Face to Face with... Charlie Morgan

Charlie Morgan, previously co-owner of Morgan Van Dam, has opened a new London-based music company called HUSH Music. During his career he has made songs for ads that have become hit singles and worked on tracks for some of the biggest brands in the world. We caught up with him to find out about the new venture, the current state of the music-in-advertising landscape and whether music companies should get more credit.

What’s your background and how did you get into music?

I come from a music industry family - in the early 60s my father was in business with Chris Blackwell, who had just set up Island Records, working on early ska songs like My Boy Lollipop. By the time I was born (and having annoyingly passed on an offer to become involved with Island) dad had his own independent label and publishing business. With one brother-in-law as UK head of A&M Records and the other a successful chart topping songwriter, the business of music was all around me and I studied for a while at the Royal College of Music. So when I was given an offer to pitch some music on the Ian Dury Sunday Times commercial by top director Vaughan Arnell, I jumped on it. Having only produced underground dance music outside of my city job, my then writing partner and I sweated all night to deliver music we thought would nail it. It did, and this first campaign went on to win a D&AD award. I’ve been hooked ever since. 

What are the biggest issues facing advertising music companies today?

Aside from budget, one of the hardest things right now is navigating the complicated pitch process and finding a way to really help our agency clients. There are so many options for music at their disposal these days and so many differences of opinion. But in saying that, we like to keep things hassle-free for our clients, and with the help of our experience in the industry we always find a way to cut through this and deliver great pieces of music. 

With the fall in record sales and more money on offer for syncs and bespoke commercial tracks, over the years we’ve seen an increase in big artists collaborating with brands. Do you think advertising is ‘the new radio’?

Brand/artist tie-ins were pretty much unheard of when we started [Morgan Van Dam] but of course now it’s an area we are becoming heavily involved in. With record industry sales slowly beginning to recover and the advertising world playing to an increasingly musically-savvy audience, brands and artists don’t jump into these sorts of deals perhaps quite as readily as they used to. Like any collaboration there really need to be clear mutual benefits, but the power of advertising to promote a music track is still hugely attractive, particularly on big-budget campaigns. One of the tracks we created for a commercial reached No.11 on the UK singles charts [I See Girls by Morgan Van Dam] and sold over 300,000 units across Europe, and John Lewis has been responsible for another UK No.1 with Lily Allen this year, so for the right project and the right artist, advertising can offer fantastic opportunities. But these days through things like social media, artists have lots of other routes to promote themselves, so it still needs to be a good fit, and radio audiences are doing pretty well.

Are music companies under appreciated in this industry?

Some people certainly think so. But we’re happy to do what we're passionate about - creating music for the original, fun briefs that come our way.

Tell us about HUSH Music. What will make it different from the competition?

We’ve always had a strong focus on creating music, partly because I’m a musician and composer myself, but with the increasing popularity of syncs, we now have a transatlantic music supervision team who bring a huge amount of experience as well as some typical North American enthusiasm and passion which is so important in providing a great search service. Everyone’s a one-stop-shop now, so rather than just being all things to all men, we at HUSH want to keep our focus on what we’re already strong at—producing fresh, cool music for our clients, whether it’s a contemporary orchestral piece for Samsung, a quirky electronica piece for Ford or a sweaty club track for Lynx.

Our mix of experience, having gone through the process of creating music for hundreds campaigns for most major brands (including Nike, Audi, Guinness, Samsung, Ford and McDonald’s) in both the UK and US along with fresh new talent I think will help set us apart. We also always try to be forward thinkers and we’re willing to take chances when it’s right, and I think that is what makes us unique. We have and are continuing to build strong ties with exciting people from the current music industry. We’re collaborating with some of the best talent to create credible music to picture for the on-demand generation; music that people would actually choose to listen to. As we do more and more digital work, and engage with a younger, more critical on-demand audience, it really means we need to deliver stand-out music.

HUSH claims to have a diverse roster of composers on board. Where have you found them and what were you looking for in them? 

At HUSH we’ve been mostly taking on new, young, fresh composers who haven’t spent too much time writing music for commercials all day long and so have musical lives outside of the advertising world. We love working with people full of youthful passion and energy and a great attitude to working and creating under the pressures we face, and it helps us make sure we’re offering something a little different. We search far and wide and have composers from around the world including our trailer composer (based in New Zealand) whose music has been featured on Hollywood trailers such as Oz the Great and Powerful, and our dance producer who has released remixes for hit acts like Alt-J and Daft Punk feat. Pharrell.

You’ve had a UK hit single before with I See Girls, which was created for a Lynx ad. Is a track’s potential to crossover something you think about during composition?

We don’t necessarily think about the chart-worthiness of the music whilst we’re creating it, but we certainly want it to have wide appeal. Much as we’d like to be given a brief of ‘make a hit song’ we’re always focused on delivering music that works first and foremost with the film. With something like I See Girls there’s always a strong element of luck and it’s a hard thing to force, but we do want to make music that people are going to get excited about - I’d be lying if I said we don’t also get excited about all the ‘what’s that song?’ comments on YouTube.

What will be the first pieces we’ll hear from HUSH?

Having just launched the new company, aside from the great clients we already work with, we have an exciting collaboration where you can expect intimate gigs in unusual places. That’s all we’ll say for now!