This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Labels & Publishers
La Roux’s not happy with her label
By Aly Barchi | Published on Friday 19 September 2014
So La Roux’s Elly Jackson has joined the likes of Lily Allen and MIA on the naughty back row of the ‘acts displeased with their labels’ bus, mainly by stating that she’s displeased with her label, Universal’s Polydor, on the basis that at its topmost, bosses are lacking in passion, and motivated mostly by chart sales and corporate avarice, and that. No kidding.
Jackson also said that she had no interest in writing another ‘Bulletproof’, and blamed the situation with her label partly on the fact that she’s in a “transitional” phase as an artist, and so is hard to “place” in the pop world.
Asked by Digital Spy earlier this week if she felt happy with her new top ten LP, ‘Trouble In Paradise’, Jackson said that whilst yeah, she was happy, she wasn’t as best pleased with the “overall performance of my record label”.
Jackson added: “I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. It’s really frustrating when your label kind of expects certain things to happen, and then they don’t happen, and then they just stop bothering. It seems to me that maybe they wanted number ones and if they don’t get them, they’re not really bothered”.
She went on: “I think that’s a real shame considering the critical acclaim and the love the record received. I think it’s something that’s obvious to everybody who likes the record; that the backing it wants – and I feel deserves – wasn’t quite there. I think it depends on the team behind it. It’s always difficult to say because I can’t say there aren’t people who have got a lot of passion behind this record, because there are. But I think it comes down to the people at the top who you never see that are kind of going, ‘Pull the budget on that'”.
Ah, gotta love the dispassionate label fat cats. Continuing on that topic, Jackson pondered: “It’s so difficult as an artist because you never get to meet those people, confront them and ask ‘Why?’ You never really get an explanation, you just realise something is not quite right and there’s nothing you can really do about it. We’re not rich enough nowadays to challenge labels – I mean, when have we ever really been?”
When indeed? Still thinking things over, Jackson said finally: “I think partly it’s also because I’m in a transitional period as an artist. I think there has definitely been an issue with where to place me. If I’m being really honest, I think that’s definitely been the thing, because I’m not the same person who wrote ‘Bulletproof’, but nobody really knows what I am going to be yet. This is very much a transitional record, and we always knew it would be when we made it. I knew I was doing something I wanted to do for me and that’s what I will continue to do. Maybe it has just taken a record to explain it”.
A record, and a lengthy explanation. Read the interview, which is actually very interesting and brings up lots of points for debate, in its entirety here.
