Going for a Song

As part of the Radleian Society’s careers programme, Beyond Radley, Jim Eliot (1989) spoke to us about his early pathway into music, what it’s like working in the industry today and why he thinks music is one of the most exciting places to be.

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Kylie Minogue, Olly Murs and Ellie Goulding are just three of the high-profile artists that Jim has written songs for.

As far back as he can remember, Jim Eliot (1989) always wanted to be a musician. He was obsessed with it – from the piano to the drums, he would try and play any instrument he could get his hands on, even going as far as to pull apart an old Speak & Spell machine when he found out you could modify it to create different sounds using the vowel keys.

This kind of technical ingenuity was a necessity though because in the late 1980s there wasn’t a great deal of everyday access to music technology and schools of the time didn’t really understand or focus on the electronic music that so interested him. At prep school, he played percussion in the orchestra and on coming to Radley it was more of the same, with the choir and recitals taking centre stage. Having finally bought his own a synthesiser, around about the time of his first year at Radley, he had to make do with occasional access to a small room, hidden away in the music department where he could play drums and generally make noise. It took the rather radical intervention of a great music teacher, Mr Gunningham, to truly introduce music technology to Radley, as he brought keyboards, synthesisers and drum machines into the music school. It proved to be perfectly timed for Jim who, through his own work, was already well-versed in how to set up these systems. Working together they took this new technology and transformed the small room into a music technology suite for the boys to use, although he frequently kept hold of the keys for the room and tried to keep everyone else away! It was a start, but this was still the early stages of Radley working with music technology and at this point it was still just a side hobby for him. It was not until he bumped into a friend who had already left school and who was working for an advertising agency that Jim got his first glimpse into music as an industry, rather than a hobby. Knowing of his interest in music, his friend asked if he wanted to visit a recording studio, something he’d never been to before. He jumped at the chance. The studio in question was a sound dubbing studio, used for taking sound effects and placing them over pictures to be used in adverts, and whilst it wasn’t a music recording studio, it had all the same equipment in it. He had no idea that there were studios like this and he was completely blown away by it – the sound quality he heard was just incredible. Up until this point, all he’d been exposed to had been through pop bands and what he’d read in the NME, but this studio visit opened his eyes to how much work was done behind the scenes.

It got him thinking that there were jobs, and maybe even a career, to be had here. With his interest well and truly piqued, he set about trying to find out more about the industry. In those preinternet days, he turned to a classifieds newspaper called Loot and started to apply for studio work in his holidays. This was how, at aged 17 and part-way through his A-levels, he found himself working part-time in a rather seedy recording studio in Brixton. Recording terrible versions of current pop hits to be used for karaoke backing tracks, it was hardly high quality work, but it was here that he learned how to record all manner of different types of instruments and the experience only fed his fascination with the industry further.

After Radley, Jim was faced with a choice between the sensible option of going to university or diving headlong into a risky music production career. Persuaded that getting a degree first and only then investigating the music business afterwards was the safer option, he looked to get himself a university place. Music Production courses at this time were academic rather than practical, and were also few and far between. So with no clear plan or particular interest beyond music, he took any course that would have him, ending up studying at Oxford Brookes. A year into his studies, and he was spending his time writing his own music and wishing he was in a recording studio rather than engaging with his course or the delights of Fresher’s life. So when a German music entrepreneur named Olaf contacted him about releasing some of his music on 12” vinyl, Jim jumped at the chance to meet.

He describes Olaf as a ‘brilliant character’ who ran a company in Wallingford that distributed records from all sorts of sub-genres, from heavy metal to electronic dance. It was the sort of place where all the waifs and strays of the music industry had their music released and so he headed over to the company premises to discuss the idea further. His expectations of a run-down operation based out of a shed could not have been more wrong as he found himself at a state-of-the-art facility with Porsches parked outside! With an agreement reached to record and release his record, Jim thought he’d made it, and phoned his parents to tell them he had a record deal and that he was leaving university. It didn’t take long for him to realised he was only actually going to earn about £300 from the deal with Olaf, but it was the push he needed. It was likely to be something of a baptism of fire, but he realised it was time to take the risk and jump into the music industry wholeheartedly. He realised he’d very likely be poor and penniless for a while, but everyone he’d met so far in the industry had taken a similar path to allow them to follow their passion. Now it was his turn.

