History
Brian Higgins found early success after producing Dannii Minogue's third album, Girl, which gained favorable reviews at the time but failed to enter the British Top 40. However, the success of the lead single, "All I Wanna Do", led to a collaboration with Cher and Higgins co-writing her international #1 hit single "Believe." Although the song outperformed all expectations and won him three Ivor Novello awards, Higgins found himself without a label when London Records was sold in 2000. After eighteen months, he decided to found Xenomania as an independent production company based in Westerham in Kent, outside of London, because it is "somewhere where concentration would be easy no one 'pops' in." He met Miranda Cooper at the 1996 Eurovision Song Contest when she was a backing dancer for Gina G, while Matt Gray had started his musical career in the 1980s, writing music for the Commodore 64 home computer. Nick Coler programmed The KLF's singles and Tim Powell started out in 1989 "doing hardcore rave stuff". Higgins attempted to launch Cooper as a solo artist under the stage name Moonbaby but failed to find success. "That's when we started writing for other people," according to Cooper. "I'd had writer's block for myself, but as soon as it was for somebody else all these songs popped out." Moonbaby's "Here We Go" would later be recorded by both Lene Nystrøm Rasted and Girls Aloud.
Read more about this topic: Xenomania
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)