Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is James Gordon, Founder of DiGiCo and the CEO of Audiotonix, creators of digital mixing consoles for live sound, theatre and broadcast. James’ love affair with music was sparked by his father’s involvement in the music recording industry. After learning the ropes as a studio engineer and then working in sales for an audio console company, James became Managing Director for digital live console pioneers, DiGiCo. The success and growth of DiGiCo led to a merger in 2014 with two pro audio businesses and the formation of Audiotonix. The group’s expansion continues with James setting the blueprint for a unique technology focussed operation within the live entertainment and audio creation sectors.
The music industry is full of fun but it’s also got obviously the back end of it. If the music doesn’t work when you are at a live event, you are in trouble. Tell me a little bit about that pleasure that you still get when you go to a gig and you hear it all working, especially one of your own.
James Gordon
Yeah I think there’s nothing is there, I mean like it, when you’re in a venue and the lights dim down and there’s that sort of hush in the audience and then you hear the first beat of the kick drum through a proper, large PA system in a big room and you just feel the energy from it and you know it’s going to be a good night and then, you know, those are the, those are the nights that make up all our memories, aren’t they, they’re the things that attach us to girlfriends or relationships or whatever that we’ve had over the years, memories good and bad and I just think that’s the power of music and live events brings that to a new level when you share it with others.
Elliot Moss
Now people may not have heard of your business but they’ll definitely, I’m imagining, will pretty likely to have been at an event. Give me a sense of the kind of events that, that you’ve supported over the last few years.
James Gordon
Yeah, sure, so Audiotonix is really just the parent company, so it’s the, it’s the holding company, if you like, for the brands that sit underneath it. And as you mentioned, we have brands in just about every sector of audio. So, if you’re, you’re into listening to music at home, you will definitely have heard songs that have been mixed through Solid State Logic mixing consoles, by far the market leader for music creation and music studios. Flip that the other way, we have a company called Calrec that does TV sports and news. So, if you like watching the Premier League, that’s predominantly mixed through a Calrec product, so you will definitely have heard of Calrec. If you like going to West End shows or you like going to big concerts, that’s where you’ll come in contact with brands like DiGiCo, who do all the major live events, opening ceremonies, things like the Olympics were started with DiGiCo consoles producing all of the audio. And then as you walk around town, you might walk into bars and restaurants or shops and you’ll hear Allen & Heath. And Allen & Heath is by far the sort of the main stable for smaller events, whether it’s a pub band or whether it’s a small nightclub, you’ll hear Allen & Heath products in there. And then we have a new company in the group started, actually we acquired it over Covid, which was an interesting challenge but we’ve got Sound Devices, and Sound Devices make products for capturing audio on filmsets and TV sets. So, if you like Bridgerton or you like watching Top Gear, you will have heard Sound Devices’ products. So really there isn’t a day that goes by where your listeners won’t hear a piece of audio that has gone through one of our brands’ products.
Elliot Moss
What a buzz for you.
James Gordon
Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
Elliot Moss
Not bad, eh?
James Gordon
It’s not like going to work.
Elliot Moss
What I was going to say but work for you, it started as an engineer, is that right?
James Gordon
Yes, that’s right. I mean really, when I was a young boy, I was lucky that my father worked for EMI so I got to get dragged around music studios when I was, you know, on school holidays or whatever and for me, amazingly, it wasn’t about the artist being recorded, it was walking into that control room and seeing the big mixing console with all the faders and the lights and in those days, you used to have 2 inch tape machines which had massive great reels on them that would spin forwards and backwards and that just ignited something in me and I wanted to work in the industry and I can remember, I mean this is something about how we work at Audiotonix but also a personal thing for me, I went to my careers officer and at the time, I said, “do you know, I want to get in the music industry, I want to work in a studio.” And her reaction to that was, “Well that’s not really a proper career, is it?” and unfortunately, I think that’s still the case today, I think you know, one of the reasons why I personally, and Audiotonix, put so much effort into our STEM project for kids at schools, is to try and educate schools that actually, our industry is huge and there’s lots of jobs, you know, there’s maybe one person stuck behind the microphone like I am today with you but there are hundreds of people behind the scenes that make us, hopefully, look and sound as good as we do and those hundreds of people are doing really creative and special jobs and we need more of them, across the whole industry. So that’s the bit I think that, for me, I’d like kids to go into their careers office and be encouraged to get into our space.
