Justin Broadrick was 15 years old when he first changed the landscape of heavy metal. A social misfit inspired by anarcho-punks Crass and the sonic terrorism of industrial originators Throbbing Gristle, he was conscripted into Napalm Death as guitarist in 1985. He appeared on the first side of their 1987 debut album, Scum, a record that helped lay down the template for grindcore, and has remained a lodestone for adrenaline-fuelled agitators ever since.

“Ninety-five per cent of the A-side of Scum was my music,” he says. “I was sitting in my bedroom in a council estate in Birmingham, writing riff after riff after riff. I was a weird machine. If I think back to it, it was always this endless river of sound. I have to stop myself from creating. You see how many projects I’ve got, it’s ridiculous. And for me, it’s the tip of an iceberg. I would release way more if I knew I wasn’t suffocating people with my music.”

We’re having coffee in central Oslo, a few hours before he’ll terrorise audiences at the city’s Inferno Festival with Godflesh, the hugely influential band he has been at the centre of, on and off, for the past 35 years. Lanky, with a tufty beard making him look like an urban wizard, the 53-year-old is a dynamo of effusive, gregarious energy, as if an endless amount of information is constantly whirring in his brain.

Justin may be one of the underground’s most prolific musicians – Napalm Death, Head Of David, Fall Of Because, Final, Techno Animal and Jesu are just some of the countless projects he’s been involved with. But the entity that’s been his defining work is Godflesh.

Formed in 1988 with fellow Fall Of Because member Benny Green, and powered by a cheap drum machine they bought with a loan from Benny’s mum, Godflesh viewed the then-burgeoning industrial scene through the grimiest, most godforsaken of lenses fashioned from their claustrophobic Birmingham surroundings. Boiled down to a vision of humanity locked into an endless struggle against overpowering forces, they were George Orwell’s 1984 on steroids. Textured by Justin’s guitar riffs squirming like welts around a point of impact, the result was startling, but transcendent too, the pummelling repetition of their music treating nihilism as a tantric state. It felt as though something utterly new and terrified was being born, and beaten down, on an endless loop. You couldn’t look away.

“It’s protest music,” says Justin. “I always felt it was resignation, how humanity is a cesspool of shit and will never crawl out of it, but still not giving in. So it’s a protest against everything we are, but the embodiment of the human condition is me fighting against that, and as I recently learned, it’s been me fighting against my autism.”

Friends had asked if he’d ever considered that he might be autistic, but he put the way his mind worked down to the “terrible anxiety” he suffered. He was eventually diagnosed with autism in June last year.

“It suddenly put everything in place: my hypersensitivity, my sense of self-failing, of being misunderstood, of feeling isolated and alone, my sense of masking, my sense of trying to be something that I know I’m not, and so on,” he says. “It’s like a battle against everything fundamentally.”

Justin knew he was different at an early age. Unable to focus at school, his report cards regularly stated he was highly equipped, but too much of a dreamer to excel.

“Although I didn’t know it then, that was a blueprint for autism,” he says. “Everything was too fast. For me, it was all carnage, mess, 360 degree perception and I’d just look out the window at the lights and the sun, and I was happier just escaping into that world than this chaos of people. Even now, I’m hearing conversations behind me, trying to filter them out. If a glass breaks behind me, I’ll be thinking what’s happening there, why is that happening, and I can be so distracted so easily.”

Abandoned by his biological father, living with an alcoholic mother, much of his sense of isolation came from a sense of being a burden to those around him. The one relative who would give him attention was his German grandmother, a renegade during WWII, who was forced into a concentration camp before being liberated by the man she later married.

“My nan would explicitly overshare, like I do. All I’d ever hear about when I was a kid were these stories of fucking horror. She was still there, even to the day she died: pure German accent and still recounting these experiences. She said she stood in front of mountains of dead bodies, and I was just a seven-year-old child. So I was being exposed to this brutal imagery with my sensitivities, and now I have lifelong PTSD as well. So imagery is very easy for me to concoct and to feel. I have highly empathetic responses to things, so I just carried all this anger and all this horror.”

The one language that Justin could think in at his own pace was music. His mother and stepdad were hippies turned punks, forming a band, Anti-Social, who put out an obscure seven-inch single of punk-meets-shock horror. He was turned onto Alice Cooper, the Sex Pistols and Lou Reed, most notably the latter’s provocative 1975 album Metal Machine Music, a record consisting entirely of feedback that was designed as either a grand art statement or a deliberate fuck-you to Reed’s label.

Justin formed a powerelectronics band at the age of 11, spurred on by his love of Throbbing Gristle and fellow industrial provocateurs Whitehouse. He went on to join Birmingham band Fall Of Because as drummer and vocalist, before a meeting with Napalm Death’s then-singer and bassist Nic Bullen led to him doubling up as that band’s guitarist, before in-fighting forced him to leave after recording just one side of Scum. A brief stint in experimental metallers Head Of David followed, though it was Godflesh where everything coalesced musically and lyrically for Justin.

Among his stepdad’s records, one that offered particular inspiration was by The Stranglers. “It was the bass playing. I just connected with filth in sounds. That texture and dirt and chaos and carnage within it, and me trying to abbreviate it and contain it almost. We wanted to turn the guitar and bass down so fucking low that we could barely even play anymore – until we were physically merging with the filth of this sound. The lower we tuned, and the more guttural it became, the more connection I had with it."

When Godflesh’s self-titled debut EP was released in 1988 via Swordfish Records, its impact was immediate. It might have drawn from both metal and industrial, but it felt like a hermetically sealed world with its own irresistible force of gravity. Influential Radio 1 DJ John Peel was an early champion, and Earache Records, home to the likes of Morbid Angel, Deicide and Napalm Death, signed them.

Their debut full-length album, Streetcleaner, was released the following year. This wasn’t so much music as the sound of a machine under unbearable stress. The hyperdense Christbait Rising was as relentless as a pneumatic torture device while the looped artillery barrage of Pulp didn’t just touch a nerve, it slammed a metric fuckton of pressure onto it. Its extremity attracted a host of fans. Justin was asked to join Faith No More on guitar by a besotted Mike Patton, while Danzig and Type O Negative also asked, in vain, for Godflesh to support them on tour in the US (the band have subsequently been cited by Metallica, Devin Townsend, Code Orange and more as an inspiration). Still, it was a surprise when major labels started calling.

“It was a surreal experience,” Justin remembers. “We were being told that we were going to be the new Nine Inch Nails, the new Nirvana, even though we don’t sound remotely like them. I remember being chauffeur-driven from Birmingham to London to some exclusive hotel, and I’d only just signed off [from unemployment benefit]. We knew we were exploding, and I was getting a little ego about it, because I’d spent my whole childhood being ignored and marginalised, and all of a sudden, you’re sitting in front of this guy saying to my face that Godflesh are the next big thing. It was like, ‘How does this make any sense?’”

Thanks to a deal between Earache and Columbia, Godflesh’s third album, 1994’s Selfless, was released via a major label in the US. Their flirtation with the mainstream music industry didn’t last long – Columbia unceremoniously dropped the band a year later. But while the chances of Godflesh becoming “the next big thing” were always remote, they were unconsciously sowing the seeds for a new generation of commercially viable bands.

Among the first of these were Nottingham industrial metallers Pitchshifter, who formed the year Streetcleaner was released and were early adopters of the Godflesh sound. Soon, Justin’s influence was beginning to show in a wave of soon-to-be famous American bands, among them Korn and Fear Factory.

“I remember [Justin’s bandmate in the Techno Animal side-project] Kevin Martin phoning me, saying, ‘Jus, do you want to hear an American band sounding just like you?’ And he played me Blind by Korn. I was like, ‘Are you kidding? It sounds like Godflesh meets Faith No More.’

“Fear Factory were structured entirely around us, but I thought it was so much more conservative. But also I saw the beauty and the fact that that’s how you take my formula, be tactical about it, and present it to a larger audience who go, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing!’ And then they hear where it came from, and they go... ‘Oh!’ Ha ha ha!"

Ultimately, the combination of musical and personal pressures got too much, and Godflesh buckled in 2002, on the verge of a huge US tour with Strapping Young Lad and Fear Factory.

“I remember thinking, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to go into unpredictable situations,’” Justin recalls. “I was sick of it. And I was sick of having to drain alcohol every night and do bongs all the time to deal with people and unpredictable situations and information overload. And because I hadn’t been diagnosed, nobody got it, obviously. No one understood why I was reacting like this – not even me at the time.”

He retreated to his new home in rural Wales and formed a new band, Jesu, as his main outlet. Initially, he took the sludgiest elements of Godflesh, expanded on the melancholia that lay at the band’s heart, and wed them to richer, post-rock textures. The project soon broadened into more pastoral and redemptive realms, recalling the 90s shoegaze era long before the revival began in earnest, and even ventured into outright pop.

Although Jesu is still a going concern, and a long-term partner and child have given him much-need balance, some demons refuse to die. At the instigation of Hellfest festival, Justin and Benny reformed Godflesh in 2009 as a live act, but the urge to record together again became too strong.

This year’s Purge is their third album since their reformation. It’s brought back the breakbeat elements of 1992’s Pure record, but it still finds new ways to distil a lifetime’s worth of dislocation and hypersensitivity. But as their colossal set at the Inferno festival in Norway will prove later tonight, Godflesh remain a galvanising and unifying force as deeply affecting for new generations of fans as much as long-term ones.

“Those shows prove this isn’t just old man music,” laughs Justin. “It actually communicates something to people, and although we never became that big band, we’ve somehow attained this legendary status.”

For all Godflesh’s negativity and misanthropy, and the wilful nihilism of mantras like ‘Don’t hold me back, this is my own hell’ (from Streetcleaner’s Christbait Rising), this is music whose overwhelming power becomes an act of deliverance – a stripping away of ego and a surrender to the ecstatic, even if it’s through the most masochistic of routes.

“There has to be some form of communion,” says Justin. “When I go onstage, it’s not a celebration. I’m not hereto entertain you. I’m on the verge of tears the entire time, because I’m so immersed in it. I want it to be this suffocating, claustrophobic experience that I feel. I am fucking crushed by it, and I do want to crush everyone else with it. But it’s not an act of vengeance. It’s a human, shared experience.”

This article was originally published in Metal Hammer issue 376, July 2023. Godflesh will perform a special show at Scala, London on Thursday, October 30.

Along with Earache and Relapse, the UK’s Peaceville Records is one of metal’s great independent labels, acting as a launchpad to such extreme metal luminaries as Paradise Lost, At The Gates, Darkthrone and countless more. In 2017, Peaceville founder Hammy looked back on the history of a label that helped metal in the 1990s and beyond.

In his brilliant autobiography Anything For A Peaceville Life, Paul ‘Hammy’ Halmshaw traces the foundational impetus for Peaceville Records to the day he bought his first tape-to-tape boombox in 1981. Then drumming with Dewsbury anarcho-punks the Instigators, this state-of-the-art tech gave him an independent source for producing his band’s early demos, but soon Hammy’s obsessive enthusiasm for DIY music saw him develop a regular schedule of cassette releases by cult punks like the Subhumans, Chumbawumba, MDC, Disorder and the Stupids.

After several lean years of home-dubbed C60s, photocopied inlays and mindbending home brew, Peaceville Tapes became Peaceville Records in 1987, Hammy solidifying his position as UK hardcore scene lynchpin with a string of vinyls by the cream of Britain’s late-80s crust crop. Deviated Instinct, Electro Hippies, Axegrinder, Doom, Decadence Within, Atavistic: these impassioned rackets were Peaceville’s earliest stock-in-trade.

