A Singer’s Life – Call my Agent (Dix Pour Cent)
After the success of the French TV series, ‘Dix pour cent’, about a Parisian artists’ agency, I wondered whether people would think that singers’ agencies were the same - backstabbing, lecherous, gossipy, mendacious, largely impervious to the needs of their clients? Then I got to thinking that people outside the business actually have no idea about our representatives at all, and that perhaps a new article about agents might be interesting and informative.
Firstly, I must make it clear that ‘Dix pour Cent’ (Call my Agent) bears no resemblance to the reality of musicians’ agents; indeed, I would think it has little resemblance to TV and cinema actors’ agents either! It has been sensationalised for dramatic purposes, and that’s why it’s so good. However, there are some basic similarities, and those will allow us to make some generalisations as we go along.
If you want to have any lasting career, it is pretty much a necessity for a professional singer to have an agent. However, the type of agent varies from country to country, especially in Europe, and I will look at that aspect in due course.
When I set out on my journey as an opera singer, back in 1980-81, the scene, in Britain at least, was very different from what it is now. To work in any professional theatre, in drama, pantomime, opera and ballet, you had to be a member of the actors’ union, Equity. I was at the Guildhall School of Music on the Postgraduate course, from 1978-81, and as that course was coming to an end, we were all looking to find work. At that time, there were professional choruses at the Royal Opera House, ENO, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera, Opera North, Glyndebourne, and a whole raft of smaller companies like Kent Opera and English Touring Opera. Each of these companies also had full-time company soloists, as well as guest contracts. In Europe, it was quite different, with literally hundreds of opera companies in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland etc, but most of these were off our radars, although the fact that the UK had joined the Common Market in 1973, meant that there were possibilities there, a situation that was to become more and more important as the century wore on.
However, when I emerged from the Guildhall in the summer of 1981, it was in Britain that I looked for work. I was newly married, in 1979, to Fran, a chartered accountant by this time, and we were basically hoping to find work together in one of Britain’s cities. One needed to have a small number of professional contracts to be allowed to join Equity, although the Catch 22 applied, in that you couldn’t get work unless you had an Equity Card. Fortunately for us singers, they accepted non-stage work as qualification, so a few concert contracts would suffice. It was much harder for actors. The other problem for me was that there was already an Equity member called Brian Scott (my birth name), and I would have to change. I never met this mysterious character, and I often imagined him as a magician’s assistant or a juggler or fire-eater. Anyway, the search was on for a new name, and several came up: could you imagine me as Scott Brian, or Byron Scott, or even Nigel Scott (my alternative name option before birth)? I don’t know who came up with Brian Bannatyne-Scott, but it was a stroke of genius. My mother’s maiden name was Bannatyne, so it seemed both appropriate and charming, and of course she was overjoyed! The other repercussion, and I must say one to which I had not given any consideration, was that in alphabetical cast lists, I was catapulted from the lowly depths of the S’s to the lofty heights of the B’s!
It is one of the anomalies of history that, for solo singers, the one good thing that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives ever did was abolish the closed shop in unions in 1990. We had all continued to be members, paying a nominal £32 a year, happy to be a part of something that benefited all singers, if not us particularly. Equity was useful, and crucial for actors and chorus singers, but soloists were not really on their radar. After the legislation banning the closed shop, Equity, obviously needing money, insisted that as well as our small annual fee, we would have to pay a small percentage of our overall earnings as well. Since even one per cent could be a large amount of money, and since Equity did nothing directly for us at all, many singers took advantage of the legislation and left the union. I don’t know how much this cost them, but it seemed a retrograde step to try to force us to pay vastly more than we had done, especially when we were now paying nothing. I know that some of my soloist friends stayed in Equity out of a desire to be loyal, and to help colleagues in other areas of theatre, but I am afraid I decided that paying a large amount for no benefit seemed silly, especially as I had a young family by this time. I did keep my new name however!
