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THE STORY OF JIVE BUNNY as told to Johnny Black
Andy Pickles (aka Jive Bunny) : My dad was a singer-songwriter who started the family business, Music Factory in Rotherham, to enable him to record his own songs. The studio grew into a business called Mastermix, providing dance mixes for deejays, and I joined the company when I was sixteen as studio gopher. One of our producers, Les Hemstock, did a 50’s rock’n’roll mix that was so popular with the deejays, he and I decided to go back into the studio and re-do the intro, do a few more edits, and generally make it more 7”-friendly, with the idea of releasing it as a single.
We took it to various record companies but the prevailing wisdom was that it couldn’t possibly work. We believed in the idea so much that my dad re-mortgaged the house which got us £20,000, which we used to put Swing The Mood out independently as the first release on our Music Factory Dance label.
I had originally wanted to call the label Jive Bunny, and a friend of my dad’s had done a cartoon of the bunny character, so we decided to call the artist Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, and use the artwork for the sleeve of the single.
Of course, it went to number one and so did the next two. We had ten chart singles in all, and that success went all over the world. We needed somebody to don a bunny suit for tv and live appearances, so I got a mate of mine from down the pub, Joe Holden, and he became the Jive Bunny character, really just because he had the right build for the costume.
Despite the success, though, we hit all kinds of problems with licencing the tracks. In my naivety, for example, I licenced some Bill Haley re-records but used the original versions on Swing The Mood, so we got sued by MCA, which cost us £70,000. And, as the success of Jive Bunny increased, publishers started demanding more and more money to allow us to use the tracks. It started to become uneconomic.
It turned out that, because we were just winging it, learning as we went along, everybody made money out of Jive Bunny except us, because we missed out on all kinds of merchandising opportunities, and we gave away publishing rights on the b-sides not realizing that the b-sides make as much money as the a-sides. I made a lot more money out of doing Jive Bunny gigs, at £3,000 a night, three nights a week, than I did out of the records.
On the plus side, it was great flagship for our company because, all through the Jive Bunny thing, I continued to work as a producer, and we expanded our operations into projects like fitness music – we supply 10,000 fitness teachers with music for their classes. What started out as a father and son business now employs over seventy people, with offices in New York, Barcelona and the South Of France.
In 1994, though, I became 2 In A Tent, with my partner Amadeus Mozart, and we had a hit with a mix of the George Formby song When I’m Cleaning Windows. I’d learned by then not give away the b-sides, so we had a laugh with that one, which consists of Amadeus doing the hovering – for which we got paid.
I’m now also the MD of Tidy Tracks, the biggest indie dance label in the UK. We specialize in hard house mixes, and me and Amadeus go out as the Tidy Boys. It gets a bit weird sometimes, because the music we do now is very cutting edge stuff, and when people realize I was also Jive Bunny, they can find it hard to get to grips with. Ultimately, though, I’m first and foremost a businessman and, although I make music I enjoy, I also want it to be music that people want to buy, otherwise I’ll go out of business.
Even my dad’s finally getting his just desserts. We’re about to put out an album of his songs, sung by a great vocalist we’ve found called Karen Hulatt, on our Boxtree Music label, so things are looking good. I think K.P.Nuts is the only Rotherham company that’s bigger than us.
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Andy Pickles (aka Jive Bunny) : My dad was a singer-songwriter who started the family business, Music Factory in Rotherham, to enable him to record his own songs. The studio grew into a business called Mastermix, providing dance mixes for deejays, and I joined the company when I was sixteen as studio gopher. One of our producers, Les Hemstock, did a 50’s rock’n’roll mix that was so popular with the deejays, he and I decided to go back into the studio and re-do the intro, do a few more edits, and generally make it more 7”-friendly, with the idea of releasing it as a single.
We took it to various record companies but the prevailing wisdom was that it couldn’t possibly work. We believed in the idea so much that my dad re-mortgaged the house which got us £20,000, which we used to put Swing The Mood out independently as the first release on our Music Factory Dance label.
I had originally wanted to call the label Jive Bunny, and a friend of my dad’s had done a cartoon of the bunny character, so we decided to call the artist Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, and use the artwork for the sleeve of the single.
Of course, it went to number one and so did the next two. We had ten chart singles in all, and that success went all over the world. We needed somebody to don a bunny suit for tv and live appearances, so I got a mate of mine from down the pub, Joe Holden, and he became the Jive Bunny character, really just because he had the right build for the costume.
Despite the success, though, we hit all kinds of problems with licencing the tracks. In my naivety, for example, I licenced some Bill Haley re-records but used the original versions on Swing The Mood, so we got sued by MCA, which cost us £70,000. And, as the success of Jive Bunny increased, publishers started demanding more and more money to allow us to use the tracks. It started to become uneconomic.
It turned out that, because we were just winging it, learning as we went along, everybody made money out of Jive Bunny except us, because we missed out on all kinds of merchandising opportunities, and we gave away publishing rights on the b-sides not realizing that the b-sides make as much money as the a-sides. I made a lot more money out of doing Jive Bunny gigs, at £3,000 a night, three nights a week, than I did out of the records.
On the plus side, it was great flagship for our company because, all through the Jive Bunny thing, I continued to work as a producer, and we expanded our operations into projects like fitness music – we supply 10,000 fitness teachers with music for their classes. What started out as a father and son business now employs over seventy people, with offices in New York, Barcelona and the South Of France.
In 1994, though, I became 2 In A Tent, with my partner Amadeus Mozart, and we had a hit with a mix of the George Formby song When I’m Cleaning Windows. I’d learned by then not give away the b-sides, so we had a laugh with that one, which consists of Amadeus doing the hovering – for which we got paid.
I’m now also the MD of Tidy Tracks, the biggest indie dance label in the UK. We specialize in hard house mixes, and me and Amadeus go out as the Tidy Boys. It gets a bit weird sometimes, because the music we do now is very cutting edge stuff, and when people realize I was also Jive Bunny, they can find it hard to get to grips with. Ultimately, though, I’m first and foremost a businessman and, although I make music I enjoy, I also want it to be music that people want to buy, otherwise I’ll go out of business.
Even my dad’s finally getting his just desserts. We’re about to put out an album of his songs, sung by a great vocalist we’ve found called Karen Hulatt, on our Boxtree Music label, so things are looking good. I think K.P.Nuts is the only Rotherham company that’s bigger than us.