It was dark, loud and aggressive, but it wasn’t heavy metal. Peaceville’s inaugural seven-inch flexi sampler Will Evil Win? was so-named because of the metal vs hardcore controversy raging in the late 80s, when many hard-left punk purists strenuously repudiated the apolitical fantasies of HM. The breaking of metal/punk boundaries was the theme of Hammy’s first appearance in the mainstream media: a two-page feature in RAW magazine, to celebrate Peaceville’s first fully fledged metal release, Bastard Ballads by Bradford headbangers Toranaga.

“I was very scared at first when I came to sign them because I thought that it would bring the whole label down,” confessed the 23-year-old Hammy in 1988.

Hammy still remembers the malice and bitterness of the punk vs metal war: “There were death threats flying around all over the place back then,” he reveals. “They were burning my effigy at punk bonfires. Just about everyone disowned me – well, all the ones who didn’t count. Soon you just think, ‘Why did I ever help these people out?’”

Toranaga were soon poached by major label Chrysalis – before falling apart – but Bastard Ballads hadn’t cemented Peaceville as a bold new force in the metal world. Two very different bands would soon provide that resoundingly powerful breakthrough. One lived 5,000 miles from Peaceville’s Dewsbury office, in sunny California; the other, 10 miles down the road in rainy Halifax.

The former were Autopsy – ex-Death drummer Chris Reifert’s hot new outfit – who came highly recommended by Carcass/ex-Electro Hippies frontman Jeff Walker. Hammy fell in love with their Critical Madness demo, and Peaceville unleashed Autopsy’s Severed Survival debut in early 1989. This was the big one – not only the beginning of a symbiotic band/label relationship that continues to this day, but also of Peaceville’s extreme metal pedigree. “Autopsy were the real saviours of Peaceville and the main reason Paradise Lost and Darkthrone signed,” affirms Hammy, “so god bless the dopeheads.”

Around the same time, Hammy introduced himself to Paradise Lost after spotting Nick Holmes wearing a Doom t-shirt at a Bradford metal club. Peaceville’s arch 90s rival label, Earache, were also sniffing around, but after Hammy wangled the band studio time and produced their 1989 Frozen Illusion demo, PL stayed with him for their 1990 debut, Lost Paradise, and 1991’s sublime Gothic, before decamping to Music For Nations and global stardom. PL were also crucial to Peaceville in one other respect: they played Hammy the first two albums by Virginia’s veteran doom warhorse Pentagram. Originally released with limited distribution in the mid-80s, Peaceville gave them iconic new sleeves and mixes in 1993 and secured a reunion album, 1994’s Be Forewarned, rescuing the drug-addled pioneers from obscurity.

Paradise Lost had already flown the Dewsbury coop when Peaceville introduced two other key acts from northern England, later to join PL as the fabled ‘Peaceville Three’: My Dying Bride and Anathema. Both bands immediately brought their own hugely distinct talents to the blossoming form, and since proved equally durable, influential and respected. But to any who remember 1991, a more accurate ‘Peaceville Three’ should involve Autopsy and Darkthrone. Alongside PL, these invaluable maniacs were responsible for blazing three distinct trails – doom, death and black metal – each dominating from leftfield forms that came to define the 90s underground and beyond.

However, when Darkthrone joined Peaceville for Soulside Journey in ’91 (“We sent the demo to seven or eight labels,” recalls Darkthrone drummer Fenriz, “but we wanted Peaceville”), black metal wasn’t what the label or band signed up for. Swiftly disowning their sludgy tech-death debut, these Norwegian iconoclasts perplexed their label with a viscerally raw, jarring new sound on 1992’s A Blaze In The Northern Sky.

“We needed to reach another destination and we were hellbent to get there,” asserts Fenriz. “The soundscape was the argument, we had finally gotten the soundscape that we wanted and it was sad to hear that Peaceville wanted to remix. Then we just said we could release it at Deathlike Silence instead… so they decided to try to release it as is.” The result was a seismically important and exciting record, even by early Peaceville’s standards.

In tandem with the progressive intensification of metal at this time, Hammy was also plugging a raft of radical, unclassifiable outfits under the banner of Dreamtime Recordings, after experiencing instrumental Dutch head-manglers Kong live. Subsequent Dreamtimers included spooky industrial duo GGFH, Drug Free America’s acid-trance and Tekton Motor Corporation – Slovenian ambient techno with thrash guitars and Formula One samples. These abstruse impulses alternated with Peaceville’s main metal acts on compilations like Vol 4 and Broaden Your Horizons, the latter title neatly encapsulating the label’s ethos of uniting disparate transgressive sounds under the cohering gaze of Peaceville’s iconic ‘sacred star’.

On these seminal samplers a generation of metalheads had their third eyes thoroughly squeegeed – although few invested in full albums. Hammy estimates that Dreamtime lost him over £100,000, but affirms, “I’d rather not change a single thing, as crazy as it was… Every dumbass costly thing came from a place. Admittedly it was a smoky green boozy place, but it meant something at some point.”

The plug was finally pulled on Dreamtime in 1997; by then Music For Nations had bought a 50% share of Peaceville, the emphasis refocused firmly on metal. However, Darkthrone had been dropped after stirring up a nest of anti-semitic vipers on 1994’s Transilvanian Hunger (“It was a shit year and I didn’t think, just lashed out with my back against the wall,” rues Fenriz), and Autopsy split up in 1995, marginalised after the MFN deal.

On Peaceville’s first website in 1996, new signings being groomed for stardom seemed to have more consciously accessible appeal. The Blood Divine featured Anathema’s former singer, Darren White, alongside Cradle Of Filth alumni, and hopes were clearly high for a new breakthrough artist, but their hippy- goth heavy metal didn’t catch on, despite an enjoyable, well-promoted debut, Awaken. After a less enjoyable, less well- promoted second album, the band fizzled out. An identical fate befell 1996’s other shot at goth-metal glory, Dominion, while promising acts like Blackstar (featuring Carcass’ Jeff Walker) and Acrimony only managed one album for Peaceville before imploding. Did commercial pressure to succeed destroy them?

“I just think they were a reflection back of where the scene was at that time,” reflects Hammy. “It’s funny but I see those times as a bit bloated and I don’t think MFN were solely to blame – I think the whole scene had gone off a bit.”

Not all of Peaceville’s late-90s signings were defunct by the millennium. Temperatures soared when Hammy and Lisa, his wife and Peaceville co-manager since the earliest days, snagged Opeth for 1999’s majestic Still Life. Alas, the prog-death Swedes were unsportingly poached for MFN’s main roster (briefly returning to Peaceville for 2007’s The Roundhouse Tapes). They had better luck with Mikael Åkerfeldt’s buddies Katatonia: hard-workers of prolific quality, the gloomy Swedes remain a perfect fit for the label after 18 years.

In 2000, Peaceville was bought by Snapper Music, initiating a profile-raising campaign of reissues and ‘Best Of’s, but the urge remained to break new talent. With At The Gates’ Tomas Lindberg helming a kaleidoscopic fusion of hardcore, prog, industrial and metal, The Great Deceiver seemed a dead cert in 2002, but once again, an exciting new Peaceville act disappeared after two albums. Ditto Soundisciples (Bristolian genre-mashers with connections to Portishead and Massive Attack) and avant-garde Norwegians Beyond Dawn, while varied hopefuls like Asgaroth, Charger, The Provenance and Akercocke only managed one LP for Peaceville in the 00s.

An important bridge was rebuilt in 2004 when Hammy reached out to Darkthrone, 10 years after the controversy that ended their relationship. “They invited us on a cool trip to see castles in northern England and Scotland to bring us back together,” says Fenriz. “Worked like a charm and we could finally have our own little portable studio, and work the way we wanted to without interference.”

Another factor in Darkthrone’s return was a new imprint, run by the band: Tyrant Syndicate. This short-lived concern shook up the 00s schedule with prime black thrashing death by Aura Noir, Old and Obliteration, as well as Abscess’s last LP. Formed from the ruins of Autopsy, Abscess represented another old Peaceville friendship rekindled, the psychedelic death-punks belching up some twisted filth before a reformed Autopsy returned to the stable in 2009, where they proudly remain.

2006 was Peaceville’s busiest year since their early 90s heyday, with new releases by Darkthrone, My Dying Bride and Katatonia plus two exciting new signings offering atmospheric twists on dark progressive metal: Novembre and Madder Mortem. Yet that November, Hammy and Lisa tendered their resignations.

“It had been building for maybe a decade and there was no enjoyment left in us,” explains Hammy in his autobiography. “No creative spark to run on.”

His parting shot was a doozy: signing Japanese all-female blackened crust trio Gallhammer. Clearly, it was an important year for cementing the legacy. “I think we owed it to the bands who had stuck with us through thick and thin not to destroy it for no reason,” says Hammy. “It’s always been a bigger entity than just me.”

Since then, Peaceville continue balancing old and new, welcoming back bands from their past like Pentagram, Akercocke and Morta Skuld while headhunting suitably Peacevillian innovators and eccentrics like Mysticum, Fleurety, Dødheimsgard, Khold, Mork, Sikth and TOMB. UK metal titans Cradle Of Filth – who poached their share of musicians from Peaceville bands over the years – finally joined the Ville family for a clutch of releases from 2010-12, while in 2014 death metal supergroup Bloodbath represented the return to Peaceville of Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes, further strengthening bonds between past and present for this abidingly special, universally respected label.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 304, December 2017

Mercury Prize-nominated indie-rockers English Teacher, Liverpool singer-songwriter Jane Weaver, and South London experimental duo O. are among an eclectic range of artists set to appear on the sixth annual compilation from producer Dan Carey's influential Speedy Wunderground label.

Scheduled for August 30, the sixth edition of the compilation series will feature eight artists/eight songs, each recorded in a single day by Carey, who has previously worked with artists such as Kae Tempest, Squid, Wet Leg, Fontaines D.C. and more.  

The tracklist for the record is:

Side A
1. Lewsberg – Six Hills
2. Jane Weaver – Oblique Fantasy
3. The Queen’s Head – Your God Owes You Money
4. HighSchool – Only a Dream

Side B
1. O. – OGO
2. English Teacher – Song About Love
3. Hot Face – dura dura
4. Tummyache – Circling the Drain

“I’m excited to have this collection ready,” says Carey, label founder, producer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and music industry innovator. “There is something that sets this apart from the previous 5 volumes: I had never worked with, and in most cases never even met any of the people on this record until the sessions for these songs.

“There’s a variety in how these collaborations came about. Jane Weaver and Lewsberg are artists that I’d been wanting to work with for a long time, whereas I saw Hot Face at The Windmill one night and just said come over to mine! I have calculated that as a result of this compilation, Speedy Wunderground now has 24 new friends.”

Carey's label plans to celebrate the release of the compilation with a launch party in London on August 29. The gig, at The Social, will feature performances from Hot Face and Morn, plus a secret headliner act and DJs. Tickets are on sale now, here.

On May 14, System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian will release his own memoirs, Down With The System, taking a look back at his fascinating life, the incredible highs and lows of his storied career in the music industry and his passionate, lifelong activism. In an exclusive extract from the book, Metal Hammer can reveal, in Serj's own words, the exciting circumstances that almost resulted in the singer signing British rock icons Muse to his own record label, back when they were a young and upcoming band - and the unfortunate turn of events that allegedly led to him missing out.

