Interview: Alastair Webber, The Other Songs

14 June 2018 - Editorial

Lost songs have been the stuff of fascination for fans since the birth of music, but what if we gave them another chance before it’s too late? Co-founder of The Other Songs, Alastair Webber, tells us how his business is doing just that...

Prince reportedly had an entire vault of them. Anderson .Paak claims Dr Dre has ‘hundreds of thousands’. Guns N’ Roses have a box set with 49 coming this month. However, unreleased and potentially forgotten songs aren’t just for the big names, and The Other Songs is working to bring new life to unrealised future hits.

Alastair Webber, perhaps best known for his work as an A&R at Island, felt so strongly about the floods of potential hits languishing on hardrives that he last year left his major label job to pursue the art of revitalising neglected tunes. The premise is simple: a showcase evening featuring a handful of songwriters, performing unreleased tracks acoustically, to an audience of industry professionals looking for new music.

A year into the life of the company and the list of songwriters who have already taken part is somewhat of a roll call of modern music – and those names you’re yet to recognise are on the right path for future success. Brand new writers such as Tilly Mann from The BRIT School, have performed side-by-side with well-known writers such as Bruno Major, Coffee, Dyo and James Newman. Furthermore, each evening spotlights one name who needs no introduction (Guy Chambers, Gary Kemp and Don Black, for example) discussing their big songs and the processes behind them. “We’ve gone into places like the BRIT School, LIPA and BIMM, searched for new talents and included them on our line-ups,” Webber explains.

“We have the unknown writers, at the same time as the industry known writers, plus the legends, all trying to prove that a great song is a great song. It doesn’t matter if you’re 60 and have written tons of hits or 17 and just starting out.”

Driven by a passion for songs, Webber – along with co-founder and brother Billy Webber and General Manager Sophia Humphreys – has spent the last year building relationships with songwriters and bringing them together as a community. Webber tells us that it’s not unusual to find songwriters, artists or industry folk evolving song ideas together at the bar post-showcase. “Whether you’re an A&R searching for songs, a DJ looking for a topline or a music supervisor looking for something for an advert or film, this is a perfect place to come. Everything you hear, other than those songs from the legends, are available songs.”

Webber further notes: “There hasn’t been a live platform for songwriters, certainly in London, for many years. We really wanted to create a forum where people can come and share ideas freely. They can chat, collaborate and hopefully get songs away in the process. We don’t take a cut, so it really is an opportunity for the creators and the creative business minds to get together and make things happen.”

Although the showcases are at the top of the food chain so far, Webber and the team have ambitions far greater for The Other Songs, already having progressed with a label and management company under the same banner. “We want to be a multi-dimensional company where we can facilitate anything,” Webber says. “We’re just starting out but our eyes and ears are open to lots of different things.”

On the label side, Webber tells us: “We’re mainly focused on quality. We obviously want to compete at a top level and our ambitions are definitely to do that.” He’s not lying either.  The team have already signed established songwriter RuthAnne as she matures into a fully-fledged artist in her own right. Her fruitful and award-winning songwriting career includes Slow Hands for Niall Horan and In The Name Of Love for Martin Garrix, but her transition to artist was a determined and obvious next step. “She’s so confident now and knows exactly what she wants,” Webber says. “She’s come with 10 incredible songs and now it’s up to us to work out which to go with, that’s our job but with everything else she’s a total natural.” A separate arm of the business, Another Rhythm, offers a label home to dance artists. The first signee, These Machines, has incredible pedigree as a producer, Mr Steve Mac. 

Despite the big names already committed to the business, Webber notes: “Our ambitions are to have mainstream success but only when the time is right and we’re not going to force anything. I think the main thing is to make sure that we do right by our artists. We’re not locking them into longterm deals, we want to be a fair company that offers a really great creative service.”

To further bolster the songwriter-artist utopia, The Other Songs is also building a central London studio that will become a creative home and drop-in centre for the community it is working so hard to foster. “We want to offer all of our writers and artists space in the studio and to create a home,” Webber explains. “We would like to be a family in the music industry. A home to songwriters and to artists, somewhere they can come and be free to create without the worries of being tied into long deals. We want to create that almost Motown situation where people can come by the studio and everyone can collaborate with each other.”

With firm statement of intent in year 1, the showcase event spreading across the world and a successful cut with John Legend in the bag, the proof of concept appears to already be happening for this fledgling company. 

Find out more here.