Skins Music in The Observer Monthly
Skins was featured in The Observer Monthly it was a 5 piece about skins music, soundtrack had interviews with the creator and the director of the infamous trailers. Thanks to Felix who sent this in.
You’re breaking my arm! You’re breaking my fucking arm!” Closing time at the Paradise Inn and a riot has broken out. A dozen policemen are losing their battle to contain the lagered-up lads and bullet-headed locals. Pint glasses rain down, a chair goes through a window, there’s blood everywhere. Earlier this evening, nine underage teenagers had walked into the grim Croydon boozer and straight up the patrons’ noses: pointing at the woman with the ponytail doing karaoke, snorting cocaine off a credit card, getting off with one another in the toilets and pouring beer down each other’s throats. Then 16-year-old Cook climbed on a table and lit a flare. Then it all kicked off.
Ah, the youth of today. Or at least, the youth of Skins – the E4 drama, now in its edgier, grittier third series, that has earned both a nod from Bafta and a shake of the head from Middle England for its lively portrayal of British teens. Here, abortion, self-harm and coffin theft are part of the daily routine, one that inevitably ends, druggily, with an all-night house party. “That’s Skins’ job, to shock the Daily Mail,” grins Neil Gorringe, who is directing today’s pub fight, an edit of which was eventually toned down for TV.
Since announcing itself noisily in 2007 Skins has been noted for risk-taking. For this series, almost the entire cast was dumped and replaced by unknowns (only Effy Stonem, played by Kaya Scodelario, remains from the first two series). For the past few weeks, viewers have been acquainting themselves with skater Freddie, idealist Naomi, “nutcase” Cook, honest Thomas, twins Emily and Katie, fame-seeker Karen and kooky Pandora.
“There was some disquiet from the channel; but we just did it,” explains Bryan Elsley, the amiable 47-year-old who created the show with his 23-year-old son, Jamie Brittain, and comes across like a groovy supply teacher, all baggy jumper and amusingly off-message views.
Elsley and Brittain figured their school-age drama could scarcely continue to be that once its protagonists had left for college – as they did at the end of series two. “Our show is for 16-year-olds,” Elsley reasons. “Better have 16-year-olds in it, then.”
In Skins’ quest to portray authentic middle-class hipster youth, it has pushed the boat out with its soundtrack. There are around 150 songs in each series, many of them by acts liable to leave even the most au courant of music programmers, as well as fans, scratching their heads. It’s a fair bet Skins represents the first TV exposure for Oregon ambient act Eluvium, Liverpool indie-ska band We Need Leads and North Shields pop group Moira Stewart, and an even fairer one that it’s the first channel flagship drama to open to the strains of Son the Father by hardcore Toronto punks Fucked Up – as series three did. When Skins isn’t busy pushing a playlist of early-adopter rock, dub and dance, it’s doing a fine job of helping to break bands – and spearheading an increasingly relevant market for the record business: promoting music through TV dramas.
Today’s pub shoot isn’t part of the show; it’s the “trail” or advert used to set up the new series. “It’s more of a music video,” says Gorringe, who will fit music to the footage. “It gives you an impression of the show.” His “trail” for series one featured a house party in high debauchery – all necking pills, sex in the shower and someone bouncing around dressed as a giant bear. It was soundtracked by a mix of Gossip’s Standing in the Way of Control, one of 2007’s defining songs by one of 2007’s defining bands. Except by that stage, physical sales of that single had seen it scale the giddy heights of number 64 in the charts.
“At that point if you were listening to Gossip, you were considered pretty cutting-edge – they were a real ‘bands’ band’,” says Gil Goldberg, founder of Gossip’s label, Back Yard Recordings. “Radio 1 didn’t want to support the record; our video wasn’t getting any daytime play. The Skins video really replaced our video. It was the first TV show marketed like an underground band; on MySpace, with virals, very carefully targeted. They broke the band. Radio 1 were forced to come back and it ended up being the second or third biggest record of 2007, in terms of airplay.” (Radio 1 says the record was played on specialist shows then added to the playlist once it was re-released, around the time of the Skins trailer.)
Gossip went on to headline Glastonbury’s Other Stage that summer. “I wish I’d known it was going to have that impact,” says Goldberg. “I was running Gossip’s marketing campaign at a small loss – we’re a small independent – so I was trying to squeeze every pound out of Channel 4 I could.”
