Point Blank Presents… is a new bi-weekly radio show hosted by a rotation of Point Blank students, starting on whynow radio, Tuesday 11th May – 10am GMT.
Rob Cowan, Founder of Point Blank
From a musician’s studio in Greenwich to a global brand, off-the-cuff, one-on-one production courses to international masterclasses, and Ricky Gervais to Patrick Topping – Rob Cowan’s Point Blank has shaped the way thousands of budding musicians have started their careers.
Point Blank is a university of sorts, but one where the instructors and the students are in a more elaborate synthesis than in a classic higher education institution.
Students take long-term courses, with a plethora of options to choose from: electronic music production or sound engineering, DJing, singing and songwriting, even radio broadcasting to the ins and outs of the impenetrable music business. Originally based in a building in Hoxton, the company has vastly increased their space in London and spread Point Blank over several continents – now with schools in Mumbai, Los Angeles, Ibiza, and two locations in China.
Cowan started his career at University of London Union, as a bass player for an “very 80s” outfit called Savage Hearts, “like a glam Bon Jovi band”, complete with studded leather jackets, eyeliner and mullet-type hair. The lead singer was Ricky Gervais, who was rather conflict-of-interest also the Entertainment Manager for ULU. Soon, Cowan became a bass player for a Sony-signed band named Honeychile. Speaking to him though, it seems that while “London was a great place to be in the early 90s”, and this near glamorous life was enjoyable for a young man, it was the more technical crafting of music that fascinated him.
Cowan started “learning to engineer because I realised that the producer really was the most important person in the band – I didn’t know anything about production to begin with, I knew how to play the bass, but no idea how to put a record together.” Through this, Cowan crossed paths with all the dance acts of the time, “Sasha, M People, D:Ream – Blur [were] in the studio”.
His story then becomes completely threaded in with that of Point Blank. Starting in a beautiful studio in Greenwich in the 90s with enormous windows overlooking the Thames – complete with the sound of lapping water, and view of St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance – Cowan started taking on students for personal engineering classes.
Using one of the first generation Macs, a G3, and an Akai S3000 sampler, the classes started as weekend crash courses for four or five people. The company quickly formed, and in 1999 after running for five years “we had just run out of space and it wasn’t practical to run a school out of a working studio”. They moved to Hoxton, in a purpose-built building with an “actual, real life office” Cowan laughs, rather than “using one of the vocal studios as an office!”
Point Blank Studio 2
They were ahead of the curve in 2007 when they set up their first online courses – which in this day and age seems to be the modus operandi for most education. Cowan is quick to point out though that the collaborative nature of music, that having students in the building, meeting, forming bands and partnerships is incredibly important, and that the worsening service of many educational institutions has come from using the pandemic as a mere excuse.
Being ahead of the trends is perhaps the crucial part of success in music, and the way Point Blank manages to stay a few steps in front is by having a very young team. “They are all on the pulse – much more than I am – I’m old-fashioned in my tastes (previously in the conversation Cowan reminisced over his first summers in Ibiza, the summers of love of 1986 blanketed in dance and electronic music) – but I like good music!” A good nugget drops when he explains that the PB instructors learn a lot from the students as well, who come in with what is playing on the streets, in the clubs, at the events. “You’d be surprised how often I’ve heard the instructors say they’ve learned about entirely new music genres” – it’s a double sided educational relationship.
The Point Blank school in Hangzhou, China
While it could seem that keeping up with the times means keeping up with the genres, the notion of genre isn’t that important for Rob and Point Blank. “There’s a lot more variety now with music that you can stream – but we realised the problem is the genres keep changing!”
So the logical step is to make courses on techniques that would appeal to anybody, whether you’re into rock music, house music, the equipment is similar, either you work at home and use laptops, or you come into the studios and are using a mixing desk. “Those techniques are the same: how do you mic someone up, how do you mic up a drum kit. We distil it to the techniques that you need.”
One new course Rob is keen to tell me about is the ‘Vocal Performance with Music Production’ – essentially how to make a record with your laptop and your voice. I maybe insultingly call it ‘bedroom music’ – an enormously popular, lo-fi offshoot genre – but Rob is clear that ‘bedroom music’ is a misleading term. “What is a studio these days? A laptop, a pair of speakers and a microphone.” So ‘bedroom music’ is far too wide, and far too unspecific, to describe a single type of music that is as varied as the countless people who release music from their bedrooms.
The Point Blank school in Los Angeles
The alumni of Point Blank – while illustrious – is almost irrelevant to what Point Blank is trying to achieve. I sheepishly ask if after years of teaching whether Rob knows when someone comes in if they ‘have it’, or don’t, and if some sort of innate talent is necessary for longevity and success. “I do believe that anyone – if they have the drive and passion – will be ‘successful’. If you’ve got that passion, that, then you’ll become good. There are of course people that are just naturally super talented, but someone new who just works, works, works – will improve, and will do well.” Maybe for those who have both talent and drive – Point Blank Recordings, the in-house but separate label of the school – is the next destination.
Some 20 years after Point Blank opened its doors as a music school, Rob Cowan’s creation is now the world’s leading electronic music school; an industry-renowned training ground that has shaped many international DJs, a new generation of industry shaker-uppers and global stars.
whynow is proud to announce a partnership with Point Blank, which starts with the Point Blank Presents… show on whynow radio: Tuesday 11th May – 10am GMT.