Leaving university, he found work in London at a number of small recording studios, each specialising in different types of music such as film scores or pop music. Over the following months and years he would hop between each of them, building up his experience and his connections amongst the vibrant community of creative entrepreneurs that he had immersed himself in. Despite feeling incredibly lucky that he’d found his people in an industry that he loved, it also became clear that he was not alone in looking to find ways to get paid. It was a competitive market and as good as working the studios had been for his technical and networking skills, it simply was not financially rewarding enough. He needed to find a niche that would pay the bills and the solution he found was a rather unusual one – jingles. Alongside the studio work, he had continued to write music and had found out that he was actually quite good at writing jingles for adverts. In the late 1990s, companies were setting aside large budgets for advertising and their campaigns on television would often rely on music to be a success.

A successful jingle, once written, could make money year after year as it had become synonymous with the brand it was advertising. Setting up a jingle-writing business with a friend, they quickly hit success, and within 5 years they had their own studio in Soho with fancy offices employing a couple of staff. He was finally getting the ‘business’ side of the ‘music business’ to work. But as lucrative as jingle writing was, Jim needed to push his creative boundaries and for him that meant trying to break into the songwriting/music industry proper.

He was an experienced practitioner in the studio and had started a band with his partner, writing their own songs and planned to get signed to their own record deal. They worked hard, writing music and playing gigs throughout London with some success, when one day someone came up to him and said, “Jim, your songs are really good, and though the band is good, it’s not enough”. Obviously, this wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but the follow up suggestion intrigued him – send his songs off to people for others to perform.

His focus up until then had been so much on writing AND performing his own material that he hadn’t realised how much professional songwriters were used in the industry. Then in 2007,

The Platinum disc awarded to Jim for Tom Walker's record 'What A Time To Be Alive' for which Jim co-wrote the opening track.

one of his songs, Two Hearts, found its way to a record company and they contacted him wanting to use it. However, they did not want his band, Kish Mauve, to perform it but instead wanted it for Kylie Minogue. Not only that, but they wanted her to record it for her return album after two years spent recovering from cancer treatment. This was what he’d been waiting for all his career – a break into the music industry proper. Even though the song only went on to be a minor hit and the doors he hoped would instantly open for him didn’t, it made him realise that this was the path he needed to take. Selling off the music advertising business, he’d truly taken the plunge.

Over the next two years, Jim threw himself into writing, penning over 400 songs. By his own admission not all of them were great, but he was determined to make a success of his songwriting. Then in 2010, he wrote a song called All the Lovers. In his mind this was ‘the one’ and it would provide his next big breakthrough. Sending it on to Kylie Minogue’s record label, he waited to hear what they thought. Their first response was not, however, the news that he was hoping for – they said they hated it. But over the coming weeks, the label were unable to find an alternative song that they liked, and revisiting Jim’s song, it grew on them. In the end, not only did Kylie record the song for her eleventh studio album, but it was released as the lead single. He had been right about this track as it proved to the big hit that he had hoped for, reaching the Top Ten across Europe and in the US. The doors that had stayed closed after the release of Two Hearts finally started opening up. With huge opportunities now before him, he needed to write the next hit, then the next, then the next and what followed was exactly that. A run of top ten hits came, that included a couple of number ones such as Heart Skips a Beat with Olly Murs, and his success snowballed from there. He started working closely on entire albums with artists such as Ellie Goulding and Will Young as a songwriter/producer. His work now sees him creating original songs, taking songs from rough ideas and turning them into a finished product and producing songs written by others. Now a self-styled ‘old hand', his talent for songwriting and the production skills he has honed over many years puts him in a place where he works with some of the biggest artists in the industry.

And despite what he calls his own ‘haphazard’ entry into the music business, he wouldn’t have changed the path he took. The lessons he learned during those early steps taught him that in order to thrive in the music industry you need to be adaptable and look for every opportunity that comes your way, whether that be recording karaoke tracks, writing jingles or handing your songs on to others to perform. And whilst it can be tricky for musicians to balance their artistic integrity with the more prosaic needs, Jim’s experiences in the industry show that you can never tell where saying ‘yes’ to something might lead.

The video of Jim's Beyond Radley career lecture is available here:

www.vimeo.com/radleyvideo

Jim in the studio during his Beyond Radley career lecture.