Skins similarly shined on Brooklyn band MGMT, whose Time to Pretend soundtracked series two’s big finale, cementing their position as one of 2008’s breakthrough acts. With a collapsing music industry desperate to sell any music to anyone anyhow, and terrestrial telly having all but given up on music programming (will Top of the Pops be back? Will it not?), Skins offers its viewers an apparently world-shattering proposition: the opportunity to discover some cool new songs. Its creators say it’s simply the music their characters would be into themselves. Indeed dance duo Crystal Castles and indie band Foals have both appeared in the show, playing live at parties attended by those characters. Meanwhile, a number of Skins Live events have seen cast members touring the country meeting fans, while bleeding-edge acts such as Late of the Pier, thecocknbullkid and Ladyhawke performed. Last year they even set up a label, SkinsLife Records.
The gatekeeper of Skins’ music policy is 22-year-old Alex Hancock. “Drama producers tend to be in their 30s or 40s and have quite a good knowledge of music, but they tend to think young people still like Steely Dan,” says Brian Elsley. “We went out and found the youngest, most obstreperous, most knowledgable music fan we could.” To be fair, he didn’t commission the world’s most extensive search: Hancock studied English at King’s College London with his son Jamie Brittain, where he was regarded as the university music nut. Hancock sorted out all the music for series one while he was cramming for his finals, teaching himself music licensing law as he went (”That was awful; I went into meltdown”). Now he is Skins’ head of music and, according to a poll in the NME, the 24th most important person in the music industry – three places above Björk.
When we met, he was sat in the threadbare offices of Skins’ London production company, Company Pictures, doing what he enjoys best: hunting through dozens of bookmarked blogs (ghettobassquake, negrophonic, lopresentation) on his laptop, looking for new music. Dressed in a black hoodie promoting a suitably obscure record label, he was bright and chipper and eager to enthuse about the previous night at Shoreditch’s Forward club, where he’d been “pretty blown away” by Marcus Nasty, a rising dubstep DJ. Series three was halfway through filming, putting all the more pressure on the writers of the last two episodes, who still hadn’t figured out how the thing ended. (A whiteboard in one room bore the fruits of some brainstorming: “___ and ___ sleep together”; “collective lack of acknowledgment”; “exams”; and so on). Hancock still had plenty of songs to track down, license from artists and labels and painstakingly sync to scenes in the edit suite. Joanna Newsom, the Californian folk singer who has a challenging way with a harp, was giving him grief (”We wanted her song Emily in one scene and she rejected it”). Elsley had just knocked back his suggestion of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s Some Velvet Morning for another scene (”Because it’s too old or too well-known? Possibly both. But it’s one of my favourite songs of all time…”)
Couldn’t he just stick on some Kaiser Chiefs and Oasis and be done with it? Isn’t that what kids are into? He looked aghast. “It’s not really fitting with these middle-class kids in Bristol, is it? If it were Shameless or something… I’m from Stoke and I know Oasis are still massive there…” Actually, if it were entirely down to Hancock, he’d stick to unsigned acts. “I would love the entire show to be soundtracked by struggling artists. People who deserve a break.” London indie band Paper Heroes would surely agree. After emailing in their track Jenny Jones, singer Matt Weedon was surprised to find Hancock on the the phone, asking to use it in an episode and inviting Paper Heroes on the Skins Live tour. They’ve since been playlisted on national radio, put out a single and done the rounds of music press interviews. “We’d only been together for two months,” Weedon says. “We only had one song.”
Such happy synergy between the show and its fans has naturally proved catnip to music companies looking to connect with “the kids”, and Hancock increasingly finds himself on the wooing end of record pluggers. “Coming to me saying ‘This song is a big priority for us’ or ‘Franz Ferdinand are really interested in being part of the show,’ ’cause they’ve realised it’s one of the best outlets for them.” Sadly, though, you won’t be hearing the results of Alex Kapranos’s occasionally danceable new direction in series three.
“I didn’t like it,” Hancock said.
In America, they have got the soundtracking of TV dramas down to a fine art. To wit: it is 2006, a young surgeon in a rose-coloured ballgown lies heartbroken next to the body of her dead fiancé. Five of her closest friends look on forlornly, frozen in their inability to offer even the slightest comfort to the grieving widow. She begins to sob uncontrollably, when the most stoic member of the group scoops her up in his arms, whispering tender words of support. Amid the sobbing rises a sound that seems to both encapsulate the fragility of human existence, and offer hope to us all. It is Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol.