Having decided on a new name, and with the attendant publicity gained by winning the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize in 1981 and the ‘fame’ of appearing on the televised masterclasses filmed in 1980 at the Edinburgh Festival with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and screened in 1981 on BBC, my profile was quite high, and, armed with my new Equity Card, I was looking for an agent. I was approached by a guy who had been at St Andrews, and who now worked for the Basil Douglas Agency. I hadn’t really known him at University, but I reckoned the connection was a useful one. I later found out that the Basil Douglas of the title had been a flat-mate of Peter Pears before he met Benjamin Britten, and was a wannabe singer, who turned to agenting. I stayed with Basil Douglas for a few years, including my contract with Scottish Opera, starting in 1982, and looking at his 1984 list now, he had some incredibly big names, including Victoria de los Angeles, Robert Holl, René Jacobs and Gérard Souzay. While I was on contract at Scottish, there was little for the agency to do, and indeed they did little. Despite the big names, I became disillusioned and was contacted by Music and Musicians, another London agency. The main agent of the firm was a powerful lady, Astra Blair, a mezzo soprano in her day, whose husband was a well-known bass-baritone, Raimund Herincx, who I had met on occasion, and who had some sort of relationship with Aberdeen University. Raimund was a great talker and had many tales to tell about his career and what he could do for younger singers. A lot of it was hot air, but he was a huge personality and I was convinced that this was good for me, which for a short time, it was. According to my research for this article, Astra is still alive at the age of 91! However, when I went freelance in 1985, this agency too proved lack-lustre.
At this point, it would perhaps be useful to explain what an agent does for a singer, or maybe more usefully, what a singer can’t do himself. There have been one or two superstars through the ages who have survived and prospered without an agent, but these are a tiny minority. Basically, a singer finds it extremely hard to get professional work on his own. He has no direct contacts with managements throughout the system, he doesn’t know what is being planned for the future by the opera companies in his country or indeed any other country, and he has no idea what fees to ask for if work were to come along. In other words, a singer has zero power to further his career, especially at the beginning. This makes the artists’ agent very important, and so the choice of an agent becomes the most crucial part of a young artist’s career plan. A good agent will have contacts throughout the business, will personally know the various managements he has to deal with, and will have a deep enough knowledge of singers and their voices to enable him to make crucial decisions about what roles to accept or push for or refuse. For his part, the artist has to trust that his agent has all that knowledge, that he has a large enough roster (but not too large) to be able to fit you in without finding yourself usurped by a colleague, that he is respected by the managements, and that he understands what your worth is in financial terms. From our point of view, the crucial thing about the money is that you will be paying the agent anything from 10 to 15% of any fee he negotiates, and so you know that, if he is doing his job, you will benefit and the agent will benefit. No one is in this business to be a charity, and one has to be very clear that this is how things work. If the system works, everyone is happy, but the fact that almost all singers say they are dissatisfied with their agent tells us that Utopia is rarely reached!
Some singers stay with the same agent for their entire careers, and if this works out, it is perhaps the best solution. You become close friends, and trust is total. I have seen this scenario with a few of my friends, but it always seems to me that, in the end, the agent doesn’t necessarily find the best fees and the best roles. Since he has found a niche for his singer over the years which is lucrative for both, he is reluctant to try new things, or to push for more money, or take a gamble. Similarly when a singer comes to the end of his career, I have often been shocked at the ease with which an agent can just abandon his singer – once he becomes less sought after, the agent seems to feel that his work is done, and he can move on. The older singer is then dropped like a stone, and his career is brutally ended.