"My label, Serjical Strike, was always conceived as an outlet for working with artists I love," he explains. "I didn’t have any real commercial ambitions for it. That notwithstanding, I narrowly missed out on signing the British band Muse in 2002 and early 2003, just before they became huge stars in America. Narrowly missed out is a diplomatic way of putting it. I was kind of screwed over.

"I’d seen Muse play at European festivals where System was performing. At the time, the band already had a big following in Europe but hadn’t broken in the US. In fact, their American record label, Maverick - a Warner Bros. subsidiary run by our old buddy Guy Oseary - didn’t even release their second album, Origin of Symmetry, in the States. Their music is this infectious blend of progressive rock and European pop with deep-seated classical influences, but I guess the label thought American audiences wouldn’t get it. I spoke to their manager about trying to negotiate an exit from their Maverick deal so I could sign them, and he seemed amenable to it. The guys in the band were genuinely good dudes. They came to my house, we jammed together in my studio, they even played with my dog.

"Maverick wanted half a million dollars to let Muse out of their contract, so I went to Sony and pitched them, essentially telling them, “Front this money. This band will be worth it and then some.” Sony hemmed and hawed. At the time, Muse was working on another album, and Sony wanted to wait to hear it before they’d commit to ponying up the half million dollars to pry Muse away from Maverick.

"Around this time, I was spending a lot of time in Australia and New Zealand. This is before I met Angela, and I was still trying to salvage my relationship with my ex-girlfriend, who I’d met on my first trip down to Sydney. Everyone knows that long-distance relationships are tough to maintain, but I’d really fallen for this Australian woman and wanted to try to make it work. I left to go down there for a few months and told my lawyer to let me know when the advance copy of Muse’s album arrived, so I could pitch the band again to Sony. It would seem my lawyer failed to do that. In the meantime, a VP at Sony tried to go behind my back and sign Muse out from under me. By the time I heard anything about any of this several months later, the whole ship had sailed. Warner Bros. heard the new Muse album, Absolution, moved them off Maverick, and was making arrangements to release the album through a different subsidiary. To date, it has sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. The band’s follow-up, Black Holes And Revelations, has sold more than five million.

"Now, to be fair, from a business standpoint, I did so many things wrong here. First, I should’ve gone directly to Guy about releasing Muse from his label. We were old friends, and we might have been able to work out something far less onerous than the $500,000 Maverick was asking for. Second, when Sony balked at paying that money, I should’ve found it somewhere else or put it up myself. Third, as annoyed as I was at my lawyer for not letting me know that the album had been delivered, I should’ve been calling in to check on it. I was way too Zen about the whole deal. My spiritual practice seemed to be teaching me to believe that if it’s meant to be, it will be. I wasn’t going to force anything. But that’s not really the way the music business works.

"All that said, ultimately, I came away from this pretty annoyed with Sony. For a record company that I’d made a hell of a lot of money for to not only be unwilling to invest in my vision but to actively undermine it was galling. The fact that their machinations ended up scuttling what would’ve been an extremely lucrative deal for both my company and theirs is even more so."

Down with the System by Serj Tankian is out May 14 via Headline. Read more from Serj in an upcoming issue of Metal Hammer

On November 15, 1992, the comedy series Married... With Children aired its 140th episode. Like many of the previous 139, it was a tale of familial woe and unlikely triumph, but this one was different: its cast featured a number of genuine rock stars. 

The plot is typically ludicrous. The show's protagonist, Al Bundy, enters a shoe-selling contest in order to stave off financial ruin. Against all the odds, he triumphs, and wins a first-class ticket to Honolulu, but his hopes of a trip away from home are dashed when wife Peggy trades the prize for four standby tickets so that the entire family may travel.

Denied access to the first class lounge, Al sees that Lovin' Spoonful founder John Sebastian is able to get in by dint of his fame, and unveils an unexpected, be-wigged alter ego, "Axl Bundy," an aging rock star from the group Shoes N' Socks.

This audacious move propels the Bundys into the first-class lounge, where they rub shoulders with Sebastian, Richie Havens, Spencer Davis, The Doors' Robby Krieger, Herman's Hermits' singer Peter Noone, and Paul Revere & the Raiders frontman Mark Lindsay. 

Peggy Bundy flirts with the musicians ("You are who I think of when I have sex with my husband!") while Al demonstrates his musical prowess by playing a pastrami sandwich like a harmonica. Unlikely as it may seem, this quirk captivates Al/Axl's new friends, and they invite him to join them on a trip to Arizona, where all sorts of rock'n'roll shenanigans will almost certainly follow. Right?

Wrong. Instead, the musicians organise a benefit concert for senior citizens, and record a charity single under the name Old Aid, We Are The Old (a parody of USA for Africa's 1985 single We Are The World), which opens with the lines, "We are the old / We've got arthritis / Our gums are weak / From gingivitis."

And there it ends. Against all odds, Al has learned a valuable lesson in not judging books by their covers, and, at the same time, discovers the heartwarming generosity of his newfound rockstar companions.

 No-Man's early years on independent label One Little Indian (since rebranded as One Little Independent) are to be celebrated in a new five disc box set Housekeeping: The OLI Years, 1990-1994 which will be released on the label on January 26.

At the same time a standalone companion disc, Swagger, chronicles the period that came after the Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson's studio experiments of 1987 and 1988, and prior to No-Man signing its first record deal in 1991, will also be released.

No-Man released two albums and series of singles on the influential OLI label (home to Björk, The Shamen etc), and Housekeeping... features the band's first two albums, 1993's Loveblows & Lovecries and 1994's Flowermouth, along with the singles compilation Lovesighs (1992). The deluxe 5CD bookset also contains outtakes, alternate versions and the band’s sessions for BBC Radio from the period as well as a hardback book includes essays by Matt Hammers (author of No-Man blog, All The Blue Changes), Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson, alongside rare photos and memorabilia.

As well as Wilson and Bowness, No-Man also featured virtuoso violinist Ben Coleman, and the albums featured notable appearances by Mick Karn and Steve Jansen (Japan), Robert Fripp, Ian Carr, Lisa Gerard (Dead Can Dance), and soon to be Porcupine Tree members Richard Barbieri, Chris Maitland and Colin Edwin.

Housekeeping: The OLI Years, 1990-1994 will be available as a deluxe 5CD bookset. Swagger will be available on CD, limited edition cassette and 180g sky blue vinyl (a Burning Shed exclusive).

Pre-order Housekeeping: The OLI Years, 1990-1994.

Burning Shed pre-order.

No-Man: Housekeeping: The OLI Years, 1990-1994

CD1. Lovesighs – An Entertainment
1. Heartcheat Pop
2. Days in the Trees – US remix
3. Drink Judas
4. Heartcheat Motel
5. Kiss Me Stupid
6. Colours
7. Iris Murdoch Cut Me Up
8. Days in the Trees - Reich
9. Days in the Trees - Ives
10. Days in the Trees - Bartok
11. Walker
12. Road

CD2. Loveblows and Lovecries – A Confession
1. Loveblow
2. Only Baby
3. Housekeeping
4. Sweetheart Raw
5. Lovecry
6. Tulip
7. Break Heaven
8. Beautiful and Cruel
9. Painting Paradise
10. Heaven’s Break
11. Taking It Like a Man
12. Babyship Blue
13. Tulip – unedited master

CD3. Singles
1. Ocean Song
2. Back to the Burning Shed
3. Swirl
4. Sweetheart Raw – full length version
5. Bleed
6. Only Baby – Breathe for Me
7. Only Baby – Be for Me
8. Long Day Fall
9. Painting Paradise – single re-recording
10. Heaven Taste

CD4. Flowermouth
1. Angel Gets Caught in the Beauty Trap
2. You Grow More Beautiful
3. Animal Ghost
4. Soft Shoulders
5. Shell of a Fighter
6. Teardrop Fall
7. Watching Over Me
8. Simple
9. Things Change

CD5. Radio Sessions 1992-94
1. Break Heaven – Nicky Campbell session
2. Heartcheat Pop – Nicky Campbell session
3. Housekeeping – Nicky Campbell session
4. Ocean Song – Hit the North session
5. Days in the Trees – Hit the North session
6. Taking It Like a Man – Hit the North session
7. Lovecry – GLR session
8. Days in the Trees – GLR session
9. Sweetheart Raw – The Way Out session
10. Teardrop Fall – acoustic session
11. Watching Over Me – acoustic session
12. Shell of a Fighter – acoustic session
13. You Grow More Beautiful – acoustic session

Swagger
1, Flowermouth
2. Bleed
3. Life Is Elsewhere
4. Mouth Was Blue
5. Curtain Dream
6. Learn To Fear
7. See No Angels
8. Sit Silent
9. Housekeeping: The OLI Years, 1990-1994Swirl

Neither Tim Bowness nor Steven Wilson need an introduction among prog fans – and in 2015, Bowness told Prog how important their No-Man project had been to achieving that recognition. At the time Bowness had just released solo album Stupid Things That Mean The World and it seemed as if No-Man was in the past. But the duo later broke an 11-year silence with 2019’s Love You To Bits.

There’s always been a touch of the artistic maverick about Tim Bowness. Back in the early 90s, alongside Steven Wilson in No‑Man, their record label were expecting a suitably pop-infused second album that they hoped would turn the band into a lucrative commercial act.

Unbeknown to them, the album advance had been spent on upgrading the duo’s studio to enable the pair to create a vivid, inventive record in Flowermouth that appealed to No-Man’s adventurous sense of integrity. On hearing the album and realising their planned vision of chart dominance had evaporated, there were repercussions for the act, as Bowness recalls.

“They obviously thought it was going to be a big pop statement, with us consolidating the first album,” he says. “So they were less than pleased to be confronted by a 10-minute track, that had absolutely no rhythm whatsoever, with Robert Fripp on it. They pulled the budget and released the album with no enthusiasm. So from there onwards, it was a real statement of artistic intent that if we were going to go down, it would be on our own terms. For both Steven and I, that was the beginning of us having a genuine audience.”

Two decades later, and with Wilson engrossed in advancing his flourishing solo career away from both No-Man and Porcupine Tree, a proposed No-Man album was attentively remodelled into the 2014 Bowness solo record Abandoned Dancehall Dreams. That wasn’t merely a swift exercise in rebranding. The freedom away from the band environment enabled Bowness to mutate the material, away from what he knew would negotiate its way through the band filter and into songs that more represented his own musical leanings.

“As with any kind of band, there’s always an element of compromise or certain ideas not getting through,” he reasons. “In No-Man, I think there was always less of a rock influence, partly because Steven was doing that with Porcupine Tree, where he had a more than adequate band to make a noise with. We tended to concentrate on the more discreet atmospheric areas of our tastes, and with Abandoned Dancehall Dreams, I introduced slightly more of a rock element and a broadly melodic balance as well. Had it been a No-Man album, it would have been more atmospheric. That then created an identity I was excited by, and I was just incredibly keen to see where I go. So that in itself defined a solo identity which I hope I took even further with the new album.”

That new album is the engaging Stupid Things That Mean The World, which further anchors Bowness’ repute and is as consistent, admirably audacious and engrossing as its predecessor. His determination to continue to establish a firm solo identity has been achieved, but he admits that there was a certain amount of unavoidable pressure. The sheer quality of the songs on Abandoned Dancehall Dreams ensured that there were now fans waiting with lofty expectations of his music.