That’s what happened in that year’s season finale of Grey’s Anatomy. It was also the moment Snow Patrol broke America. The producers of Grey’s Anatomy had hardly stumbled across Chasing Cars by chance; it was brought to them by Alex Patsavas, founder of the Californian company Chop Shop. Patsavas is a “music supervisor”, a role that’s been called “one of the fastest-growing careers in the music industry” and involves the placing of songs in TV shows. She has soundtracked Gossip Girl, The OC and Mad Men – sometimes with up to nine songs an episode, a third of which tend to be from “unknown” bands – and been Grammy-nominated for her trouble. The Killers, Coldplay and Duffy have all reaped the benefits of her knack for pairing a big, emotive song with a big, emotive TV moment, for which labels charge her “anything from $1,000 up to Paul McCartney money”. (Skins contracts legally bind them to offer everyone the same payment; usually around £400. But that’s for small bands. Thirty seconds of Queen or Robbie Williams could easily come in at £16,000 – £8,000 each for publishing and recording rights.)
Patsavas is often sourcing music for a show before the pilot has even been shot. “Because I use music as a character, it really captures the audience’s imaginations,” she explains. “The music business has changed. All the big CD stores in America have closed. Fans are finding music through TV, instead of more traditional channels. Songs are now debuted on TV before they’re even played on the radio.”
As much was apparent when Detective Danny Messer’s phone rang in CSI:NY not so long ago. “Coldplay?” noted his partner of the ringtone, while a shot of the screen spelt it out. “Yeah! It’s called Talk,” Messer explained. “Something my girlfriend’s really good at.” The single then played over the closing credits. The broadcasting behemoth CBS has even set up its own label, CBS Records, specifically to collaborate with the TV network in writing bands into their shows.
It’s a sea change not lost on James Walsh of the British band Starsailor. In December, he took his acoustic guitar to his American manager’s LA garden and performed All the Plans, the new Starsailor album, for an invited assembly of music supervisors. It’s not out until March, but Walsh hoped to tee-up its release via the placement of several songs in TV dramas.
“It’s become a huge part of bands breaking America,” he explained one afternoon before he left. “It’s taken over from the idea you need to go out there and flog your guts out. As Snow Patrol have discovered, if you can get your music in a particularly poignant moment or a season finale of a huge TV show it can have as much, if not more, effect in considerably less time.”
Several older Starsailor songs have already been “serviced” in shows such as CSI, Law & Order and Eli Stone – impassioned Britrock apparently being particularly well-suited to the genre. “We tend to get a lot of criminal dramas,” Walsh chuckled. “Somehow a music supervisor gets hold of these songs that were not a great success, and they’re given some validation. You think, ‘That song was worth writing, ’cause someone has connected with it.’ Though,” he noted, “we’ve still not had The Snow Patrol Moment. No season finale or montages yet.”
You might argue that people get into bands to tour the world, not to soundtrack someone popping their clogs in a prime-time hospital drama. But Walsh says, in America at least, “you need it, in order to survive. There’s a genuine chance of making it in the UK on the back of radio play; whereas America is just too vast”.
In the UK, we’re coming round to the notion that instead of another doomed attempt to make music TV popular, a more profitable use of time would be trying to fit music to TV that already is popular. Thinking inside the box, if you will. “There’s so few music shows now that you have to look at the opportunities there are to get the right music to the right demographic,” says Simon Gavin, MD of A&M Records in the UK, home to Duffy and the Courteeners. “Record companies now have to plug producers of TV dramas in the way they used to plug radio stations.”
Find the right combination of song and show and seemingly everyone wins. It would be a special sort of curmudgeon who thought Half the World Away playing wistfully over the end of The Royle Family was to the detriment of Oasis, for example. “Or look at Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy in the [2006 TV] ad for the Zane Lowe radio show,” says Gavin. “That went a long way to getting that record heard by a lot of people. Or Big Brother 7, when they did a montage at the end to Run by Snow Patrol. Three-and-a-half minutes! A free advert! The album had an immediate spike because it was the right scene with the right record.”
Another afternoon at Company Pictures, and TV plugging, Big Brother montages and The Snow Patrol Moment were far from the minds of the Skins team. In his office, Bryan Elsley cued up a track from the fifth episode of the new series, which goes out this week. “A little classic called Rim Lickin’,” he grinned. “The lyrics are just broadcastable.” It clattered out of the speakers – “You’re the stuffing/ I’m the chicken/ So we’re clickin’/ You’re still lickin’/ Clock is tickin’/ Stick your dick in…” – sounding not unlike the sort of boisterous R&B track Destiny’s Child used to excel at.
