Birmingham, now known as Highbury Studio. [6] The studio has been used in the past by such notable acts as Duran Duran, Ocean Colour Scene and Stephen Duffy. [7] Currently it hosts some of Birmingham's finest artists such as Ruby Turner, Alternative Dubstep Orchestra, and Goodnight Lenin. [8]
Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many skinheads.
Cannibal Corpse is an American death metal band formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1988, now based out of Tampa, Florida.
Moseley is a suburb of south Birmingham, England, three miles south of the city centre.
Nick Rhodes is an English keyboardist and producer, best known as a founding member and the keyboardist of the band Duran Duran.
Signing Off is the debut album by British reggae band UB40, released in the UK on 29 August 1980 by Dudley-based independent label Graduate Records. It was an immediate success in their home country, reaching number 2 on the UK albums chart, and made UB40 one of the many popular reggae bands in Britain, several years before the band found international fame. The politically-concerned lyrics struck a chord in a country with widespread public divisions over high unemployment, the policies of the recently elected Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher, and the rise of the National Front party, while the record's dub-influenced rhythms reflected the late 1970s influence in British pop music of West Indian music introduced by immigrants from the Caribbean after the Second World War, particularly reggae and ska – this was typified by the 2 Tone movement, at that point at the height of its success and led by fellow West Midlands act The Specials, with whom UB40 drew comparisons due to their multiracial band line-up and socialist views.
Fine Young Cannibals (FYC) were an English pop rock band formed in Birmingham, England, in 1984 by former The Beat band bassist David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox with singer Roland Gift. Their self-titled 1985 debut album contained "Johnny Come Home" and a cover of "Suspicious Minds", two songs that were top 40 hits in the UK, Canada, Australia and Europe. Their 1989 album, The Raw & the Cooked, topped the UK, US, Australian and Canadian album charts, and contained their two Billboard Hot 100 number ones: "She Drives Me Crazy" and "Good Thing".
Ocean Colour Scene are an English rock band formed in Birmingham in 1989. They have had five top 10 albums, including a number one in 1997. They have also achieved seventeen top 40 singles and six top 10 singles to date.
Roland Lee Gift is a British musician and actor. He is the former lead vocalist of the pop rock band Fine Young Cannibals.
Moseley Shoals is the second album by the British rock group Ocean Colour Scene which was released during the Britpop era. The album reached #2 in the UK charts, and amassed 92 weeks on chart, making it the band's most successful album in terms of weeks on chart, despite a later album reaching #1.
John Foxx is an English singer, musician, artist, photographer, graphic designer, writer, teacher and lecturer. He was the original lead singer of the new wave band Ultravox, before leaving to embark on a solo career in 1980 with the album Metamatic.
Stephen Cradock is an English guitarist, most notable for playing in the rock group Ocean Colour Scene. Cradock also plays the guitar in Paul Weller's band, having appeared on all of Weller's solo records following his self-titled debut solo album. Cradock began playing lead guitar for British ska band The Specials in 2014.
Simon Geoffrey Fowler is an English singer and acoustic guitarist, best known as the frontman of Ocean Colour Scene.
The Raw & the Cooked is the second and final studio album by British rock band Fine Young Cannibals, released in 1989. The title of the album was lifted from the book of the same name by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Four songs from the album first appeared in film soundtracks in the mid-1980s, three of which were soul tracks from the Tin Men film. The band had already recorded over half of the album by the time David Z came to produce the remainder. His work with the band, which resulted in dance-rock material, included studio experimentation.
Roger Charlery, known professionally as Ranking Roger, was an English musician. He was a vocalist in the 1980s ska band the Beat and later new wave band General Public. He subsequently was the frontman for a reformed Beat lineup.
Psi Com was an American post-punk band of the early 1980s, consisting of Perry Farrell (vocals), Aaron Sherer, Vince Duran (guitar) and Kelly Wheeler (bass). Prominent in the underground Los Angeles music scene, the group were noted for being the first band of Farrell, who went on to achieve greater fame in the bands Jane's Addiction, Porno for Pyros and the Satellite Party.
Oscar Lloyd Harrison is a British musician who currently plays drums with Birmingham-based Ocean Colour Scene and the British ska band The Beat. He also plays piano and bass guitar, and occasionally sings lead vocals.
Dan Sealey is the former session bass guitarist for the rock group Ocean Colour Scene. He was drafted in by the band after Damon Minchella left the band in 2003. Sealey is also in Merrymouth, a folk band with Ocean Colour Scene bandmate Simon Fowler and Adam Barry. Before joining Ocean Colour Scene Sealey was a member of the band Late.
The Incredible Kidda Band (aka The Kidda Band) were a British power pop band formed in Nuneaton on 10 February 1976, and composed of Alan Hammonds (guitars, vocals), Graham "Kidder" Hammonds (percussion, backing vocals), Dave 'Legs' Lister, (lead guitar, backing vocals], John Rollason (guitar, backing vocals), Les Rollason (bass), Graham "Dick" Millington (drums). Later members of the band were Mark "Tarky" Bates (drums, backing vocals), Keith Taylor (bass), Mick Rollason (guitar, backing vocals) and Paul Gardner (drums).
Birmingham's culture of popular music first developed in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s the city's music scene had emerged as one of the largest and most vibrant in the country; a "seething cauldron of musical activity", with over 500 bands constantly exchanging members and performing regularly across a well-developed network of venues and promoters. By 1963 the city's music was also already becoming recognised for what would become its defining characteristic: the refusal of its musicians to conform to any single style or genre. Birmingham's tradition of combining a highly collaborative culture with an open acceptance of individualism and experimentation dates back as far back as the 18th century, and musically this has expressed itself in the wide variety of music produced within the city, often by closely related groups of musicians, from the "rampant eclecticism" of the Brum beat era, to the city's "infamously fragmented" post-punk scene, to the "astonishing range" of distinctive and radical electronic music produced in the city from the 1980s to the early 21st century.
Merrymouth was a folk-oriented band founded by Ocean Colour Scene songwriter and vocalist Simon Fowler (guitar/vocals), Dan Sealey (guitar/piano/vocals), Mike McNamara (Bass/Piano/Organ/Guitar/Percussion) and later Adam Barry (piano/organ/accordion/harmonica/vocals).
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)