“I really don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think people were surprised at how good and coherent that album was,” he says, justifiably. “Perhaps it made them aware of the input I had on No-Man’s music. Suddenly, there are those expectations as people liked Abandoned Dancehall Dreams and that’s given me momentum for my own solo work. In No-Man, when you’ve got a guitarist and co-writer like Steven, you don’t really need to add much musical input. With this, it has been exciting to be able to unleash my compositions. Also, when I write, it’s still an act of discovery because I still don’t consider myself to be much of a musician. I can write on guitar and keyboard, but it’s always a bit of a surprise what comes out, and the results on songs such as Press Reset and Know That You Were Loved went past my expectations.”

The bulk of No-Man’s live band appear on the album, along with Porcupine Tree bassist Colin Edwin, and the writing has been split between solo Bowness compositions and more collaborative sessions. There’s also an intriguing partnership with Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, entitled Where You’ve Always Been. Originally appearing on a Manzanera poetry album, Bowness had been drawn to the music and, after obtaining the master tape, altered both the lyrics and sound to ensure it matched the timbre of the album. Everything You’re Not and Everything But You were also joint creations with Peter Hammill, which was especially gratifying for Bowness given that he’s been an ardent fan for a number of decades.

“Since I was about 15, Peter has been very big in my life, and having a classic northern miserabilist upbringing, his album Over was a Desert Island Disc for me,” he says. “It was particularly special working with Peter because he was the major influence on me when I first started getting passionately into music. Everything But You was written almost as a homage to some of his more absurd, time-signature freak-outs with Van der Graaf Generator. Luckily, Peter was very game, so we recorded the skeleton of that in his studio as well. And once more, he was fantastic as I was doing some fairly peculiar backing vocals and it was great for him to be there, encouraging me along.”

Lyrically, Bowness has always possessed an eloquent prowess, with his tales being known for a melancholic nostalgia that rarely becomes excessively maudlin. It’s something that has permeated his work throughout his career and is, as he explains, a theme he has always been drawn to.

“It’s a natural inclination and something I often think about,” he muses. “To a certain extent, I think there’s nothing worse than forcing meanings on your work. Of course it’s interesting to challenge yourself, but going against your natural inclination in a radical way would seem false. So a lot of it is instinct and tied in with aspects of my life. Obviously I hope that on occasions it’s not entirely hopeless, that there’s an optimism, beauty and purpose, but yes, it’s a natural inclination, perhaps based on my experience to a degree.”

Thematically, this album delves, as Bowness puts it, into the things “small or large, that we cling to in order to give our life meaning and hope”. It’s a loose, unifying but not overpowering concept, and it explores a variety of areas, such as relationships, loved toys and music itself.

“Music has been something I’ve been obsessed with since I was a teenager and, stupidly, it means as much to me now as it did when I started out at 17,” he reflects. “I still listen to music avidly and make music enthusiastically. A couple of the songs relate specifically to musical obsession and how this can be something that makes life worth living as well. So generally speaking, the themes are things that help us carry on in our day-to-day, whether that is our day-to-day beliefs or holidays or whatever.”

The most unsettling track is Know That You Were Loved, which deals with the final moments of a life. Bowness handles the sombre subject matter with a reserved dignity and it somehow maintains an unexpected optimism. Yet the inspiration behind the lyric was particularly harrowing.

“When I was younger, making music but trying to make a living out of music, I did a lot of work with the elderly,” says Bowness without a hint of what is to come. “One of my weirder jobs was having to wait beside people as they were dying because they didn’t have family. So I would have to hold peoples’ hands, give them orange juice and hear the death rattles. It was quite an extraordinary experience, so it’s really the passing thoughts of someone as they are fading out.”

Keen to ensure that the album maintained both a musical and lyrical consistency, Bowness also trawled through his vast archive of career recordings to locate fitting material. This included a No-Man track dating from around 1995 that has been retitled Sing To Me, as well as a song originally that was recorded in the late 80s with his then-band Plenty, called All These Escapes.

“I have a ridiculously large archive, which I call ‘the cupboard of doom’,” he laughs. “In fact, I’d probably say I’ve got around ten albums of unreleased songs in the archive. The material with Plenty was consistently strong, but part of the problem is that they were recorded around 1987, so you’ve got constipated vocals that sound like Wayne Hussey with a hernia. The original version had the core of a very strong song botched very badly.

“Steven also sent me a file containing unreleased No-Man pieces from the mid-90s and Sing To Me was on there. It perfectly fitted the mood of the album so I’ve rewritten the lyrics and added a couple of musical sections. I honestly couldn’t believe that we had forgotten about it and hadn’t developed it further…”

The annual charity White Label Auction is almost upon us, and among the white labels and test pressings up for grabs are records by Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, The Who, the Sex Pistols, The Cure, Rory Gallagher, Budgie, Gary Moore, Iggy Pop, Deep Purple, Rainbow, Genesis, Mötorhead, Nazareth, Status Quo, Manic Street Preachers, Mark Knopfler, John Mayall and the Scorpions.

The Cure's Robert Smith has been particularly busy, donating signed white label copies of the band's albums Disintegration, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Acoustic Hits, Greatest Hits, Wish, Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography, The Top and The Head on The Door. 

Elsewhere, the test pressing of the 2018 reissue of Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same is one of only five produced, and is estimated to sell for between £150-£200, while the 11LP white label version of Status Quo's The Vinyl Collection 1972-1980 is expected to fetch the same amount – which is less than the box currently retails for on Amazon. A bargain, perhaps. And for those with deeper pockets, the bidding on some of those signed Cure albums is already heading towards the £1000 mark.  

The auction catalogue is available online, and fans can either bid online or register to join the live auction, which takes place tomorrow (June 6) at 10am UK time. 

"As ever, we are grateful to all the artists, their labels and teams for making the event possible with their generous support," says Johnny Chandler, A&R Director at Universal Music Recordings, who founded the White Label Auction, "and hope to generate as much as we can to help the Trust continue its valuable work.” 

Proceeds from the auction - which raised £44,000 last year – go to the BRIT Trust, the charity established by the UK record industry in 1989 that supports hundreds of causes around the country, including The BRIT School, East London Arts & Music, the Nordoff & Robbins music therapy charity and many more.

Audiophile record label Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab will pay 40,000 consumers a total of $25 million to settle a class action lawsuit launched last August. The label, commonly known as MoFi, stood accused of using digital processes during the manufacture of its "all analogue" album releases.    

The scandal – known as MoFi-gate – broke last summer when Phoenix record store owner Mike Esposito uploaded two videos to YouTube accusing the company of using digital masters in their "all-analog" and "triple analog" records. 

MoFi subsequently issued an apology for using unclear language and betraying their customers' trust, but two customers filed a class action lawsuit in Washington, alleging that MoFi's analogue branding was deceptive and resulted in them paying inflated prices. 

In January, MoFi – who describe themselves as "the undisputed leader in audiophile recordings since 1977" – elected to settle the case, but the amount of the settlement was disputed by some consumers, who argued it had been reached through a “reverse auction” in which MoFi argued with "ineffectual" lawyers to find the cheapest possible settlement. 

Now a federal judge has approved the $25 million payout, which will allow customers to either receive a full refund, or keep their albums and receive a 5% cash refund, or 10% of the money they'd spent in credit to spend on future MoFi purchases. 

“We appreciate the court’s ruling, which supports all of our claims that there was no reverse auction or collusion," MoFi's lead counsel Joseph J. Madonia tells Billboard. "As always, MoFi continues its commitment to provide the best-sounding records possible.”

MoFi's upcoming releases include the six David Lee Roth-era Van Halen albums, which will be released as 45rpm double vinyl sets retailing at $125 each. 

Thomas Waber isn’t a man given to unnecessary histrionics. The 48-year-old German is the model of Teutonic directness. His conversation is articulate and efficient, his answers blunt and honest. So when he describes something as “an existential crisis”, you know he’s not exaggerating.

The flashpoint he’s referring to came in the summer of 2009. The label Waber spent 16 years building, InsideOut Music, had gone from fringe concern to progressive rock powerhouse. They had released records by Spock’s Beard, Transatlantic, Symphony X, The Flower Kings, Devin Townsend and dozens more acts who helped shape the landscape of modern prog.

In the 1990s, the mainstream music industry viewed the prog scene with the same affection it would a leper colony – studiously keeping a safe distance. But the success of InsideOut took everyone by surprise. Everyone except Thomas Waber, at least.

In 2000, Waber signed a deal with a major German distribution company. The deal would extend InsideOut’s reach hugely across Europe and into America. It meant they could put out more records, offer heftier advances, sign bigger names. But the upward swing shuddered to a halt in 2009 when InsideOut’s parent company filed for bankruptcy. It was no fault of Waber’s, but the result was the same: one of prog’s figurehead labels was perilously close to having the plug pulled on it.

“Was I worried? Of course,” he says. “That was a very difficult time.”

Thanks to a combination of business smarts, brinksmanship and sheer bloody-mindedness, Waber managed to save InsideOut. But he didn’t just drag the label back from the edge of doom. He found a way to give it a new lease of life. Nearly a decade on from that near-extinction event, InsideOut are stronger than ever. And 25 years after the label was founded, it stands as one of the great bastions of the genre.

“InsideOut are 100 per cent responsible for prog’s ongoing success over the last 25 years,” says ex-Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy, who’s known Waber since the early 90s and whose bands Transatlantic and Sons Of Apollo have both released albums on the label. “They carried the flag when nobody else would. So many bands have had an outlet because of InsideOut.”

Thomas Waber is a child of the 80s. The first Genesis album he bought was Abacab, at the age of 11. He grew up feeling like he’d missed out on prog’s golden era. “When I started listening to this kind of music in the early 80s, I thought, ‘Wow, I missed all the good stuff, because it all happened in the 70s,’” he says.

We’re sitting in a boardroom in the London offices of InsideOut’s parent company, Century Media, who are in turn owned by major label Sony Music. For someone who is an outlier on the bigger music industry spectrum, he looks at home here. But it’s a role he’s grown into. He’s definitely a prog fan who started a label all those years ago, rather than a record industry executive who spotted in niche in the market. He laughs at the thought of it being anything else. “If you were a record executive who wanted to make money in the 1990s, prog is not what you should have got into,” he says.

Waber may have felt that he missed out on prog’s glory days, but there was still plenty to keep him interested. He gravitated towards the neo-prog movement that blossomed in the UK, and Southampton’s IQ in particular. His early career would become inextricably linked with that of the band.

“I met Thomas when him and a few of his mates came along to a couple of IQ gigs on the Are You Sitting Comfortably? tour in Germany,” says IQ guitarist Mike Holmes. “They just used to hang around. He wasn’t involved in the music industry at that point. He was a fan but he was very opinionated. I don’t mean that in a bad way – he had a lot to say, which was pretty good.”

Holmes points to a band rehearsal attended by Waber just after their second singer, Paul Menel had left, as indicative of his character. “Thomas encouraged us to go after our previous singer, Pete Nicholls. He was very vocal about that. And we did. And then we started talking about a new record, and how we would record and release it.”

IQ had recently parted company with their label, Phonogram. Rather than go through the arduous process of seeking out another deal, they decided to set up their own record company, Giant Electric Pea. Waber, who was studying economics, was brought into the fold. “It was myself, Thomas, our keyboard player Martin Orford and our lighting guy Laurence Dyer,” says Holmes. 

Waber curtailed his studies to throw in his lot with GEP. “It was naïve,” he says. “But I guess it wasn’t the worst decision I made.”

