Ministry Of Sound chief slags off Fischerspooner

It was just a fortnight ago that we spoke about the release of Ministry Of Sound big-wig, James Palumbo’s incendiary debut novel, Tomas (read the full story here). With its prickly sense of humour and twisted view of reality, it looks like a roaring read, and another successful conquest for the MOS mogul. But when Palumbo caught up with ITM’s roaming correspondent Skrufff, spoke with great venom about his greatest personal failure, that being avant-garde electro duo Fischerspooner.

“Do you know them? They were a gay performance band from New York and they were the hottest thing of the time and a bidding war erupted around them, which was taken to ridiculous levels by an East Coast Jewish American lawyer,” Palumbo says.

“After we signed them to Ministry, we had to deal with all sorts of bullshit,” he continued. “They’d tell us things like ‘we can’t come over to London unless we fly on a Concorde’ and ‘we’ve got to stay at (luxury hotel) Claridges’ and all this rubbish,” Palumbo spat. “They were acting like superstars before they actually became superstars and we ended up paying them US$2million. And sure enough there was a bang and a puff of smoke and they ended up selling nothing. I think they sold four albums, or maybe five, it definitely wasn’t ten,” he laughed,

That’s a severe dressing down if we’ve ever heard one, but the MOS boss didn’t stop there, laying another boot into the duo. “Their music was rubbish, I can’t even remember the name of their main song; ‘We Are Nothing’ or something like that: total nonsense. What was funny about it was that one side of the graph there was the hype and the promise and on the other side of the graph was the amount of money we lost: the bigger the hype, the more money we lost.”

Palumbo’s scathing words about MOS’ tumultuous relationship with Fischerspooner as well as the band’s subsequent falling out with the Capitol company may explain why the latter has spent the last few years out of the spotlight, only returning this May with the Entertainment LP, released on their own label, FS Studios.

Although Palumbo’s words against Fischerspooner are nothing short of scathing, we’re in awe of the frank and brutally honest way in which addresses his own failure. To let loose like that is both impressive and pretty damn brave. So major kudos there.

Meanwhile, Fischerspooner have been announced as part of the very tasty looking Melbourne International Arts Festival in October, so chances are we’ll get a national tour from the duo. Until then, it’s your move, Fischerspooner.