The relationship between music and art has always been obvious but difficult to clarify. The creative impulse behind both is the same and the dialogue between artists and musicians concerning the different ways that this can be achieved can be heard in relationships from Warhol and The Velvet Underground to Status Quo and Lowry (which you prefer is up to you!). But they have perhaps never been sold together in quite the way that Fred Mann of Fred [London] LTD is selling them now.
“Why not release an album?” says Fred. The buoyant Vyner Street gallerist has lived as much through music as he has through art. His space in the east end opened in 2005 but he had managed and curated other spaces for years before going solo. The record label was launched on Halloween 2006, making it one-year-old next week (he’s celebrating with a good cup of tea).
“I always knew I would go to Art College but I played four instruments and when I was 12 I was working on the door of a club in Leicester Square” – it was the early eighties and he was illegally working at blitz scene club “Taboo”. Inspired by eighties club-land’s decadent glamour he moved to New York and became heavily involved with the scene there.
“You went to clubs in NY and they were all there; Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, Basquiat – there was a huge cross over between music and art”. It was in the States that he began to work on music videos, designing sets and art directing for acts as diverse as Rage Against the Machine, The Smiths and Mariah Carey. This explains his eclectic taste in music.
Of course, this kind of eclecticism can draw criticism from music industry dinosaurs who believe labels should reflect a genre rather than a taste. “But I’m eclectic, why shouldn’t the music be?”
Fred oozes enthusiasm and makes a good point, gallerists often hang artists with radically different styles or approaches so why can’t a record label encompass a similar philosophy? And his musicians are extremely varied. From Gallon Drunk with their dirty guitars to Catherine Bott, a classically trained soprano whose first album with Fred’s label was a politically resonant collection of arias on Christian/Muslim relations.
His experience as a gallerist has obviously paid off and helped him work with Bott on her album, Convivencia, a collaboration that he compares to working with an artist on an exhibition. You are, after all, working with an artist to conceive a creative project, the tools are just different.
Gallon Drunk were old friends and Catherine Bott was a favourite who Fred wanted to work with. It all seems to have happened very naturally through a combination of old mates and mutual interest. His relationship with Pauline Taylor, who had formally worked with Faithless, began as he overheard her saying “I hate record companies” whilst standing at the bar after one of her gigs.
The real joy of branching out into record making, which he compares to producing catalogues for an exhibition, seems to come from the collaborations he has nurtured between his artists.
Stuart Croft, a video and installation artist, directed the video for Gallon Drunk’s single “Grand Union Canal” and Pauline Taylor played at the opening of his Leipzig gallery in September this year.
He is delighted that his artists attend the album launches and his musicians the private views. His east end space is turning into a music-art hub. He is the first to admit that he is not easily categorised as just a gallerist and runs his business is in an “unstraightforward way”. He seems to be channelling Steve Rubell – his club night OBERON, begins next month at Fabric.
His entire demeanour smacks of a man who lives to do what he loves and his enthusiasm is infectious. You get the impression that his role as aesthetic impresario doesn’t feel like work to him, it’s just what Fred does.