That was because it had been created for Skins by Destiny’s Child’s producers, the Rural. When you see the scene – in which the Karen character sings to both Radio 1’s Scott Mills and The Mighty Boosh’s Bob Fossil (Rich Fulcher) – it’ll be clear why. It was typical of the extra mile the Skins team were willing to go to get the music right. For series three, they invited aspiring musicians to email in tracks (”Microhouse, balaeric, funky, alt-folk, ambient, 16th-century choral,” said the website. “You name it, we will listen to it!”), the best of which are being used in the show. Elsley would love Skins to be able to fulfil its A&R potential – “to have music from unsigned bands, which are then signed to our label, available as cheap downloads and promoted at our parties where the bands play live; a virtuous circle to support new music inside the show and to the fans.” But Ofcom, the TV regulator people, won’t have it. It counts as product placement, says Elsley. “We’re scratching our heads trying to work out what that means for The X Factor. Because those stars have become very rich.” (Ofcom says the issue is one of cross-promotion, as covered by section 10.3 of the Broadcasting Code. The X Factor’s content is directly related to the programme; the music in Skins is not. However, that doesn’t stop them releasing CD compilations, so long as they’re not promoted within the show, as they have done.)
Meanwhile director Neil Gorringe was still editing together footage of the pub riot. He said he’d spent the past month “constantly listening to music, reading thousands of blogs and putting every track I can think of into Last.fm [the custom internet radio station that creates endless playlist chains], then following the spiralling chains”, and was still trying to work out which song would complement the series trail best. He was down to a shortlist of 10.
“It’s kind of working against massively uptempo and massively downtempo,” he sighed. [Eventually, he settled on Halfway Home by critically adored, but hitless, Brooklyn band TV on the Radio.] After his impact with Gossip, he was aware that he’d “set up an expectation” and was keen to get it right.
If Elsley could find a way around Ofcom – perhaps by Skins using a third party record label, but retaining creative input – he had big plans for the show’s music. Though, admittedly, these were unlikely to help dig any label of out of their current financial woes. “I want to sell music so cheap it’s not worth stealing,” he explained. “Like a lot of things, it would be a great thing to do as long as people aren’t trying to get rich. Kids don’t want to get rich. They just want people to listen to their music. And they want to go to gigs and parties and have fun.
“That,” he said, “is what kids want.”
Some shoot, some score
Put music with TV sport and everyone’s a winnerCan they kick it? Yes, they can. Usually to the sound of some lad-rocking Oasis, Kasabian or Kings of Leon. Or, should some pathos be required, then James Morrison’s You Give Me Something or Sigur Rós’s Hoppípolla (for a 2005/2006 end-of-season goal montage) should get the job done. Yes, music and football TV now go together like Saint and Greavsie used to – indeed, that’s where it all began. When footie telly moved from the straight-up action replays of the BBC’s Match of the Day to the more magazine-based, light-entertainment medium initiated by the pally ex-footballers’ vehicle Saint and Greavsie (ITV, 1985-1992), rock music joined in.
After football landed on Sky Sports in the early 90s, ballooning budgets meant slicker production values – and deeper pockets should a Prodigy or Simple Minds track be required. Tim Lovejoy’s Soccer AM arrived on Sky in 1995, capitalising on the former Big Breakfast researcher’s enthusiasm for all things indie – and Noel Gallagher was soon joining him on the orange sofa, discussing the finer points of penalty shoot-outs.
Maxïmo Park, Belle and Sebastian and Elbow have all soundtracked Soccer AM. “And there are bands we occasionally take a punt on,” says its assistant producer Trevor Giess. “With the unsigned acts we pay something like £200 to use the track. There was a band called Pint Shot Riot who ended up doing quite well.” (There were festival slots and good-sized gigs for the Jam-indebted band in their native Coventry.)
Now it’s almost impossible to think of someone scoring a goal on TV without something that sounds a bit like Oasis thundering away in the background. Inevitably, record companies have been quick to capitalise.
“We started putting the release dates of the tracks up on the screen,” says Giess. “Now we have good links with the labels and pluggers, and get songs at the same time, or ahead of, radio.”
Episode 6
Does anybody know where it’s from? Thanks. 