The first album released on Giant Electric Pea was IQ’s J’ai Pollette D’Arnu, a collection of live tracks and B-sides that came out in June 1991. The initial plan was to focus on IQ’s own music, but the remit soon broadened. The label became home to fellow neo-prog outfit Jadis, rising Brit band Threshold, US nu-prog heroes Spock’s Beard and more. The music industry might not have been interested in prog, but Waber and the members of IQ figured that there were still plenty of people out there who were. 

Waber himself was deeply embedded in the scene. He’d befriended the members of Dream Theater early in their career. “He was following us throughout Germany on that tour,” says Mike Portnoy. “He was like a Deadhead, going from show to show. I got to know him as a fellow prog fan, talking about Yes and Genesis and Pink Floyd and all that stuff.”

Waber had correctly spotted their crossover potential. “They opened up the heavy metal scene to prog,” he says now. “Before that, no one outside of that world would buy it, no magazines would write about it.”

Dream Theater’s against-the-grain success confirmed to Waber that there was a market for progressive music in the 1990s. What there wasn’t was an infrastructure: there were few labels beyond the odd bedroom-run cottage industry, no professional distribution companies interested in dealing with the records that did come out. “There was a scene and infrastructure in the UK, but the rest of the world was dead as far as the genre was concerned,” he says.

The situation needed rectifying. Giant Electric Pea were doing well, but they were based in Britain and didn’t provide a steady income for Waber. In 1993, while still involved with GEP, he decided to set up a new company in Germany with a friend, Michael Scmitz, that would help get records that he liked into the hands of people who might also like them (Scmitz left the company amicably in 2006). For the name he took inspiration from an album by one of his favourite bands, The Tubes, that was lying on his desk. Its title was Outside Inside. Waber liked the sound of it, so he reversed the wording. InsideOut was born. 

More than once, Waber pushes back hard at the suggestion that he’s a figurehead for the prog scene. “It’s never been about being on a mission for prog,” he insists. “I grew up on 80s prog, but I’m not a prog nerd like some guys. It was more like, ‘Why aren’t IQ selling more albums?’ or ‘Hey, I like these bands, let’s work with them.’”

That ethos drove InsideOut from its inception. Waber describes the label’s early days “as a little convoluted, a little blurry”. There was an overlap with Giant Electric Pea, for whom he continued working. The new label initially distributed albums by GEP bands such as IQ, Threshold and Spock’s Beard. In 1994, Waber licensed former King Crimson violinist David Cross’ solo album, Testing To Destruction after being given it at a music trade fair. “I was into King Crimson when I was young and I thought, ‘That could be a cool thing to do.’”

Testing To Destruction – catalogue number IOM001 – became InsideOut’s first proper release. Over the next few years, the label’s identity began to coalesce around the bands Waber picked up: neo-prog (embodied by America’s Enchant and Switzerland’s Clepsydra) with a side order of prog metal (courtesy of the likes of Italy’s Eldritch and New Jersey’s Symphony X). Yet there was no InsideOut sound in Waber’s head. The roster was built on entirely more pragmatic foundations.

“Signing bands is a mixture of availability, whether they’re actually interested in working with you and whether you actually like those bands or see something in it that would work,” he says. “It’s always worked like that. You get presented with opportunities – you take some of them, You don’t take some of them. Some of them you don’t want to take.”

He cites Symphony X as “the first significant actual signing we made”. He had been tipped off about them by a PR company the label worked with. “I listened to them and thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty special.’ And I could see how that would do well with the fans that liked Dream Theater.’” (He was proved right: Symphony X’s 2007 album Paradise Lost is InsideOut’s biggest-selling release.)

Conversely, Waber passed on the possibility of signing Porcupine Tree in the late 90s. The British group were still on their original label, Delerium, at the time, and were looking for a bigger home. “They were a different band back then,” he says. “I did see the potential, but I didn’t see that it would become as big as it did. It’s not like those early Porcupine Tree albums weren’t good, but they were more niche. Then they changed gears and all of a sudden they attracted a bigger audience.” He shrugs. “You can’t foresee something like that.”

InsideOut did just fine without Porcupine Tree. For years, they operated under the radar of the mainstream music industry: big enough to thrive but small enough to not be interesting to what Waber calls “bigger players”. That suited him fine.

“If the bigger players come in because they see an opportunity, you’re going to have a problem,” says Waber. “The thing with prog is that people in the mainstream music industry don’t give a shit about it. Although there’s always two or three people at a label that go, ‘I’ve never really been able to talk about this here because it’s really uncool, but I’ve always been a huge prog fan…’”

All that changed at the turn of the millennium. Waber had beefed up the label’s roster with some established names: King’s X guitarist Ty Tabor, the Mike Portnoy-led supergroup Transatlantic, Devin Townsend, Spock’s Beard. The latter’s fifth album, 2000’s V, had marked a significant step change for the label. “All of sudden things changed, because it sold really, really well,” says Waber. “They were a band who were starting to break through to a more mainstream audience.” He smiles wryly. “We had Spock’s Beard and Transatlantic going like that, and Neal [Morse, Spock’s Beard frontman and Transatlantic keyboard player] called one morning and says, ‘I’ve got to tell you, I’ve found God and I’m going to quit those bands.’ You kind of go, ‘What the fuck? It doesn’t make sense.’”

The occasional bump didn’t slow InsideOut down. They were becoming too big for the music industry to ignore. In 2000, heavyweight German distribution company SPV bought into the label. Suddenly, InsideOut had more reach, more money and more status.

Over the next nine years, the label flourished. With few genuine competitors, it owned the road when it came to contemporary progressive rock. It put out albums by veterans (Steve Howe, Steve Hackett, Swedish pioneers Kaipa) and newer artists (Pain Of Salvation, The Tangent, Kino) alike. Its release schedule went from a handful of records every year to dozens. InsideOut was flying. And then everything nearly came crashing to the ground.

Bankruptcy stories are complex and rarely interesting, and that of SPV is no exception. But when the company’s owners began insolvency proceedings in May 2009, its impact on InsideOut was immediate. The administrators had frozen SPV’s assets – and by extension, InsideOut’s with them. Yet bills still needed paying, and Waber was liable for potentially ruinous personal damages if it they weren’t.

“It happened so fast,” recalls Waber. “You’ve got to do whatever you can to stay focused and try and sort out the situation.”

The clock was ticking. As Waber tells it, InsideOut was an asset that SPV could have sold but they weren’t ready to let go of it “because it didn’t fit in with their plans”.

Waber decided he had only one option. He told SPV’s owners that if they didn’t cut InsideOut loose, he would hit the nuclear button. “It was, ‘Okay, either, if you don’t sell us in the next seven days, I’m going to go and declare bankruptcy myself.’”

It was a risky gamble that could have meant the end of everything Waber had spent the previous 16 years building. But he knew that if he could only extricate himself and his label from SPV’s mess, there was still a future for InsideOut. “There was a feeling of, ‘People are buying these records and listening to these bands,’” he says. “‘There’s something good here. Someone’s going to help us out.’”

He held his nerve and his instincts proved right. SPV capitulated, and German label Century Media swooped in to save InsideOut. They had survived their existential crisis. The future was secure.

According to Waber, the last decade has been as smooth as it can be for a traditional record label in the digital age. There have been bumps: the departure of InsideOut mainstays Ayreon to Dutch label Mascot was one source of frustration. “You think, ‘Did that have to happen?’ Then the next thing, you sign Kansas and go, ‘This is great.’ You win some you lose some.” 

During the SPV years, Waber concentrated on the business side of things as much as he did scouting out bands. Since the turn of this decade, he’s been able to concentrate on what he likes the most: signing and nurturing bands.

“Century Media said, ‘Look, you should focus on what you do best and just get on with it.’ I still have responsibilities, but I don’t have responsibility for the whole company any more.”

These days, the label’s roster includes contemporary bands such as Riverside, Leprous, Bent Knee and Haken alongside the likes of Steve Hackett and Devin Townsend (via his Hevy Devy imprint). Yet Waber rarely signs brand new bands without a track. He thinks there has only been one in the label’s history: Magnitude 9, who released their debut album on InsideOut in 1998. This is partly down to caution, but also a product of most new music he’s sent simply not being up to scratch.

“Some of the stuff we get sent is just ridiculous,” he says, an uncharacteristic flash of frustration in his voice. “We get death metal bands sending stuff in, basically stealing your time. Out of 300 things that come in, there are maybe 20 that are relevant to the label and maybe one thing where you think, ‘That’s not bad, but it’s still not worth signing.’”

That’s not to say they don’t believe in new music. In 2017, they signed US art rockers Bent Knee for their fourth album, Land Animal. “InsideOut are definitely the big label in that scene,” says Bent Knee singer Courtney Swain. “I don’t know if it’s a holy grail for bands, but they have a muscle that other labels don’t have. We definitely reached more people with them.”

Waber estimates the label have released around 500 albums. Blind faith in whether or not a record would sell gave way a long time ago to accurate forecasts. Sometimes too accurate.

“You think, ‘These bands should sell,’ and then they sell exactly what you thought they would sell. It’s never been, ‘Wow, how did that happen?’ It’s always been, ‘Why has nothing ever done better?’”

The answer, as he sees it, is simple: there’s a ceiling on prog. “It’s a niche genre. There aren’t many bands that have managed to cross over: Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Spock’s Beard before Neal found God. The prog scene has always been fairly insular.”

He remains wary of that us-and-them mentality, especially when it’s internalised within the scene. The barriers that have come up between fans of the genre’s original masters and those who lean towards its new generation frustrate him. “You’ve got people who like Yes and Genesis and Steve Hackett and everything else, and they’re really snobbish about that. They would never check out Leprous or Haken or Animals As Leaders. Whether they’d like it or not, they wouldn’t even give it a try.”

He’s less frustrated at having to deal with the caprices of musicians. His no-bullshit conversational manner extends to his business practices.

“Dealing with bands is our daily bread and butter,” he says. “I guess you sometimes wonder if you should have become a psychiatrist or worked in a kindergarten instead of setting up a record company, because that’s what it’s like with artists a lot of the time. But the way I work is that I’m very upfront and very blunt. People know that. And if they don’t, they know it within five minutes of being in a room with me. Some people are, like, ‘Who’s this idiot?’ But most people appreciate honesty, because no one in the music business tells you the truth.”

Are you on good terms with everyone who’s left the label?

“I’m on speaking terms,” he says. “When you start out, everyone is close, everything is a big family. But at some point you’ve got to be able to step back. If you can do that, you’re fine.”

“Oh, Thomas is very upfront with his opinions,” says Bent Knee violinist Chris Baum with a laugh. “We’ve definitely had some interesting discussions with him. But his track record proves that he’s right.”

Mike Portnoy agrees: “Most of the time, I don’t want to hear the opinion of someone who works at a record company,” he says. “I usually go the opposite way. Thomas is one of the few people who I’ll listen to, and what he says is usually spot on.”

InsideOut’s existential crisis is a distant memory today, The label is in as healthy a position as a modern record company can hope for in 2018. Over the past 12 months, they have released new albums by Spock’s Beard, Kino, Riverside, Haken, Roine Stolt-fronted supergroup The Sea Within and Beardfish/Big Big Train guitarist Rikard Sjöblom’s Gungfly, among others. Next year, there will be high-profile new albums from Steve Hackett, Devin Townsend, Nad Sylvan, Tim Bowness and Bent Knee.

Significantly, 2019 will see Dream Theater releasing their first ever album on InsideOut, more than a quarter of a century after Waber first met them. It does more than just bring their relationship full circle – it represents the convergence of two paths that have simultaneously but separately charted the journey of modern prog from the dark days of the early 1990s to its current bright renaissance. 