Elliot Moss
You’ve mentioned briefly, we did a quick survey of the, all the different brands that are involved.
James Gordon
Yes. Some of them.
Elliot Moss
Some of them. Your role in that now, having been the guy who was buzzed by the sound, you’re still the guy that’s buzzed by the sound and I wondered where the technology that’s required and I’ve read a little bit about the research and development thinking that goes into your business, the technology that goes in there, the love of music and you being a guy in business, I mean you’ve, you know, there are multiple dates in the history of the business so far because you’ve gone and acquired a number of businesses along the way, you’ve got private equity investment, those things are serious and grownup, James. Whereas, you said the music industry doesn’t necessarily, you know obviously at the highest and the biggest levels it does but you wouldn’t necessarily put a creative person in that position. Where have you managed to pick up these different skills around understanding tech, understanding business as well as still retaining your love of music?
James Gordon
Ooh that’s a deep question you’ve thrown at me there. I think the business bit was the necessary evil, if I’m honest. You know, I mentioned earlier, I was working in a music studio and it was a bit like this one actually, there were no windows and I was desperate to get into a studio with windows and that’s how I got offered the chance to go and work for Soundtracs as it was then, which was a digital mixing console manufacturer based down in Epsom, so sort of Surrey area. And I thought that was a great opportunity to go in, meet lots of other studio owners and hopefully find myself in a studio with a window so I could have some daylight because it’s a, it’s a pretty hard day when you’re, you’re shut in a room, as we are today. So I thought that was my plan, that was my smart move but then I walked into the building and, at the time, Soundtracs had a technical director called John Stadius, and he's got grey hair everywhere, he looks just like Doc out of Back to the Future, and I walked into the room with him and he was just full of passion for the technology and the components and at that time it was with analogue devices, they were making a Shark DCP chip and he was explaining how powerful this chip could be and what it would allow us to do in the future and I just got captivated by what he was talking about and his energy to develop and then actually, when you make products that allow people to make better end results, it actually is just as exciting as actually being the person behind the faders, making the, you know, the project work and that, that just got my creativity going. On the business side, we got to the point where we wanted to move Soundtracs into doing live sound. Live sound was very much an analogue platform because of reliability and because people were worried about shows stopping and we, we could see that shows were growing out of the capacity of the products that were available and digital technology would allow us to open that out and give people in the live forum much, much more flexibility to be more creative. So that’s where we started DiGiCo and we basically got five or six net worth individuals, some from within the industry and some from out of the industry, to trust in us to allow us to do our first sort of management buyout of Soundtracs and create the brand, DiGiCo. And that worked really well for four or five years and then, as is often the case, some of those investors had different directions they wanted to go in and we ultimately had to buy them out and at that time, the only way we could see ourselves being able to do that was go into the world of private equity, which filled us with fear at the time because, as you say, not very corporate people. We were very fortunate, I managed to find a CFO, a guy called Clive Parritt, who joined us, who had lots of experience of private equity and I think without him, we would have struggled but he, he gave us such an insight into how we needed to operate and where we needed to professionalise and actually where we needed to push back and we needed to say no, no, this is, this is what we need to do, it’s what’s right for our customers and that allowed us to grow the business successfully with private equity and we grew DiGiCo to being quite a large scale business in our sector and we stated to get approached by a lot of bigger, corporate companies within our industry and our industry doesn’t generally have a good relationship with mergers. Generally, the talent leaves because the culture of the business changes and it’s not fun anymore, it’s not creative anymore and it puts restrictions around people because, you know, not everything has to be the same, we don’t have a, have to have a cookie cutter approach to things in life. So, so we were getting worried that that was going to happen to us and really, in that situation, you have three options, you can ignore it and hope it doesn’t happen, ultimately that’s not normally the smartest decision, you can let it happen and hope it doesn’t become what you fear or, in our situation, we decided the best course of action was for us to become what we feared and we decided at that point, let’s start acquiring some businesses, let’s start buying things but doing it in a audio sensitive way, in an industry sensitive way, and that’s when we added Allen & Heath and Calrec to DiGiCo and created Audiotonix back in 2014, as you mentioned, and we ran that for I think probably two or three years and then we realised actually, we’re quite good at this, we’ve managed to get synergies in the background but keep the personalities of each of the brands, the customers still see when they go to Allen & Heath, it’s Allen & Heath or DiGiCo is DiGiCo, it’s not suddenly been overlayed with a big corporate and we decided to add some more and that’s when we added Solid State Logic and then we added KLANG and then because all of the companies in the group were actually doing better in the group than they were out of the group, we started to get approached by other companies that were keen to come on board and allow us to merge with them and buy them.