I have had a succession of agents over the 40+ years of my career, changing sometimes because the relationship of trust has broken down, but sometimes in the pursuit of something new, which necessitates a change of focus. I have been lucky that agents have wanted to work with me, and I with them, and I only languished without one for a couple of years, way back in the late 1980s. After that hiatus, I joined an agency which had John Tomlinson on their books. He was the pre-eminent young bass of the time, and I hoped to get some of his scraps and left overs. This wasn’t to be, but I did get picked up by ENO, which was at the peak of its success, with the triumvirate of Mark Elder, Peter Jonas and David Pountney in command. Roles like Monterone (Rigoletto), the Commendatore (Don Giovanni) and Banquo (Macbeth), along with some smaller roles and covers, kept me in constant work in London from 1987-1993, and I was able to appear at the Wexford Festival in Ireland as well as many concerts in the provinces and with Chelsea Opera at the QEH.
There was a major hiccup after Wexford however. As I came off the stage after a successful performance of Marschner’s ‘Der Templar und die Jüdin’ (a German version of Walter Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe’, written only 10 years after the novel was published in 1819), I was greeted in my dressing room by a representative of my agency. Expecting praise and a warm embrace, I was disgusted to receive nothing but an invoice for my commission fee, stipulating cash, preferably the next day.
What I did the next day was put in motion a change of agents, which was effected very soon. My friend, David James, of the Hilliard Ensemble had recommended to me his agency, Magenta, then the foremost early music agency in the business. I was beginning to become known in the baroque world as a full-voiced bass with a flexible coloratura, especially after my appearance in the performances and recording of Monteverdi’s ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’ with Richard Hickox, and this seemed the perfect time to move. The crass behaviour of the old agent was a simple catalyst to change to Magenta, and things proceeded apace. I was assigned to Anthony Dawson, formerly an English tenor with whom I had worked in the past, and whose sincerity and loyalty were apparent. He maintained my work with ENO, but also got me in with Trevor Pinnock, the charismatic harpsichordist and director of the world famous English Concert, the Hilliard Ensemble for Arvo Pärt’s ‘Passio,’ and various other baroque groups. My fee immediately was almost double (the old agency had no idea what to charge), and soon, I was singing all over the world with some of the greatest early music specialists around.
The point of this anecdote is to show how important having the right agent is for any singer, and I hope this personal tale demonstrates how quickly and fundamentally a change of agent can affect one’s career.
A similar change happened about 10 years later, when I moved to my present agent, Robert Gilder. I had been doing pretty well, working mainly in Europe throughout the 90s. Magenta changed owners and the manager I was assigned to after Anthony Dawson retired was unsatisfactory. I joined a smaller agency, and for several years all went well, with me getting most of the important bass roles which came in to the office. Then they took on another bass, at a high level but who hadn’t sung much opera before. I could see that he had a really good voice, with less of a niche sound than me, and that he was probably even more marketable. I could also see that he was using my agency as a springboard to greater things, and that he would not stay for long. Unfortunately, the head of the agency believed he could take this bass to the top himself, and suddenly, he was getting all the roles that I had been cast in, and I was feeding off scraps. I was still incredibly busy, but I could see that I was no longer top dog, and in a small agency, that is most unsatisfactory. Consequently, I started looking around, and I had a chat with Robert Gilder. Robert and I are almost contemporaries, and he had been known for being a decent agent but with far too many singers on his books. Our conversation led me to believe that he planned to cut down his list, and that he envisaged really good things for me. I knew he had an office in New York, and good contacts in Germany, so I decided to take the plunge. My old, smaller agent discovered that his star bass was indeed just waiting to move to a major agency, and so he lost two basses in quick succession. I was sorry, because this guy was a decent man, but sadly naive. His agency continued for about ten years, and he retired in 2016.
Robert and his various assistants over the years have been very good for me in the latter period of my career, allowing me to sing major roles all over, especially in Canada, Germany and France, and I owe him a lot. We have had our occasional differences, but he has been loyal to me (and I to him), and I think we have been good for each other. I was especially grateful to him for keeping me on even after my accident forced me to stop singing opera, and you can still find me on his list.
As usual with my articles, my story has overlapped a lot with the points I was trying to make about agents, and I crave your indulgence for that. I hope the personal stuff has illustrated what I was trying to say about the way agents work, and perhaps I can conclude with a more lucid explanation of what they do.