Thomas Waber isn’t the kind of person to oversell the part he or his label has played in the genre’s resurgence. As he reiterates one last time: “I’ve never been on a mission for the prog scene.” But if nothing else, the anniversary of the label he founded 25 years ago does occasionally give the man who once worried that he’d missed out on prog’s golden era pause for thought.

“I look back on it and I realise that I’ve witnessed a lot of stuff first hand,” he says. “Stuff that happened that people who are getting in the genre now, or even 10 years ago, didn’t experience. That makes me think we’ve done something right.”

This article originally appeared in issue 94 of Prog Magazine.

The Cult's Ian Astbury has never been a man overly-troubled by modesty.

"If you're a fan of rock music, our new record's essential," the singer stated boldly in October. "I don't think there's any recent releases of rock music that comes close to Under The Midnight Sun."

The man has previous form here. Back in 1985, Astbury declared that his band were "like Big Country and U2, only better!"

"I respect those people," he assured The List, one after The Cult's second album Love debuted at number 4 on the UK albums' chart "but they've become rather conservative. People are coming round to our way of thinking and we're at a stage where we can break into a world-wide audience."

Twelve months earlier, however, The Cult's prospects looked rather less certain. Though the group's debut album, Dreamtime, reached a respectable number 21, its second single, Go West (Crazy Spinning Circle), peaked at number 90 in the UK, and record companies in Europe weren't falling over themselves to court Astbury and Billy Duffy's band. 

An August 1984 booking on a popular West German TV show offered an opportunity for the Bradford band to put themselves in the shop window. 

Traditionally, bands showcased on Music Convoy would perform on the back of a truck, or trailer, parked up in the centre of a German town. For reasons unknown, however, it was decided that The Cult's August 27 performance of Go West would be filmed beside an outdoor swimming pool, complete with high board divers, and a cameraman in the pool. 

Not having to worry about remembering lyrics, or indeed strum the guitar hanging around his neck, Astbury was free to issue a novel approach to European record labels to come and get his band, flipping his guitar over at one point to reveal the hand-written please 'SIGN US NOW!'

The Cult wouldn't break into the German Top 40 until 1989's Sonic Temple album, but who's to say this wasn't where the seeds of their Teutonic triumphs were sewn.

Watch the clip below:

After purchasing the catalogs of heavyweight names such as Grammy-winning country music songwriter Liz Rose, R&B legend Keith Sweat and hitmaker to the stars, Cory Rooney, Open On Sunday not only cemented itself as a major player in catalog acquisitions; they also captured the attention of investors. To start 2022, in just its fourth year, Open On Sunday secured $150 million for future catalog investment. 

Open On Sunday works with songwriters, producers, publishing companies and record labels, purchasing both publishing and masters. With Open On Sunday, rights holders can sell either all or just a portion of their catalog, with the catalog owner retaining the rights to future projects. Plus, unique to the industry, Open On Sunday offers a guaranteed buyback option, providing members peace of mind when selling work that holds personal value. 

“Having run a record label myself for many years, I know the energy songwriters and producers pour into their music,” says Co-Founder and President, Malcolm Thompson. “We don’t want our clients to feel like they have to sell their heart and soul just to do business with us.”

Open On Sunday also offers a special financing option for record label owners through its Catalog Builder program. Catalog Builder offers more favourable terms than an advance or traditional loan. 

Open On Sunday has also earned credibility within the industry for its purchasing process, using the latest in data analytics technology and a proprietary algorithm to produce competitive offers for catalogs in all size ranges. The company has acquired a roster of more than 60 catalogs to date, across all genres of music. 

Ultimately, though, it’s Open On Sunday's ability to close deals quickly that separates the company from its competitors. Larger firms will often throw out gaudy numbers when making an initial offer, but after further evaluation, either can’t meet the mark, or take up to a year or more to close. Open On Sunday puts in the work ahead of time, so when an offer goes out, the funds are available and they can close within weeks. This level of efficiency often exceeds clients' expectations, earning their trust and respect. 

Open On Sunday strives to bring transparency to the industry, providing clients with a clear picture of what their music catalog is worth and making them a competitive offer. Its user-friendly website allows for the easy uploading of data and documents, and answers to all questions are readily available through its Speak to a Leader program. 

“We want to strike a balance between technology and personal interactions,” adds COO, Greg Spils. “We use technology to bring down the costs of assessing your catalog’s values, and we pass that value onto our clients. At the same time, we’re happy to talk directly to rights holders to answer any questions about the catalog sales process.”

Visit openonsunday.com to start your free catalog evaluation.

Most metal fans will be familiar with the black and white Parental Advisory label, that has diligently warned us about ‘explicit content’ for the best part of four decades. But the label has an intriguing backstory – it was the result of a tense court battle between Frank Zappa, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, and Al Gore's wife Tipper Gore, and its creation was incited by one of the most notorious outbreaks of mass hysteria in American history: Satanic panic.

Satanism began to claw its way into mainstream public consciousness in the 60s. Occult rockers Coven, who were one of the first openly Satanic rock bands, blazed the trail with their debut album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls. Although the album wasn’t released until 1969, Coven wrote their first song in 1966, the same year that Anton LaVey made headlines by establishing the Church of Satan — the first legitimate organisation dedicated to the practice of Satanism. 

LaVey’s ideas spread like wildfire, and it wasn’t long before two of his followers established their own organisations: the First Occultic Church of Man (1971) and Temple of Set (1975). In the 70s, bands like Black Sabbath, Kiss, Judas Priest, and Led Zeppelin burst onto the charts, sounding darker and heavier than anything that had come before. By the time the 80s arrived, America was in prime position for full-blown Satanic panic, and metal music would find itself directly in the crosshairs.

The panic was primarily fuelled by the publication of a (now discredited) non-fiction book called Michelle Remembers in 1980. It was an account of how psychiatrist and co-author Lawrence Pazder had uncovered hidden childhood memories of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) in his patient Michelle Smith. And just like that, hysteria was ignited. 

Communities started a witch-hunt in local daycare facilities, hoping to root out underground Satanic groups who might be abusing children in similar rituals. Between 1983 and 1990, over one hundred daycare centres were investigated by police and nearly two hundred staff arrested, despite a distinct lack of physical evidence. 

The most infamous example is the 1983 ‘McMartin trial’, where police permitted an unlicensed psychotherapist to take testimonies from over 400 children using coercive techniques. McMartin daycare staff were accused of 321 counts of child abuse in a court case that lasted six years. 

Concerned parents and local leaders would soon come to suspect that Satan wasn’t just invading their communities through daycare facilities, but that evil forces were also infiltrating homes in the form of popular entertainment. Metal’s unapologetic exploration of subversive subject matter made it the perfect target for Satanic accusations. And it wasn't alone — popular board game Dungeons & Dragons was drawn into the drama, after two separate incidents of teen suicide were linked to the game by the victims' parents.

Worried parents believed bands were hiding Satanic messages in their songs using a technique called ‘backward masking’. In 1983, a televangelist demonstrated how Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven contained sinister messages like ‘I live with Satan’. When asked about the accusations, lead singer Robert Plant simply replied: "You've got to have a lot of time on your hands to even consider that people would do that.”

Judas Priest also found themselves at the centre of a backward masking scandal when two young men attempted suicide in 1985. One died instantly and the other passed away from injury complications three years later. He told his parents that hidden messages in the Stained Class album caused the suicide pact, and in 1990, after his death, Judas Priest were called to stand trial in a civil lawsuit.

“We had no idea what a subliminal message was,” Rob Halford said. “It was just a combination of some weird guitar sounds, and the way I exhaled between lyrics. I had to sing Better By You, Better Than Me in court, a cappella. I think that was when the judge thought, ‘What am I doing here? No band goes out of its way to kill its fans.’”

By the mid-80s, hysteria was rife, and something needed to be done. Enter the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC), a committee dedicated to increasing parental control over music consumption. They promised to protect innocent ears from the lure of drugs, violence, sex, and the occult. The PMRC was founded in 1985 and led by Tipper Gore (the wife of future Vice President Al Gore). Once up and running, they wasted no time.

Their first act was to release the now legendary 'Filthy Fifteen' list: a list of 15 songs deemed inappropriate for impressionable minds. The list included Possessed by Venom, Trashed by Black Sabbath, and Into The Coven by Mercyful Fate. Metal bands weren’t the only ones to feel the heat — pop acts like Prince, Madonna, and Cyndi Lauper also made the list, marked X for ‘profane or sexually explicit’. 

 On September 19, 1985, the PMRC took their issue to the U.S. Senate, where they held a hearing to advocate for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to start using a rating system for explicit music. Their opposing witnesses were none other than Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, and John Denver. The three argued against artistic censorship, with John Denver even likening the labels to Nazi book burnings.

Despite the opposition’s fight to protect artistic freedom, the PMRC won their case, and the Parental Advisory label (also known as the “Tipper Sticker”) was born in November of 1985. The RIAA agreed to use it on selected records at their own discretion. But the battle wasn’t over. 

In the immediate aftermath, the Parental Advisory label gave musicians something new to rebel against. Metallica’s 1986 Master Of Puppets album artwork contained a parody label, and bands like Megadeth and Danzig wrote diss tracks about the PMRC directly.

The PMRC disbanded in the late 90s, but their legacy can still be found plastered to the front of selected digital downloads, albums, and singles. They’d be disappointed to know their crusade didn’t deter people from listening to ‘Satanic’ music — the more people were told not to listen, the more they wanted to hear.

Venom singer Cronos was pleased with the sales boost their album got after being featured on the Filthy Fifteen list. In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, he said: “That album wasn't doing too well when it was first released, actually, but after their fantastic marketing scheme, it picked up and started selling very well, so thanks for that, PMRC. All they achieved was advertising hardcore underground music.”

Satanism and the occult have been thematic mainstays in metal music ever since those early days. It’s become so commonplace that bands like Twin Temple, Watain, and Behemoth have openly Satanic members and often use ritualistic elements and symbolism as part of their live performance. “A lot of metal draws from the occult, from Satanism,” says Twin Temple singer Alexandra James. “It’s subversive, it’s in your face, it’s not for everyone, it champions the outsider, and that really goes back to its roots in rock’n’roll.”

After the 1985 PMRC Senate hearing, Snider told Newsweek he was concerned the Parental Advisory label would be used to “keep creative artists’ work from the general public”. Zappa predicted that record labels would start cancelling contracts and limiting distribution. Luckily for metal music, they were wrong — Satan still sells records.

Post-rock specialists A Cheery Wave Records are to release the latest in their post-rock compilation series which celebrates the best in underground post-rock. The new compilation, A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters: Volume IX, will be released on April 2.

"We wanted to look back fondly at some of the great bands who are no longer with us, and, as such, the album features only bands who have split-up," say the label. "This is a cheery wave from the beyond."

The new 12-track compilation features songs from bands such as Double Handsome Dragons, And The Earth Swarmed With Them, Kasper Rosa, ...And Stars Collide, Glissando and more, who have split up.

A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters: Volume IX is the label's first to be released on physical formats: very limited editions of 33 cassettes and 50 CDs. These include a bonus track unavailable elsewhere. It will also be available as a free/pay- what-you-want download.

"I'm yet to find a post-rock compilation released on tape, so this may well be the first," the label add.