Elliot Moss
And we’re going to hold it there because I’m, I want to come to that moment, it’s a pivotal moment in the story but I don’t want to rush you because we’ve got another little thing coming up here. James is going to be back in a couple of minutes but right now, we’ve got a quick clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. MDRxTech CEO, Tom Grogan talks about the metaverse, what it is, why companies would wish to explore it and the potential risks we should be aware of.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today, the man of the moment is James Gordon behind the mic, as he said, in the darkroom although of course it’s in wherever you are in your head right now, you’re listening to Jazz Shapers. He’s the founder of DiGiCo and the CEO of Audiotonix, creators of digital mixing consoles for live sound, theatre and broadcast and a lot more too. You were talking about the fact that, and I loved your phrase, “become what we feared” which is essentially this, you know, and you’re right, people do fear, they fear private equity, people do fear conglomerations, people do fear that they’re… the freedom will be sucked out if, the creativity will be sucked out it, you talked about not being a cookie cutter. So, obviously, you were, I think you were about to say just before we went into the Digital Session, that people started to approach you and people said we want to, we want to be in. Right now, are you still in that place, where people are saying we like what you’re doing and if you are, which I imagine you are, what is the secret source that you’ve managed to create?
James Gordon
Well the good news is, we are. So we should start with that, I guess. We are very much in that space. I think our industry is full of companies that, you know, it’s a relatively young industry and I think there are lots of companies in it where the founders are still passionately involved in their business and they’re emotionally connected to their staff, as we all are, and they want to look after them and they want their business to continue to succeed and when they look at the things we’ve acquired and how we’ve gone about it, and we can talk about that in a minute, but how we’ve gone about it in a sensitive way and helped promote the business as it is rather than trying to rebrand it or change the name or overlay another name over the top, I think that’s allowed founders to feel comfortable that when a business gets acquired by us, we know what it is, we know the industry, we are industry people, we’re not bankers and we care about it and we want the business to do well. I mean, Solid State Logic is a prime example, it was actually owned by Peter Gabriel and he’d acquired it because he didn’t want it to go bankrupt fifteen years ago or so, and he pretty much interviewed us via his team for a nine month period, to make sure we were going to look after his baby and that’s what it is for people, it’s a big, passionate thing. I’m pleased to say we’ve done very well so, he still sends me emails.
Elliot Moss
He’s happy. Is there a bit of a translation job that you do in your role between the primacy of the music and the sound and the love and the way that technology is connected and those people, as you referred to the gentleman before, that you just saw and extraordinarily excited about the technology, as well as kind of this understanding how the business is going to work? Do you find yourself explaining things to people that may not see the whole picture the way you do?
James Gordon
Yeah I mean every, every, you know, as we’ve mentioned, we’re in private equity, right, so for us, every three or four years tends to mean there’s a transition as the company grows and we go out of one investment cycle into another one and the big thing for me when we’re looking at a new private equity partner, is to find somebody that gets the culture of our businesses and all of them are subtly different and I guess the secret sauce with Audiotonix is there’s twelve, thirteen of us that actually work for Audiotonix and about 650 people that work for all the independent brands and that’s because we’re just the glue in the middle, we’re the ones that if someone in Solid State Logic is desperately trying to create some USB technology, we can put them in touch maybe with someone at Allen & Heath or DiGiCo who’ve already gone on that journey and they have that technology and that allows us to get more products to market faster, more efficiently and not make the same mistakes multiple times. Now the applications are very different but the technology in the background is actually very similar, so that, that efficiency I think is what us as the group people have to do and you know, we have one in marketing and one in technology, one in manufacturing, one in ops and their roles are basically to make sure we leverage all the good bits but keep every brands own identity as well. So, they have their own sales teams, their own marketing, their own support and as far as a customer is concerned, they’re dealing with the brand they want to deal with and with the people they want to deal with and I think that’s probably the bit we don’t, we don’t go in with a spreadsheet and try and work out how we can save money, we go in and try and work out how we can grow the business and that’s a different philosophy.
