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MADISON AVENUE - HOW THEY CAME ABOUT
Madison Avenue was concepted initially by Andy Van in mid 1998 as he wanted to devote a lot of time and effort into creating a credible Australian house artist. The concept was to develop an artist with different singers and musos all working on this artist and it's releases. As Andy was not a great lyric writer, enter Cheyne Coates who had worked with Andy on various musical projects in the past. Cheyne's ability to write interesting and catchy lyrics was obvious as she had written a track for Andy titled "Do what you do Best" a few years earlier for an artist Andy was developing called Bubbleman. Although "Do what you do Best" didn't do a well as they hoped, was always considered an excellent track.
ABOUT THE NAME
The artist name was originally going to be just Madison as Andy had always loved the name and wanted to use it for his first daughter, sometime in the future with his future partner. Cheyne and Andy felt though, that if the single word Madison was used as the artist name, then whoever sung the songs for the artist, there was a possibility that the public would think that that singers name was Madison, so a fairly obvious word to add to Madison was Avenue !
FIRST TRACKS
The first track they worked on was a track called "Fly" in late 1998 and into 1999, sung by Kellie Wolfgram. This track took a while to produce and went through various re-workings and remixes. It has been finished and will appear on Madison Avenue's debut album around September 2000. The 2nd track was "Don't call me Baby", this also did take some time to complete, was a much stronger song both in musical elements and ofcourse the vocals, and was chosen as the debut release for Madison Avenue.
SIGNING TO LABELS
The artist was signed up to Melbourne's premier house label Vicious Grooves, and Andy & John Course (both from Vicious Grooves) took the track to Canne in France to the 1999 Midem Music Conference where it was strongly chased by various labels around the world in particular UK labels. After some to'ing and fro'ing with these labels, the artist was licensed to Virgin for the UK and Sony for Europe & America. And the rest (as they say) is history……