The A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters: Volume IX cover photo is the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition stranded on Elephant Island in April 1916 as they waved goodbye to Ernest Shackleton and crew departing to seek rescue. It has been designed by Barry Parkinson from Goonies Never Say Die.

Pre-orders open on March 19.

Check out previous Cheery Wave compilations.

Various Artists: A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters: Volume IX
1. Double Handsome Dragons - My favourite animal is the white werewolf 2. The Rock of Travolta - 24 Frames Per Second
3. And The Earth Swarmed With Them - It Will Begin Again
4. A Genuine Freakshow - Frightened Ones
5. Kasper Rosa - You Fool, Warren Is Dead!
6. obe - Drop C Life Centre
7. Goonies Never Say Die - Something Of Summers Past
8. Monsters Build Mean Robots - A Town Called Tourettes
9. 52 Commercial Road - Ash
10. ...And Stars Collide - Every Step Takes Me Further From Home (Part II)
11. He Was Eaten By Owls - Inchoate With The Light Go I pt iii (feat. Loraine James)
12. Glissando - The Long Lost

Pallas’ debut album should have been the launch pad for a career to rival the success subsequently enjoyed by Marillion. But behind The Sentinel lies a convoluted tale of high expectations dashed by ill fortune and a fabled producer whose eye came off the ball.

While The Sentinel was Pallas’ first studio effort, their first release was Arrive Alive, a 1981 live album. Arrive Alive and some energetic live shows, most notably at London’s iconic Marquee Club, brought the band to EMI’s attention. “We were going to London a lot, gaining a solid following and good press reviews,” recalls bassist Graeme Murray of the band’s exhilarating early southern forays.

Having been signed by EMI, Pallas started work on what would become The Sentinel, renting a farmhouse in north east Scotland. “We just shut ourselves in there,” Murray continues. “We wrote a couple of atmospheric, late night compositions and I remember that we had the opening sequence of Rise And Fall with its rising chords.” With the band conjuring up the visual image of “something huge rising up out the ocean”, the seeds were sown for the album’s concept. “We had this idea of the Atlantis legend and came up with a storyline.”

“Atlantis was the track which gave rise to the whole album,” adds singer Euan Lowson. “I had been away for a couple of months in the summer on a Euro railcard. When I got back the other guys had completed about three minutes of the big intro. It was particularly inspirational and I saw down and wrote a lot of the storyline around it.”

Murray describes Pallas as “a band that has always written musical pictures” and The Sentinel painted a very visual picture adding a modern gloss to the Atlantis story. “We found that visual images helped us in the creative process to come up with musical ideas. We started forming the lyrics around the storyline.” The band proceeded to spend considerable time jamming to create some of the tracks on the album and embellishing musical themes which they would weave across different tracks. “It’s something that we have done since,” Murray adds. “I think it gives coherence to an album if you have some recognisable melodies cropping up in different tracks.”

Arrive Alive was an obvious candidate for inclusion on The Sentinel as the band felt that it had radio appeal (and it did flirt briefly with the singles chart). But all the material on the album otherwise was created for it in a dedicated manner and honed through live performances.

Beavering away in their rented farmhouse Pallas wrote far more material than necessary or physically possible for a single album. And that was one issue that would hamper The Sentinel. “Back then you were constrained by the fact that you were putting your album out on vinyl,” Murray points out. “So realistically you required 40 minutes but we could have easily had a double album.”

Discussions were held with EMI on the topic – they baulked at the idea. “They just about had a heart attack at the prospect of signing and launching a new band with a double concept album in the midst of the new wave!” laughs Murray.

With the wonderful wisdom of hindsight Murray recognises that Pallas’ gameplan was imperfectly conceived. “In retrospect our first EMI album shouldn’t have been The Sentinel. We should probably have re-done the stuff that was on the Arrive Alive album. And then we could have done a double album next.”

EMI may have demurred at the idea of marking Pallas’ debut on the label with a double studio album but having asked the band which producers they’d like to work with, they pushed the boat out by securing Yes producer Eddy Offord. Other names mooted were Steve Lillywhite and, bizarrely, Chic’s Nile Rodgers. Working with Offord held enormous appeal. Not only was Offord available, but he also liked the demos that he’d heard. “We were huge Yes fans,” says Murray. “The prospect of going out to record the first album in America with him was like a dream. We were swayed not only by a trip to Georgia but also the chance to work with someone who was a hero to us, a legend.”

Immediately prior to departing the UK for their American adventure, Pallas played the Reading Festival, airing much of the material that would feature on the album. Murray remembers: “We were on stage at teatime on Friday and then flew to Atlanta the next day so it was a very exciting time in our lives.”

Being in the studio with Offord was everything Pallas had hoped for, professionally and socially, as they spent the next two months sequestered in his Atlanta studios. “There were so many stories about Eddy and they turned out to be true – he was a real character to work with,” Murray chortles. “It was a busy time and we learned a lot obviously. He certainly made us work harder on the vocal front with the big harmonies, which I suppose came down to the work he had done with Yes.”

Away from home, the band worked hard and played hard. “We would work until past midnight and then Eddy had his favourite pub which was a Florida crab shack – he would take us there every night. I think Eddy was pleased to be working with a British band again because he had gone out to live in America and was working with lots of southern rock bands. He enjoyed the fact that we were so fired up and enthusiastic too.”

That said, Murray has sometimes questioned whether the band would have done better to work with a more contemporary producer, recalling Offord’s reaction when they listened to Yes’s 90125 together. “I was blown away by it, but I think Eddy found some of the things that were happening on there a bit radical.”

Offord’s working methods were very organic with his studio set up in an old cinema. “His studio was unconventional. We set up on the stage in the cinema and his desk was down in the stalls. There was no control room and live room. Basically it was like setting up for a live gig and he was down in the front stalls doing the mixer and monitors. Effectively the control room was set up in the front stalls but there was no physical barrier between Eddy and his desk and the band!”

“Eddy was sometimes doing three things at once, while watching his beloved baseball team on a monitor on top of the second desk,” adds Lowson.

Offord had some useful contacts which he milked for Pallas’s benefit. Steve Morse (then of the Dixie Dregs, subsequently of Kansas, Deep Purple and Flying Colors) lent the band guitars while another contact provided a synclavier. “That gave us what were then some very new keyboard sounds,” says Murray. “We were trying to make it more modern; we didn’t just want to sound like we were replicating something from 1972. We were trying to update things within a reasonably limited budget. We had taken all of our own stuff over with us as luggage!”

While Offord’s studio and recording techniques may have been unusual, recording of the album went smoothly. However The Sentinel swiftly ran into problems thereafter. Having run out of time in Atlanta and with their visas expiring, Pallas returned home to the UK with some rough mixes, leaving Offord alone to mix the album properly. It was just as Offord was invited to record The Police live on tour.

Back in the UK, the final mixes arrived, and Pallas were shocked by the flimsy-sounding results. “We were gutted,” says Murray. “We were absolutely 100 per cent convinced that someone else came in and mixed it for Eddy because it just did not sound like it had when we were in the studio working with him. Anybody who
has seen us live knows that the band is really powerful and we felt that it just didn’t convey that power we’d heard in the rough mixes as we’d been going along.”

This wasn’t the only mystery in Pallas’ time at EMI. “When we signed to them there was a team put together to make the Harvest label great again,” Murray reveals. “They’d had Deep Purple and Pink Floyd had been on there at some point. Now they wanted it to make Harvest a signature rock label again.” Pallas were involved in this project in its infancy. But on their return from the US they discovered that the entire team had been sacked. “We came back to head office with our new album and they were going, ‘Who are you again?’”

Thirty years later what happened to The Sentinel mixes still perplexes the group. “It was a disappointment. We were never happy with the way it sounded because we knew that in the studio it was more exciting and had far more of an edge.” Allied to the weak mixes was the double-album concept reduced to a single disc with a jumbled running order and a slug of key material excluded.

The Sentinel was remixed for its US release and the album benefited from the addition of Patrick Woodroffe’s timeless artwork. And while EMI’s PR machine got behind the album and the band would tour it, ultimately Pallas were promoting something that was a pale shadow of what they had planned. “It was difficult for us to enthuse about it knowing that we had all heard something so much better,” says Murray.

Pallas would eventually release The Sentinel as they’d intended with The Atlantis Suite intact – tracks Eyes In The Night, Cut And Run and Shock Treatment were parts of this, redistributed across the first disc – on a 1992 reissue for the Centaur label. But the original album was hardly a disaster, reaching Number 41 in 1984 – not bad for a band who had not had Marillion’s run of luck with radio play, press and charting singles.

What would throw a further spanner in the works was the departure of singer Lowson prior to the recording of second album The Wedge. In a smart move, the band drafted in Abel Ganz singer Alan Reed, who would front the band until 2010. However drifting into a semi-dormant state after The Wedge nearly halted the band’s aspirations, and only with new singer Paul Mackie and 2011’s XXV album have Pallas started to amass serious momentum once again.

This article originally appeared in issue 38 of Prog Magazine.

Finding a good record label is like stumbling across a gold mine. If it’s got a consistently strong roster, it’s easy to get lost and spend hours on end hearing great new band after great new band. To help you get that feeling of euphoria, here are five underground labels you should keep your eye on throughout 2021:

Church Road

Church Road was started by Sammy Urwin and Justine Jones of Employed To Serve in 2017, but it wasn’t until last year that it really came into its own. Following the downfall of Holy Roar Records, the label quickly picked up alumni such as Svalbard, Palm Reader and Respire. Those three ended up releasing some of the best heavy albums of 2020: When I Die Will I Get Better?, Sleepless and Black Line respectively.

Already, 2021 is slated to get similarly promising noise from new signees Timelost (post-grunge) and Wowod (post-metal). If you’re after boundary-pushing aggression that’s consistently brilliant, this is a haven to keep your eye on.

Closed Casket Activities

If you’re only appeased by the most abrasive, noisy and relentless of metalcore, then Closed Casket Activities is your dream come true. Specialising in all things evil and “-core”, the New York imprint is home to a collection of extreme underground darlings, including Portrayal Of Guilt, Vein, End and Gulch. 2021 will herald the second Portrayal Of Guilt full-length (even stronger than their already fantastic debut) and the relentless powerviolence of Jarhead Fertilizer, not to mention lots of other brilliantly horrible stuff.

Pelagic

Headed by Robin Staps (guitarist of progressive metal luminaries The Ocean), Pelagic Records is all about shining a light on the most daring, esoteric and challenging rock musicians. Its mission statement was initially quality over quantity: they released only a handful of albums a year but promised that each of them would be among the underground’s crème de la crème. However, as it’s grown, Pelagic has only upped its output – somehow without damaging that commitment to perfection. 2020 heralded lauded outings from Envy (post-hardcore), Neck of the Woods (death metal), Lesser Glow (doom/hardcore) and more, with 2021 due to start big with the wonky rock‘n’roll of Lizzard.

Sacred Bones

Since 2018, Sacred Bones have had an amazing ace up their sleeve: their ongoing Alliance Series. Sure, they sign bands from post-rock to metal to noise music, but that’s the real cherry on their unpredictability sundae. The venture puts two labelmates together on one album and sees what they can come up with. So far, we’ve heard amazing things from The Body & Uniform and Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky, and the Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou collaboration was a runaway hit in 2020. The latter are promising  a new EP in 2021, and we can’t wait to hear what other team-ups are on the way.