Before I do that, I should point out that singers’ agencies in Europe tend to be rather different from those in Britain, although that has changed a bit since I started out in the 1980s. Since there are hundreds of opera companies in continental Europe (in Germany alone there are 226, in Britain only 5 all year round and a few festivals), agencies tend to be huge and impersonal, literally sending singers out at random and hoping to find contracts. My only experience of this system was in 1985, during the two year hiatus I wrote about earlier. I contacted an agent in Vienna who I had met when competing in the Belvedere Competition that summer, saying I was open to finding a contract in Germany. I was sent to Giessen, Wiesbaden and another which I forget now. Turning up at each theatre, with a crowd of other singers, I found in turn that one was looking for a baritone, and one for a deep bass. The third wasn’t really looking at all but had a random audition that day. I had driven 1000 miles around Germany, at my own expense, sent by an agent who hadn’t even bothered to find out what voice I had. Fortunately, I had taken my father with me for the trip, so we had a great father/son bonding experience, but the whole thing was a complete waste of time and money. That was my one and only venture into the German system!
Let’s look at an example of how the British agent system works:
Most agencies are run by one or two people, with various assistants either to deal with financial affairs or to look after particular singers. Quite often these, usually younger, people can be worth getting involved with, as they are often embryonic agents themselves and can go the extra mile to get you work. After a few years at Gilder, I worked closely with Sam Krum, who became my de facto agent, and knew my voice and ability best. We made a good team.
On a particular day, the casting director of a certain opera company can call the agency, saying they are looking for X to sing Y in a new production of Z. The singer is completely unaware of this conversation, and this is where the trust factor comes in. We have to trust that our agent knows who best to recommend to the opera company. The agent will look at his list, and check availability (these contracts are usually at least a year or two in advance – in the old days, it was often 3 or 4 years ahead), and then, having decided who to recommend, will contact the singer with some information and ask what we feel about it. If the dates fit, and the role looks interesting (or the venue!), the singer will either give the go-ahead immediately or ask for a bit of time to study the role and see if it fits his voice and character. Once we give the go-ahead, the agent will go back to the management, and either say that the singer is interested and is prepared to come in for an audition, or if the singer is more advanced, will be happy to take the role without audition (my preferred option!). As my career progressed, I was less willing to travel for an audition, unless I was virtually the only candidate or the audition involved some sort of meeting with a director. At the beginning, because I was less well-known, I sometimes turned up at an audition to find 10 or 20 other singers milling around. This was not pleasant.
It was now the agent’s job to convince the management that they wanted their singer, and only then would the matter of a fee come up. This is the aspect of the agent’s work that I always felt was absolutely their domain, and where I was least competent. Singers never know what their colleagues earn, and the subject never comes up in conversation, ever. Consequently, you rely exclusively on your agent to negotiate the best fee. It’s also not just the fee. There is the question of travel and accommodation expenses, whether there can be an advance on the fee, how it’s paid etc. Very often, a contract is made whereby the singer gets paid per performance, starting with the first show. If, as often happens, there is a six to eight week rehearsal period, living in rented accommodation and eating out, you may be out of pocket by a four figure sum before you have earned a penny. The agent has to deal with all that, as well as getting the best fee possible. He earns 10-15% of the fee, so it’s in his interest to get the singer a good one!
There are also many other things a good agent can do, including helping a singer through an illness or a bereavement, and often acting as a marriage guidance counsellor. The life of an artist, often spending months away from family, in a tense, intimate situation with close colleagues, can be challenging, and a good agent should be able to spot the tell-tale warning signs.
As you can see, I have had several agents throughout my 40 years as an opera singer, some better than others, but one thing is for sure, we cannot survive without them! At least we are spared the machinations of the characters in ‘Call My Agent’, as far as I know!
Cover photo: france télévisions