Elliot Moss
The creativity thing, James, as you’re talking, it’s pretty obvious that that’s what drives you, the love of the music, the love of the outcomes actually, the outputs, the sound, however it might come, whether it’s through a small little widget, whether it’s through a big piece of tech or whether it’s enormous speakers at the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee or whatever it might have been - which I was at, by the way…
James Gordon
So was our kit.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, so was your kit. I enjoyed your kit, I was involved in some of the raising of the money from the business community, so I got incredible seats and the sound was perfection, so when I was doing my research, I realised that you were the reason for that. This creativity now though, what’s it a product of do you think? Why is James Gordon so creative?
James Gordon
I don’t know if you can put that down to one thing. I guess, you know, as, having listened to your show before, I know a number of people have come on here are dyslexic as well, and I am, I’m guilty as charged and I think that means you have to A, have a very good memory because it’s harder to write stuff down, so I do have a very good memory, but it also teaches you to look at things differently and you have to be able to communicate and release, you know, energy in a different way and for me, that’s always been creativity, whether it was you know school plays when I was at school or whether it was doing music or creating something with technology, it’s always been something of an outlet for me and you know, I think it makes us look at life maybe slightly differently to other people.
Elliot Moss
Is it stressful? Is it stressful being dyslexic or was it before you knew that’s what it was, in the sense of you were being asked to do something you just couldn’t do?
James Gordon
Ah, you’ve got to make do it, I’m going to have to praise my mum now, aren’t I, ah no.
Elliot Moss
I think this is the moment, James.
James Gordon
No and she’s going to listen. Yeah, essentially, when I was ten or eleven, the schools kept saying I was lazy and I wasn’t trying hard and she fought really hard because clearly she didn’t think I was lazy or whatever and back then, dyslexia wasn’t a common thing, schools didn’t really acknowledge it, they didn’t know how to deal with it and she got me tested privately and then had great joy in going back to the school by the way and telling them that they got it completely wrong. And I guess that, that helped me because it gave me an understanding of it but it still meant that you struggled through everything academic. You know I left school at sixteen because it wasn’t for me and doing something creative definitely was and the moment I got that, I actually realised what had held me back was actually pushing me forward now. So as you get older, I think it becomes something you can take advantage of.
Elliot Moss
But just describe in a moment, a moment when James Gordon, who is dyslexic, has dyslexia, is able to see something differently in the room. Just give me one example of when you go…
James Gordon
There are hundreds.
Elliot Moss
Give me, just, because I’m intrigued.
James Gordon
Well it can be, it can be a mathematical thing, so it can be that you know we’ll be going through numbers at the end of the month, looking at an acquisition of a company or whatever and they’ll throw up spreadsheets and I’ll just come straight out with the answer and you know I’ve got very talented CFOs and people in the company and they will sometimes just look round and go how did you get there so quick and it’s how you problem solve I think, you know we can move into you know an R&D challenge where we’re trying to make something work and it’ll seem obvious to me on a route that we should take and generally, that’s not always right unfortunately, but generally it is.
Elliot Moss
And is it visual for you? Do you just see it?
James Gordon
Yeah, it is, yeah, it’s just obvious, you just see it straight away, you go straight to the solution.
Elliot Moss
And what do you see? Literally.
James Gordon
The answer. I can’t desc…
Elliot Moss
But it’s not written, the answer, is it?
James Gordon
No.
Elliot Moss
No. So, what, what form does the answer take?
James Gordon
It’s, it’s, I think, I mean there’s a lot of things on dyslexia about how you look at things and how your logic is slightly different and I think it’s just how you view a problem. You know, I’m left-handed as well so that probably doesn’t help. So, I mean, it’s those challenges of how you look at life and I just think with it, it gives you a different way of looking at it and that different way sometimes lets you get to the answer quicker. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes, obviously, if you hand me a, if you hand me a big email and it’s a mass of text, I’ll spend the first ten minutes breaking it up into small paragraphs because I just can’t read a lot of block text, it just all blurs into one but if you allow me to space it out, it’s fine. So, it’s not, it’s not the, it’s not great at everything but when it comes to logical challenges and problems, I think it just helps me get to the answer quicker, so I view it as a positive actually now.
Elliot Moss
I would say so, it’s pretty much definitely a positive because you’re building an empire, an empire of sound and many other things, not that kind of empire, it’s a good empire where…
James Gordon
It’s a friendly empire.
Elliot Moss
It’s a friendly empire where the good people can express themselves in the republics and they don’t have someone in the middle telling them what to do.
James Gordon
Can I have it as a hippy community?
