Take a venue. Throw in dressing rooms, make-up artists, the hottest music talent around, a backstage celebrity ‘retreat’, top-class catering, diva demands, security to turn away blaggers, all backed by a prolific advertising campaign – and you might get a glimpse of what goes into organising the Music of Black Origin (MOBO) Awards...
Why do I put myself last all the time?” laughs Kanya King, after revealing that she usually leaves planning her MOBO Awards outfit until the day before the event. When you’re responsible for putting on one of the most prestigious shows in the music industry calendar for a global audience of 250 million, dresses might understandably fall pretty low on your list of priorities. But if organising the event wasn’t time-consuming enough, managing the MOBO brand has bestowed on her shoulders responsibilities she never bargained for.
A beacon organisation
When the first MOBO Awards screened in 1996, the brand took on a life of its own. King soon found she was a role model for budding female entrepreneurs, and an ambassador for both urban music and black issues.
“We became very quickly a beacon organisation,” she says. “We’d get inundated by calls from people wanting practical advice on employment opportunities, career development or business. They saw us as an umbrella organisation they could trust to give advice without any vested interest.”
So what was it about the MOBOs that touched so many people? Let’s not forget it was a landmark event. At the time King felt passionately there was a lack of recognition for urban music in proportion to the revenue it was generating for the music industry, and wanted the imbalance redressed. The record labels took some convincing, and many were unsure there was an audience for the MOBOs.
But King was resolute. Ever since she could remember, she had wanted to attend a show like the MOBOs, and she was certain there was a similarly hungry audience out there. She had a vision for the awards that would embrace diversity, and as the child of a Ghanaian father and an Irish mother, King wanted to create a space where fusion was celebrated and a white artist singing ‘black music’ could also be honoured.
“It was always music of black origin, never artists of black origin,” she says. The name was of the utmost importance to this vision. “It’s short, memorable and it sounds quite ethnic, yet also inclusive,” observes King.
She also wanted urban music disassociated from the ‘unjust’ press it was receiving at the time. “Even though we didn’t have the same budget as the more established award shows, I needed to kind of pretend and make our resources go a long way,” she explains. So she drew on her experience organising gigs as a student.