Elliot Moss
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 I am very pleased to say is none other than Paul Noble, Founder and Credit Director of Spiritland, a series of venues for music lovers in London and Lisbon, and also a production company. Born into a musical family and always believing he’d do something in the music world, Paul joined the BBC as a radio producer and sound engineer, working across the very different tones of the BBC’s speech and music stations. Having launched a radio consultancy in 2000, working with youth facing clothing and alcohol brands, it was a visit to Tokyo while exec producing Monocle’s magazine new radio station that set Paul, as he said, “on a train track, travelling towards a destination called Spiritland.” He really did say that apparently. Inspired by the Japanese listening bar phenomenon – he’ll tell us about that as well – Paul set out to open a venue with, as he says, “the best sound system in the world” and the most deep and involved music policy, pulling in all his musical interests. Spiritland was founded in 2014 as a pop-up before opening venues in King’s Cross, Mayfair and the Southbank Centre. They’re also a production company with studios and outside broadcast vehicles and last year they opened their first international venture across six bars in a hotel in central Lisbon.
It’s great to have you here.
Paul Noble
Yeah, lovely to be here.
Elliot Moss
You’re a music guy, I mean we’re going to talk all about the business but in your bones, Mr Noble, is music. Why?
Paul Noble
As you said, I grew up in a, in a musical family so, everyone was playing instruments, my dad plays guitar and sax and a bit of piano, my uncle always had keyboards and drum machines and wrote a few musicals, so everyone in the house was musical and we, no one can read music, everyone just picks up an instrument and starts playing it. So, growing up on the stereo was all the sort of usual Simon and Garfunkel and Led Zeplin, Beatles and you know all, everything that was around in the Seventies plus lots of Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, Joe Pass, Oscar Peterson, all the, all the jazzers of the time who were still playing and I grew up in London so, you know going to Ronnie Scott’s and the Bull’s Head in Barnes and 606 Club, that was part of my childhood so, yeah, the music was everywhere and then I started, you know, on my own musical path which was Capital Radio really was like the centre of my musical world when I was a kid and then eventually hip-hop, the hip-hop kicked in about fourteen, fifteen and then…
Elliot Moss
So, a lot of genres, I mean kind of traversing all sorts of music there.
Paul Noble
Yeah, I went all over the place but that was the origins of it all.
Elliot Moss
Now lots of kids, and I’m a seventies child as well, we’re from a similar neck of the woods, a Wembley guy meets a Stanmore guy.
Paul Noble
Yep.
Elliot Moss
Both still on the Jubilee Line and proud of it. A lot of kids love music, we all love music, but for you it became not just your passion but your business world, the orientation of your life. When did that, when did you make that realisation that that was going to be the case?
Paul Noble
I did a degree at Bournemouth University and I started off in film and TV and at the time we all wanted to be Quentin Tarantino, everyone wanted to be the director and we all wanted to make these sort of gory films and then you start working on it and immediately you realise there’s no budget, no, you just can’t, it’s a, it’s impossible, whereas radio, one person, two people, three people could sit down in a studio and make something professional and…
Elliot Moss
We hope.
Paul Noble
We hope. We’ll try. It’s just a much more immediate medium and so I, I did a degree in radio drama, I wrote a play, I finished university, started working at the BBC as a sound engineer and did a long induction into the sort of BBC world of sound engineering which at the time was still reel to reel, cutting tape with a razorblade and I worked at Radio 4 and 5, lots of speech radio, Desert Island Discs, Woman’s Hour, worked on the news, worked on the sport on 5 Live but I always wanted to be in the music world and at Radio 1 and 2, and that’s a, you know, so does everyone else, everyone would love to be doing Peel Sessions at Maida Vale and you know all the festivals and so, I did an apprenticeship really at the speech side and then ended up in the music group working on Radio 1 and 2.
Elliot Moss
And we’re going to pick it up in a moment. Back to that story of how the producer, because this is what I’m really interested in, the producer who became a man of business, a person of business. Before we get to that though, just the reel to reel thing because I briefly worked at Capital Radio when I was a teenager for a few weeks in their newsroom, it was called The Way It Is, you might remember it and I had to splice as it called, cutting with razors and stuff. Just visualise for me the reel to reel discipline because it's something now of course that one is in a studio, one has digital stuff, people can edit at home, you don’t need all that thing but then it was not the case.