Elliot Moss
You can do whatever you like. Stay with me for my final chat with James Gordon, CEO or the hippy community called Audiotonix and we’ve also got some classic Steely Dan, that’s coming up in a moment as well, don’t go anywhere.
My Jazz Shaper, Business Shaper is James Gordon, CEO of hippy community called Audiotonix. How that’s going to go down with your private equity friends, I’m not sure, but anyway…
James Gordon
They’ll deal with it.
Elliot Moss
We know, we know what you mean. A couple of quick things before we have to love and leave you. Firstly, you talked at the beginning about the importance of STEM subjects and the importance of kind of, the next generation of people that are going to go into the music industry. If you had a magic wand now, what would you do with Government policy to push that along?
James Gordon
Ooh that’s really good for me, you’ve opened a big can. How long have we got?
Elliot Moss
We’ve got, it’s a quick one because I’ve got one other one after that. You’re going to have to get, so you’re going to do that, thirty seconds.
James Gordon
I’m going to do it fast. So, during Covid I got very active with an organisation called We Make Events, which was basically there to try and demonstrate to Government, the importance of our sector, which at the time is, you know, was one of the fastest growing ones, it is back to that now because its recovery speed is phenomenal and I think the real challenge is, is we’re a new industry and if I could get Government to listen to anything, I’d get them to try and standardise some SIC codes or something for companies in our industry to register at, so that they could see, you know, how much the industry means to the country. You know, 80% of what we do is exported internationally, our talent across the industry goes exported as well and we are one of the market leaders in the world as an industry, you know, the UK does it better than most and we don’t promote it enough as a sector and we don’t value it enough and Covid demonstrated that because obviously all the lights went off for a little period and now they’re back on, I think Government needs to realise that some of the new industries are actually more valuable than they think they are.
Elliot Moss
Excellent, and that second part of that, which is actually this valuable industry you’ve got, what’s it going to look like in ten years? Are we all going to be avatars of ourselves? Are we all going to be in different rooms? I was looking at a 5G festival which I think you guys were behind and I’m like okay, so you can be in seven different locations, the audience can be in 57 locations and everyone will feel like they’re in the room. Is that the future?
James Gordon
5G Festival was actually very interesting. We ended up having a venue in the O2, a venue down in Brighton and a studio in London with different elements of the band playing together and we used some KLANG technology to give an immersive monitor mix for the artists, so it felt like they were in the same room with each other and what it actually allowed us to do was have musicians in different places collaborate and audiences to share an experience as well, which was really interesting. The audience, when one audience clapped because somebody walked out, the other instinctively joined in and it became a more linked up event and I think, I think that’s interesting, that’s going to be interesting for us with some of our audio creation products in the future, you know will, will people be able to rehearse more frequently because they can do it from home but I think one thing Covid definitely did teach us, it’s not just about listening to the music, it’s about experiencing it with everybody else and live gigs are valued more, I think, by most people than they were prior to Covid because they were taken away from us and now we can go back, we realise how important they are and it’s about sharing something, you know, sports events are the same, you know you can watch, watch a Premier League football match on TV and you’ll see much more of it but it’s not the same experience as being in the stadium with the crowd and I think people like to be with people, we value it, it’s who we are.
Elliot Moss
Been great talking to you James, thank you so much. Here we are on Jazz FM talking about the power of music and that’s quite right. Thank you so much for you time. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
James Gordon
I’ve gone, gone with an interesting one, Chilly Gonzales. And the reason for that is, we are lucky enough to be heavily involved in the Montreux Jazz Festival and Montreux is great, you get lots of headliners that come and play by the lake and it’s an amazing experience, so I’ll do a good promotion for that, but one of the nice things about Montreux is they have lots of small venues as well and a few years ago, I think 2017, I bumbled into a small venue with Chilly playing and he did this set, where basically he deconstructed classical music and turned it into pop music and then he took some pop music and turned it back into if it was a classic piece and it was an amazing gig to be present at and I would never have, I would never have bought a ticket to go and see it but the fact that I did captured me and I watched it and listened to it and enjoyed it and I thought it was a prime song to finish with actually.
Elliot Moss
Chilly Gonzales there with Oregano, the song choice of my Business Shaper, James Gordon. He talked about the decision to become what we feared. In his own words, a hippy commune rather than a conglomerate. A lovely way of looking at a big, group business. He talked about seeing things differently, the power of being dyslexic rather than the downsides of being dyslexic. And finally, he talked about the music industry itself, the power of experiencing something together, with other people. Great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.