Muriel Vandenbossche

Militant Music P.R.

Paris 

20/12/2006 - 

You don't forget a name like Vandenbossche – and you don't forget a P.R. like Muriel, a woman who has devoted nearly twenty years of her life to promoting jazz and world music stars and unearthing new talents. Born in 1961 and growing up on a diet of '70s sounds, Muriel Vandenbossche has established herself as a rebel who found her cause.

Muriel entered the P.R. profession as a trainee, turning up for work one morning, discovering a real passion and staying in the business for the rest of her life to date. "I didn't even know the job of P.R. existed when I was younger," she says, "All I knew was that I couldn’t see myself selling socks or houses as a career!"

Growing up with a civil servant father and a mother who worked in a bookstore, Muriel was drawn to the world of arts and culture from an early age. "I was absolutely fascinated by the artistic milieu," she admits. And then, of course, there was her character. "I never wanted to be like everyone else… I was lucky that at the age of fourteen I started hanging out with people who were older than me." Hanging out with the older generation led to Muriel  discovering the '70s rock scene while girls from her peer group were still going crazy for French disco king Patrick Juvet. "I was totally disconnected from the teen environment of the day," Muriel concedes in retrospect.

Muriel's crowd of elder mentors not only took her under their wing, but directly influenced her musical and literary tastes and ultimately changed her vision of the world. It seemed to the young adolescent at the time that she gained ten years experience overnight. "It was post-68 and we were curious about everything," she says, "There was a real hunger for freedom and a vital need to protest against the establishment. We went round reading Sartre and believed in revolution." Basically she says, there were two choices: "Either you fitted the mould or you rebelled against it. And I became one of the rebels."

It was obvious from an early age that Muriel was not cut out to follow a straightforward career path. "I always wanted to do things differently from other people," she says, "I never believed in following the crowd. Even my mother used to say I was unsociable. Basically I was always elsewhere. I wasn't like other girls my age. That's just the way I was. I was always plaguing myself with questions about things other people never even bothered about. I believe that sort of thing's in your genes. You're born that way, out of synch with everyone else. The important thing is to realise that and know yourself."

Muriel could easily have ended up in the music world on the other side of the equation. She studied violin assiduously for many years, but never thought she was gifted enough to make a career of her playing. "I had too much respect for real artists to ever try and be a musician myself," she says, "I have enormous respect for other people's talent." Instead of pursuing her own career, the young music aficionado decided to choose a profession which would keep her in contact with those she admired. She became Muriel Vandenbossche, press attaché and general promoter of talent – a tough and frequently unrewarding job where lesser P.R.s have fallen by the wayside, worn down by the disdain, arrogance and bad faith of journalists. Muriel claims she has never suffered the outrageous slings and arrows of the media, however. "If my motivation were purely professional," she says, "I think I'd have been the laziest P.R. in the world. But doing what I do out of passion is an entirely different ballgame."

A woman of conviction

Muriel admits that that passion has to go hand in hand with dedication and sheer bloodymindedness when it comes to defending artists who, on their own, would never get airtime on radio or television. "It's a constant battle to get something that’s not in the Top 10 heard," she complains, "The Top 10 records have a total monopoly on the airwaves and to fight that you have to be a real musical activist – something which suits my character down to the ground!" Fired by a spirit of contradiction and a real force of persuasion, Muriel describes her approach to the media as being "You want me to listen to that on the radio, well I want you to discover this instead!"

Muriel Vandenbossche is the first to admit that she ended up in P.R. quite by chance. "Given the path I followed, I was more destined towards a career animating cultural workshops or something like that." As a child Muriel often dreamt of working in marquetry, a craft which requires almost as much patience and perseverance as her current career. She eventually ended up organising children's shows at a youth centre, but boredom soon set in and she began looking around for something else. One day she came across an ad. for a trainee in a P.R. agency managed by a friend of a friend. "And suddenly I thought 'Yes, that's what I'm going to do!' without even knowing what the job entailed. After that I became really passionate about what I was doing." At the end of her training, the director of the agency offered her a summer job. By the end of that summer she was hooked and went on to set herself up in business as a P.R.

After weeks of hustling behind the scenes, organising intensive mailings and barrages of phone calls to festival directors, Muriel finally hit the jackpot when Les Saisons Musicales de Royaumont asked her to take them on. Suddenly afraid that she would not be able to manage such a big client alone and "without references", she turned to her old boss for help. "I said to him, 'OK, I'll bring in enough money to cover my pay and you can, create a position for me in your agency.' He agreed and we went along to meet the people at Royaumont together. We landed the contract for the 'Saisons musicales' which meant we were responsible for managing a huge budget. And throughout that entire period my boss was training me. I've been totally passionate about this business ever since!"

Muriel got an even bigger break after that when Le New Morning, the legendary jazz and world music venue in Paris, took her on as a P.R. A spate of contracts with record labels and tour organisations soon followed and Muriel ended up working with a host of prestigious names including Sonny Rollins, Pat Metheny, Dianne Reeves, Jacky Terrasson, Richard Bona, Yusef Lateef, Belmondo and Ray Barreto. 

Muriel claims that P.R., often seen as such a totally unrewarding profession, is still a source of passion and personal happiness to her. And within the P.R. business, where reputations are made or broken by word of mouth, she is greatly respected by colleagues who praise her rigour, her unfailing sense of intuition and her independence. Artists, journalists and producers all appreciate her communications expertise, her strategic planning and the fact that she is always available.

Muriel's take on her success? "I think luck comes to you if you put a lot in. At the end of the day, I've made a success of things because I worked really, really hard." Not to mention putting her personal and social life on hold and accumulating the stress of frequently overbooked schedules. "You never count the hours you put in," she says, "I didn't actually take a holiday for years so I think I deserve the fact I am where I am today." And where she is today is an enviable position of taking on only the artists who interest her. "I've always taken on albums I liked," she says, her eyes sparkling with conviction, "and that means albums I think are really, really good!"

Soeuf  Elbadawi