Paul Noble
Yeah it’s, it’s like a gigantic cassette but it’s two open reels, the tape travels over a play head and so you can stop it and you can manipulate it very finely to get to the top of a, a word or a sentence, you mark it off with your little chinagraph pen, you mark the in, you mark the out, get your razorblade, chop it and stick it together with some Sellotape and then you can really refine that, you can chop away at it and on the news side of radio, it gets really hairy where you’re, you could be editing the back of a programme while the front’s playing out, so you get very fast at it.
Elliot Moss
You’re in real time and also I remember when I used to do it, I cut my fingers quite a lot because I’m very clumsy and the angle of the cut…
Paul Noble
Oh yeah.
Elliot Moss
…makes a difference to the way that the edit sounds. I can’t remember which one it is, obviously the 90 degree one and there was 45.
Paul Noble
You want it at 45.
Elliot Moss
And the 45 is smoother, isn’t it.
Paul Noble
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, 90 is a bit abrupt.
Paul Noble
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
I do remember, yeah.
Paul Noble
And still I’m such a, I can still hear on the radio, I can hear the dodgy edits.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, the dodgy edit, yeah.
Paul Noble
The dodgy fades, I’m highly critical.
Elliot Moss
Well actually, let’s fast forward now because here we are, you became obsessed with quality of sound.
Paul Noble
Mm.
Elliot Moss
And equipment and leads that cost £10,000 and beautiful speakers and incredible amps and one-offs. Did that start with looking at these two reels and going “I just love?”
Paul Noble
Do you know what, it was almost totally separate. There was, I was working with really lovely equipment at work at the BBC and at that time there were things like EMT turntables and Studer CD players and Quad amplifiers and PMC speakers and all kind of lovely, really beautiful audio file gear but that was, for me that was just at work and then at home, I was just tinkering around with my home stereo, which was you know at the beginning you go to Richer Sounds and you buy Cambridge Audio and that kind of thing and then there’s, you get on the upgrade path and you think oh maybe it’s the CD player and then you upgrade your CD player, no, I need to have it sitting on some special stands and then you…
Elliot Moss
Maybe it’s the quality of the lead though, maybe I need to upgrade the amp.
Paul Noble
All of it.
Elliot Moss
And then you go, yeah.
Paul Noble
And you know, it’s the journey and not the destination and to sort of fast forward massively, I got just very deeply into the sort of listening to really nice equipment but not my own, other people’s and then I went to a show in Munich called High End Hi-Fi which is where the sort of audio nerds meet.
Elliot Moss
I was going to say. And now, “What are you doing this weekend darling?” Well I’m going to an audio show. Of course you are.
Paul Noble
Yeah, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Have fun. On your own.
Paul Noble
And it’s a series of rooms and everyone’s demonstrating their equipment so people are showing off their speakers, amps, source products and, and obviously cables which you know how do you demo a cable, you need to A B it against another cable and I went to this one room which was a company called Living Voice who are based Long Eaton near Nottingham and the sound just blew me away, I’ve never heard anything like it and there’s, you know it’s really hard to quantify what makes great sound, there’s obviously some very muscular and sort of punchy sound systems and then there’s some very delicate ones which are maybe more appropriate for listening to classical and jazz on and this Living Voice equipment, it just, it was like a time machine, you’re in the room with the band or with the musicians and it just blew me away and so I got chatting to them, it’s Kevin and Lynn are the owners, and started buying equipment from them and then the conversation started of you know how could we put this in a venue, could we do something together.
Elliot Moss
What can we actually make and that is what I’m going to be talking about in a bit with Paul Noble because he went to Japan and came back with a, an idea which was essentially riffing on this notion of the listening room, which is sort of a version of what Spiritland right, is right now. Much more coming up from Paul in a couple of minutes but right now we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Sessions, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Business founders are invited to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip focussed on entering the arts industries, we hear from Fabien Riggall, he was the founder of Secret Cinema and now the founder of Lost.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Paul Noble, Founder and Credit Director – I didn’t mention the Credit Director, Paul, but now I just have – Founder and Credit Director of Spiritland, a series of venues for music lovers in London and Lisbon and also a production company. So we have whizzed around. Time travel allows us to do that. We’ve jumped backwards and forwards but essentially, the person in front of me is a geek when it comes to delivering – in a nice way, Paul, I like geeks.
