Peter Kingston
Here’s a whopping conundrum. For eight years you’ve been toiling on your thesis about the British post-war far left, as it happens and you’re within a spit of the doctorate. The examiners want you to rejig the thesis introduction and resubmit it.
On the other hand, a song you’ve written for your band has just burst into the charts. It’s your first hit and a major record label wants to sign up you and the band. Well, what do you do? Mike Jones never really hesitated. Yoooo! Hello music, goodbye academe, he yelled, plunging into the mad whirl of jet travel and Sheraton hotels.
Alas, the mad whirl didn’t spin long for Latin Quarter after that appearance on Top of the Pops in February 1986: “We never had another hit in Britain,” says Jones, “but we were successful for longer on the Continent, Germany and Holland. It was like entering a hotel lobby through revolving doors, having a fantastic time and then suddenly you’re out in the cold again before you know it, and you don’t understand how it happened.”
Now, well over a decade later, Jones has a much clearer idea why Latin Quarter’s experience was such a familiar tale. As director of Liverpool University’s new MBA for the music industries programme, the only one of its kind in the United Kingdom, he will be relying on that understanding and his own experiences to teach the first batch of 20 students starting this autumn.
The vast music industries music here meaning popular music must be the last of the giant sectors to get a tailored MBA, Jones reckons. A lot of this must be put down to the absence of career structure, he says. “You hardly ever see a music industries job advertised in the Guardian pages.”
The aim of the one-year full-time programme is to give people who want to work in the music business a broad view of how it works, says Jones: “We can’t guarantee people jobs, but we intend to try to empower our students for this very maverick and global industry. The course will be dealing with the infrastructure rather than the creative side of pop.”