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Offering a helping hand: Tom McRae

Bite of Hard Candy: for her 11th album, Madonna employs the biggest names in the game

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After losing the backing of his record company, Tom McRae is organising his own roadshow to help other musicians.

SMALL ACTS CLUB TOGETHER
When he was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2001, it looked as if Tom McRae was going to become the new David Gray. But his music career didn't go as planned, and after years as the nearly man, his record company dropped him.

“Eventually they told me they could have given away a £10 note with every one of my albums and still have lost less money,” he tells me.

But that was all a long time ago, and now the singer-songwriter of heart-broken balladry is taking his music career into his own hands, and finding life much more rewarding as one of the little guys.

Continuing without weighty financial backing was a struggle, but his big idea, to organise independent musicians to pool resources and tour together, was a winner.

He started in the US with a changing bill of American artists, and is now bringing them to the UK under the banner of the Hotel Café Tour.

“If I was limited to England, I wouldn't have a career,” he says. “But I've survived because I can get out to the United States.

“That opportunity, to get out on the road to new audiences, should be extended to people who don't have the support of major labels.”

McRae took the name, and his inspiration, from the Hotel Café, a tiny venue in east Hollywood that has earned a reputation as the place for people with acoustic guitars to meet and start collaborating. Everybody drops by, from local favourites such as Gary Jules and Joe Purdy to Patty Griffin and Pete Townshend.

McRae is taking this freeform spirit around Europe with five acts who earned their stripes at the Hotel Café — Greg Laswell, Catherine Feeny, Jim Bianco, Cary Brothers and Brian Wright.

“It's like a festival on the road,” says McRae. “If you don't like someone, don't worry, someone else will be on in a minute.”

He's obviously passionate about the idea, even though, with the help of Gibson Guitars and the American Embassy, it's only just breaking even.

“It might be spectacularly naïve in a business sense, but I think it's a good thing to do. This is great music that wouldn't get a chance to be heard in a live setting any other way.”

If he occasionally sounds bitter about his early career, in which he was also Brit and Grammy nominated — “Those guys at big record companies couldn't sell a life preserver to a drowning man; they are uniquely inept” — more often he sounds inspired.

“Everything's changing so fast,” he says, “It's the perfect moment for making opportunities. Anyone who doesn't think this is a great time for music is crazy.”

Tom McRae and the Hotel Café, King's College, 30 April (020 7403 3331, www.kclsu.org)

MADONNA PLAYS IT SAFE

Madonna's 11th album was launched with suitable fanfare in London this week, in a trendy east London bar. The venue was strewn with sweets and a portrait of the singer made entirely of jellybeans, to whet the appetite for Hard Candy's release on 28 April.

Early reviews, however, have been indifferent. Just two-and-a-half years after her disco romp, Confessions on a Dancefloor, another Madonna album doesn't feel like quite the event it should.

“She's not me/She doesn't have my name,” she sings over bouncing synths and crisp funk guitar on She's Not Me. It's a good job she's included a song about her uniqueness, because this is possibly the first time the most famous woman in pop could be mistaken for somebody else.

Her past collaborators, such as William Orbit, Mirwais and Stuart Price, were all lifted from relative obscurity to play a part in her multi-million-selling world. Here Madonna employs the biggest names in the game, Timbaland and The Neptunes, who have already given stuttering beats and scifi sounds to Nelly Furtado, Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.

Five years ago this could have been a daring move. Today it feels like the safest she's played it in a long time.

Which is not to say that the songs aren't innovative, and more importantly, fun. A thudding house beat maintains an almost exclusively brisk pace over which more complex drum patterns skitter, from the rattlesnake rhythms of Incredible to the frantic bongos of Candy Shop. Give It 2 Me echoes the chirpy disco pop of Lipps Inc's 1980 classic Funkytown. The single, 4 Minutes, is centred on dramatic synthesised horns and a Justin Timberlake cameo that serves to emphasise the whole album's similarity to his FutureSex/LoveSounds.

The xylophone-led dance track Beat Goes On, featuring Kanye West, sounds like another future hit, but you can't help thinking that might be thanks to his presence more than Madonna's. By choosing pop's strongest personalities to work with, the woman with the strongest personality of all has made Hard Candy feel like their album, not hers.

NEW ON THE NET

Nottingham's Tindersticks have relocated to rural France and are soon to release their first album in five years, an exquisite collection of slow-motion torch songs. The slightlylivelier-than-usual comeback single The Hungry Saw is downloadable everywhere from Monday.

Already favourites with the hipsters, Crystal Castles are a duo from Toronto who use vintage electronic equipment to sound like the world's most beautiful Atari game. Their self-titled debut album won't be released until the end of this month but is already in download stores.

The American radio network NPR recently challenged Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt to compose and record a song in two days, which must have been a doddle for a man who once released an album that was 69 tracks long. The story of his gentle electronica number The Man of a Million Faces is at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p hp?storyId=15859351, and the song can be found in download stores from Monday.

 

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