Paul Noble
I’ll take it.
Elliot Moss
Take that. A geek when it comes to the quality of the audio and also an adventurer, you jump on planes, you work for Monocle as it was then, discovered this amazing world and Japan is extraordinary, still surprising at every turn, you discover this idea and you kind of bring back your version of it and in 2014 you open your first pop-up. When you moved from being the producer behind the scenes to sort of the impresario in front of it, what was that like for you? Was that uncomfortable?
Paul Noble
It was a strange but also felt quite natural shift. I was spending time in Japan with Monocle, there was a bureau over there, so I was travelling there to work on radio projects and I’d heard about the listening bar scene and their sort of approach to music but going there…
Elliot Moss
This is like six to eight people in a room, they pay a bit of money and they just listen to the owner playing an album, that’s it.
Paul Noble
Yeah, usually, the usual set-up is it’s the owner and their record collection, it’s usually all on vinyl, it’s sometimes very high end equipment, sometimes just lovely equipment but there’s, they tend to like JBL speakers, Tannoys, Macintosh amps, you usually see the same things over and over again but there is an integrity and a sort of depth of credibility in what they do, where it’s just totally single-minded. Most of them you’ll pay a cover charge, so you’ve already sort of invested to being there and give the music some attention and they will just play an album from start to finish. Now lots of them, there’ll be a book, they send out a book and you can request either an artist or an album and they’ll play it for you and it’s just, it’s nothing to do with club culture, it’s nothing to do with DJing, they’re divided by genre, so there’s some are blues bars, some are strictly jazz, some are even from you know one era of jazz and there’s, for example, a classical music bar called Lion which goes back to the 1920s, so they come in all sorts of different formats.
Elliot Moss
But you had an idea that it was portable in some form.
Paul Noble
I just, I was there for five weeks with my wife and we travelled round the country and it’s not, these aren’t just in Tokyo and Kyoto, they’re all over Japan and I spent the whole timing thinking what, I’m in heaven, I go to these bars, I’m absolutely….
Elliot Moss
Of course you are. What was your wife thinking?
Paul Noble
Oh no, she was, she was into it, she was loving it, I mean there’s a few photos of her having a nap in a bar but, no it was, it was just a musical paradise and in London, you know, I go to concerts, I go to clubs, I buy music, I DJ, you know everything and also with a lot of my friends, our whole world revolves around music but to go to a bar in London, you’re going to hear jazz, funk and soul, to go to a club it’s going to be house, techno, drum and base and a version, something electronic and banging, and then all of these other genres which I’m interested in and I’m kind of exploring but on my own, you know, just on my stereo, Americana, dub, ambient, country, indie, AOR, whatever, everything. It’s all just sort of a solo pursuit.
Elliot Moss
But then you open this thing up and I just want to jump to that first night in Shoreditch.
Paul Noble
Yes.
Elliot Moss
What was it like? What did it feel like? Was it, was it an extraordinary feeling sharing your vision with people?
Paul Noble
Yeah, so it was in a, it happened quite quickly, I went to, I did this long trip to Japan in March of 2014, came back and then met my then business partners who’d just opened a restaurant called Merchants Tavern with Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick so, a really beautiful room, very high-end food and drink offer and I came back and said I’ve got an idea, it’s called Spiritland and it’s just a very deep exploration and celebration of many genres of music with DJs, but it’s not a club, there’s no dance floor, they just play music for the, you know, the joy of listening to it and it was a hit, it was supposed to be a three month pop-up, it ran for two years, we had…
Elliot Moss
Wow.
Paul Noble
…DJs who would be playing to much, much bigger crowds, playing their personal pursuits so, for example, Andrew Weatherall, the late great Andrew Weatherall played there and he played a night of Rockabilly and dub and you know the kind of stuff he plays away from the dancefloor, Elijah Wood, you know the actor who’s actually a massive music head, played a night of Turkish progressive rock and the most obscure ‘70’s music.
Elliot Moss
I’ve got to say and we’re going to have to have some more music, we’re going to cut in, but Paul, as Paul was telling me this, he’s literally almost got tears in his eyes, that’s the point, that’s the point about the impact of music on this man and what he’s wanted to bring to London and now Lisbon and I’m sure more places too. The adventurous side of you, Paul, I mean music is an adventure in its own way because you keep discovering, you keep discovering, but your love of travel and then I think I read somewhere that you sort of, you fell in love with hospitality, as it were. Has all that, is that working for you or do you still go the primacy is about the music?
Paul Noble
Spiritland at the heart is a music brand. Everything around it is aligned to the quality of the music and when I say the music, it’s the programming and the equipment so, our food and drink offer, our interiors, our sort of presence online, it’s all sort of in service of the music and it’s all considered, it’s all at the highest level we can do it and it’s quite modest as well, there’s a, a sort of integrity to just putting on an album and playing it rather than, you know, similarly with cocktails, you can make a fantastic drink with three ingredients, you don’t need to start you know smoke bombs and…
Elliot Moss
So there’s a sort of, I sense from you there’s an authenticity and a simplicity to what you bring un, unvarnished, un sort of not flashy basically.
Paul Noble
No.
Elliot Moss
And is that, is that part of your personality do you think? Do you think that’s very much you?
Paul Noble
I mean Spiritland is certainly a manifestation of all of my interests, which is music, equipment, food, drink, interiors. It’s a very, you know if you come in, it’s a very sociable space, you’ll meet people and there’s connections and things start happening there, so yeah, I…
Elliot Moss
And look, it’s gone, it’s gone really well and then of course Covid hit and everyone in the hospitality business was, was you know wacked by that in different ways, some obviously than others. You lost the Royal Festival Hall venue. Without being sort of too emotional about it, what, what did that feel like at the time? Was that like the death of a, you know, of someone you knew well?
Paul Noble
Er, it was really tough because we opened our first proper venue in 2016 in King’s Cross and that’s a 70-seat café bar, radio studio and there’s only so much you can do in that space and we wanted to do something bigger. We started talking to the Southbank who had this fantastic space at the foot of the Royal Festival Hall where I’ve been going to see concerts for years and it’s also, you know, the Southbank it’s, I think it’s 16 acres, it’s the biggest arts centre in Europe.
Elliot Moss
It’s incredible.
Paul Noble
You’ve got the BFI, National Theatre.
Elliot Moss
Was Jude Kelly running the Southbank then?
Paul Noble
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
And actually she was on this programme many, many, many years ago. Amazing woman.
Paul Noble
Right, and you know maybe it felt like the food and drink weren’t aligned with the quality of the sort of creative content coming out of the National, sorry the Southbank Centre, you know there’s lots of chains. We were the only independent and we just had horrible timing, we opened at the end, in December 2018 so we spent 2019 finding our people, letting them know there was somewhere they could come and eat, drink before, after the shows, we worked with a lot of the organisations there, we did after parties for the BFI, we did a lot of record launch, we did work with a lot, with the music industry quite heavily so we did album launches for Bruce Springsteen, John Legend, Leonard Cohen, which his son presented and we did some great stuff but it only ran for a year. 2020 everything shut and then the Southbank didn’t open between the lockdowns, so when it did open, it was just into a very different London where the three day week was a real thing, people had moved their businesses out to Europe, so we were, it was just a very different scene and we ran for I don’t know maybe a year or so longer and then it went. And now it’s, you know, in the world of hospitality, just places come and go, you see it happen quite quickly.
Elliot Moss
But Spiritland lives on and we look forward because we’ve got other stuff to talk about, which we will be doing in our final chat and that’s with Paul Noble, my Business Shaper today, founder of Spiritland, very much still going. And we’ve also got some music from Kamasi Washington, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Kamasi Washington, featuring Patrice Quinn, wasn’t that beautiful, with Cherokee. Just for a few more minutes, Paul Noble is my Business Shaper, he’s the founder of Spiritland. I know you’re in Lisbon and there’s going to be more stuff I’m sure, but as I’ve been talking to you I’ve been thinking all roads were always going to lead to this, Paul, for you, I don’t think you could have had another journey, even though your journey has been BBC and then you’ve gone and done your own thing, but it feels like you’ve been compelled to be in this world.
Paul Noble
Compelled is the right word and it wasn’t a conscious decision to move into hospitality and I’d never worked in bars or restaurants but it was a moment of if I don’t do this, who’s going to and it was just a, yeah, a pure compulsion.
Elliot Moss
But also, it’s just you, there is no, there is no creation of a, of a persona called Paul Noble who, who wanted to have an idea, this is just who you are.
Paul Noble
Yeah and, and also my business partner Sophie, who’s the other part of Spiritland. Every, you know, everything that happens in Spiritland is sort of comes back to the two of us. But yeah, it’s been, it was a sort of massive, midlife career swerve from radio and I’d done so much radio, I was sort of at the end of my radio journey and now yeah, it’s hospitality venues, spaces and we also collaborate a lot within Spiritland with the music industry but also within film, literature, fashion, you know everyone, all of these creators have a musical inner life which we can work together on so, but that will…
Elliot Moss
But that, and that’s the thing I was thinking about, if you’re the creator which you are and you’re Creative Director, it must be super painful, we talked about the Royal Festival Hall, but it could be anything that when it doesn’t work out and is your, is your relationship with business more stressful than your relationship with music and with hospitality or have you become, so you now enjoy the business side of it much more? Honest answer please.
Paul Noble
Honest answer is it’s been a huge, huge learning curve for me and before, I was just a radio guy sort of paid by the hour or by the year and I would turn up to a studio like this and either push buttons around or put together a show and the whole process, you know, I was, I was very green about all of it, company structure, having employees, building a brand, you know, it was, it was all new to me and also dealing with investors and landlords. Yeah, it’s been a massive learning curve, it’s been you know incredibly challenging at times and you listen to any entrepreneur, podcast or read any books and everyone, you know, it’s how much pain can you take before you throw in the towel seems to be…
Elliot Moss
And how much pain can you take?
Paul Noble
Well, I mean I’m sitting here.
Elliot Moss
You are.
Paul Noble
Spiritland’s still going and we’ve just opened six venues in Lisbon so…
Elliot Moss
And how is that, in a nutshell?
Paul Noble
It’s really good, it’s a really exciting city. We are doing it in a hotel in very central Lisbon. Two of them are music based bars, one is a, a, you know, our love letter to Japan and it’s very inspired by the listening bars of Japan, the other one is a more DJ-led bar and then there’s four other bars which are all doing something different with drinks, two of them are outdoors, one’s by a pool so, it’s a big canvas for us to do…
Elliot Moss
So, all the different parts of your brain basically are now brought to life and just in terms of the next step, is there more international expansion planned?
Paul Noble
We would love to do more internationally, there’s European cities which are really of interest and also, we would love to do something in Tokyo, which you know sounds extremely coals to Newcastle but I think there is space for the British listening bar to come back to Japan and it’s a really full-on celebration of British music and that could be Beatles, Bowie, Kate Bush, Radiohead, Ezra Collective, sort of all of our interests, all of our loves and you know also bringing a British approach to food and drink, so that…
Elliot Moss
You heard it here first.
Paul Noble
Who knows.
Elliot Moss
Sounds like a good idea to me. Paul, it’s been brilliant chatting to you, thank you so much for your time. Just before I let you disappear to do more creative things, you lucky man, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Paul Noble
It’s Praise by Pat Metheny, it’s on the album First Circle and there was one bar in Tokyo which I kept coming back to, which I just, a really special place and they on the last night I was there ten years ago, they played this song and it’s a really, really special song to me, it’s one of my, it’s just like all Pat Metheny’s music, it just kind of makes my heart explode and without being too woo-woo, I was like this is a sign, someone’s trying to tell me something.
Elliot Moss
Pat Metheny there with Praise, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Paul Noble. An absolute focus and a passion for music and it’s defined what his life and what his business has been about. The ability to shift from one career to another, the radio person became a businessperson, but again the common thread, a love of music and then a love of hospitality and now a love of giving people pleasure. Great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds 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.