Translation Loss

Translation Loss isn’t exclusively a metal label, balancing the heavy stuff out with ambient, electronic and hip-hop releases. However, when they do share something unabashedly extreme, there are few better. In 2020 they dished out the third album by US grindcore nasties Wake, which ended up generating plenty of buzz with its ingenious infusion of doom, death and progressive metal. Similarly brilliant was the debut album by black/death metal crew Drouth, whose 10-minute tracks were ceaselessly violent but never monotonous. This year, the imprint will issue the debut album from Swampbeast, whose sludgy extremism pummels with a cavalcade of stellar riffs, comparable to Conjurer and Behemoth.

Spiritbox are to release a limited vinyl run of their extreme single Holy Roller on October 2 via new label Rise Records in association with Pale Chord. The 7” will also contain a previously unreleased remix with guest vocals from Crystal Lake’s Ryo Kinoshita.

Speaking on the announcement of their new signing, Spiritbox vocalist, Courtney LaPlante says, "We have always dreamed of partnering with a label that embraces our DIY mentality and respects our independence, a label that understands immediately what we want to accomplish and how we want to get there.

 “It’s been surreal getting to know the team at Rise Records, never feeling like we have to be anything other than our authentic selves. They are not some monolithic corporation, but individuals with a passion for music. They understand us and allow us to just be Spiritbox, now with the resources and guidance that we have always wanted. I keep thinking I am going to wake up from some fever dream and it was all in my head. 

 “To our fans. We are so excited to celebrate this milestone with you. We know how hard you have worked to spread the word about our band and we are so grateful for the time, energy and belief you have invested in us. We understand that with more resources comes higher expectations. We will not let you down, I promise!"

Sean Heydorn, Head of Rise Records adds, "We’re very excited to welcome Spiritbox to the Rise Records family and kick off this partnership with Pale Chord. The band caught our attention some time ago, and watching their exponential growth throughout an otherwise tough year for artists has been really inspiring. Despite all the band have already accomplished and done with Pale Chord, we feel it’s just the beginning."

Spiritbox have been confirmed for Download 2021 and currently working on their debut album.

Watch the nightmarish music video for Holy Roller, which was inspired by the horror movie Midsommar.

Napalm Records have launched a website to not only keep fans informed about tour postponements and cancellations, but to also help artists amid the coronavirus pandemic.

With bands severely affected around the world by the ongoing situation, the website – which will be updated on a regular basis – will also provide details on artists’ crowdfunding drives, live streams and more.

Napalm Records are planning on hosting links to classic concerts and will also share information about intimate living room or studio concerts which the label are dubbing the #NapalmSofaSeries. 

Every time an artists makes their content available, it will be uploaded to the website. And to mark the launch, it’s been announced that Wolfheart will hold a virtual concert on the site on April 9.

Napalm Records owner, founder and managing director Markus Riedler says: “Our thoughts and well wishes go out to all who are impacted during this difficult period of time and we would like to thank the strong community of fans for their immense support of any and all artists in the past and especially at this time. 

“Whether it be supporting crowdfunding campaigns, purchasing music and merchandise, or even offering words of encouragement to artists via social media – this support is crucial in keeping music moving forward in times like these. Please stay responsible, healthy and safe.”

Napalm Records managing director Thomas Caser adds: “The essence of our music – experiencing it live – is hit extremely hard by this pandemic. A lot of artists who were on tours that got cancelled or had scheduled tours that got cancelled or postponed are facing difficult times. 

“But our metal community stays strong and we have seen amazing reactions, acts of solidarity and support for the artists. This is what our family of metal is about. Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for this. 

“Please keep on being positive, support the bands by listening to their music, show pride by proudly wearing their merchandising, and spread the music by sharing.”

Caser adds: “Keep your tickets for moved tours, shows and festivals, hang in there with us! Better times will come when we all are able to gather again at concerts and festivals to celebrate our music. In the meantime, stay strong, healthy and foremost – home! Thank you all.”

Check out the website here and click back regularly for all the latest news from Napalm Records and their artists.

Yesterday, we reported that The Recording Academy and MusiCares had set up the COVID-19 fund, with both donating an initial amount of $1 million each to help artists who are struggling in the current climate.

Tomorrow (March 20), Bandcamp will waive their revenue share on all sales through the website making it an ideal time to help the artists you love. The drive will run from midnight to midnight Pacific Time.

Here at Louder, we’ve come up with 10 ways you can help your favourite bands amid the turmoil.

Before the Beatles came along and ruined it, the record companied had the British market nicely sewn up. 

The four major companies – EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips – would choose their artists from established managers. The managers had already groomed the artists, remodelling them with new names such as Marty Wilde, Billy Fury or Cliff Richard. The record company would then select songs for them to record, ready-to-wear numbers from London’s Tin Pan Alley songwriters or maybe tried and tested American hits that hadn’t been released in the UK.

Marketing and promoting singles was pretty straightforward. National newspapers weren’t interested in pop music. That left the three weekly pop newspapers: Melody Maker, Record Mirror and the NME. Radio promotion was limited to the BBC Light Programme – which had a remit to entertain everyone between the ages of seven and 70 – and Radio Luxembourg, which crackled across the English Channel for every evening.

Then along came the Beatles who, in the immortal words of Dennis Waterman (via Little Britain), “wrote the theme tune, sang the theme tune”. Artists that wrote and sang their own material not only disturbed the record companies’ cosy working practices, they also revealed a huge demand that they hadn’t been aware of.

For a while the companies maintained control. The new-fangled beat groups still wore suits and were respectful, only coming into the studio control room unless they were invited.

But under the surface things were changing. The Rolling Stones began recording in America where they could create and control the sound they wanted. When Eric Clapton turned up to record the Bluesbreakers album with John Mayall he turned his amp right up to get the feedback tone he wanted, to the horror of the lab-coated studio technicians.

But after the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album the market exploded in all directions. Suddenly there were hundreds of bands playing all kinds of music, and a whole new generation eager to listen. What’s more, the bands wanted to make albums rather than singles. The record company executives didn’t have a clue. The only young people they knew were working in the post room.

But outside the record companies a new breed of entrepreneur was emerging to exploit this musical revolution: managers, promoters, booking agents, publicists. They were watching the fast-moving trends closely and, more importantly, they knew and understood the new music in a way that most record company people didn’t. They realised that instead of simply giving the artist to the record company they could record the artist themselves and then licence the result to a record company for manufacture and distribution. You could even form your own record company and have your own label.

Towards the end of the 60s a whole new batch of record labels sprang up, some formed independently and others by the record companies themselves who realised that they needed to market this new music under a separate identity away, from their existing labels. They were staffed by young, enthusiastic people who had a different rapport with the artists: they treated them as human beings rather than contracted serfs; they encouraged the artists to create rather than controlling them; they also understood that a new act might take three or four albums to develop.

In the 70s these labels became a vital part of the rapidly expanding rock music scene and gained their own identities from the music they released. There was a period when, if you bought an album released by Harvest, Vertigo or United Artists you had a general idea of the kind of music you were getting, even if the name of the band was unfamiliar.

Album sleeves had an important part to play in marketing the music – the artwork, typography, gatefold sleeves, even the design of the record label itself. If that expense – when allied to the recording costs – was large, the potential rewards were huge. The profit from one million-selling album could pay for a dozen new acts. The trick was to release as many albums as you could afford and as soon as one started taking off, move in and maximise the potential.

Island Records

The first independent label to make a serious impact was Island Records, which was started back in 1959 by Chris Blackwell, whose family were part of the well-known food brand Crosse & Blackwell. With money no object and growing up in Jamaica, he became addicted to the local ska music and formed Island as a means of getting the music distributed around the country. In 1962 he set up his label in the UK to bring the music to the West Indian population who’d migrated to south London, and two years later had a No.2 hit with My Boy Lollipop by Jamaican teenager Millie. He’d licensed the record to the Philips label Fontana and he did the same with the Spencer Davis Group when he started managing them, scoring two No. 1 hits with Keep On Running and Somebody Help Me.

By 1967 he was ready to launch Island as a stand-alone label, signing and releasing albums by John Martyn and Traffic followed by Free, King Crimson and Mott The Hoople. He also made deals with up and coming management and production companies that brought with them Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention and Nick Drake. 

All these acts were new, unproven and musically diverse, but they would all become hugely successful (in Drake’s case sadly, posthumously) and signalled the label’s broad scope. Not only did they subsidise the less commercial signings – Wynder K Frogg, Dr Strangely Strange, White Noise and Heavy Jelly (purveyors of the original headbanging classic I Keep Singing That Same Old Song) – they enabled Island to compete with the majors, unrestricted by old fashioned attitudes and practices.

By the 70s, bolstered by the arrival of Emerson Lake & Palmer and Cat Stevens, Island was the most invigorating label on the British music scene. The pink label and palm tree logo was seen by many as a guarantee that the record would at least be interesting. And it enabled bands such as Quintessence, Amazing Blondel, Clouds and Nirvana (not that one, the British one) to maintain cult followings they might not have achieved otherwise.

The only way was up. Roxy Music arrived, making sophisticated and hip glam rock, and Chris Blackwell realised his ambition when he turned white folks on to reggae music with Bob Marley & The Wailers. No other British record company had as much success with as wide a range of acts as Island in the 70s.

The launch of Island was a wake-up call for the major record companies.

Decca/Deram/Gull

Ironically it was Decca, the most old-fashioned of the majors, who led the way. They’d started the Deram label in 1966 to showcase their brand new ‘Deramic Sound System’ (aka stereo) to discerning hi-fi buffs. They thought they’d get the Moody Blues to record a version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony with the London Festival Orchestra but the Moody Blues had ideas of their own.

The result was Days Of Future Passed, which attracted a much bigger audience, thanks largely to its showcase single, Nights In White Satin. Deram also released Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade Of Pale, which was No.1 for six weeks in the summer of 1967.

Buoyed by this success, Decca began putting their underground acts on Deram – Ten Years After, Cat Stevens (although he was pretty poppy when he loved his dog back then), Keef Hartley Band, East Of Eden and some bloke called David Bowie, whose self-titled album and single The Laughing Gnome flopped miserably (the latter was a Top 5 hit six years later). They never moved their biggest act, the Rolling Stones, on to Deram however – perhaps because this would have meant renegotiating a contract that was heavily loaded in favour of the company.

Deram’s bright start encouraged Decca to launch the Deram Nova offshoot in 1969 but releases by Aardvark, Bulldog Breed, Black Cat Bones and Pacific Drift barely registered. The Moody Blues’ Threshold label was another offshoot, providing the first three albums from Wolverhampton rockers Trapeze featuring Deep Purple-destined Glenn Hughes on bass. 

Deram also lost two of their big names – Ten Years After and Cat Stevens – but they persevered through the early 70s with Caravan, Camel and Curved Air, none of who achieved the kind of breakthrough that would have taken the label up to the next level. And there were inconsistencies: two of the most promising underground acts,
Savoy Brown and a young Thin Lizzy, were on the Decca label. 

Suspicions that Deram was being allowed to wither hardened when Decca launched a new, supposedly hipper label, Gull, in 1974. It could have been a triumph. One of Gull’s first signings was Judas Priest, already creating a major stir on the Midlands’ club circuit with their edgy, angry metal rock. But somewhere between the recording and the release of their first album, Rocka Rolla, several of their most powerful live songs got chopped or edited. 1976’s Sad Wings Of Destiny was a far better indication of the power of Priest but the damage was done and the band left for major label CBS. 

EMI/Harvest

EMI was far more clued up about what an underground label was supposed to be. They’d already shown an awareness of the changing musical climate by signing Pink Floyd and doing licensing deals for Tyrannosaurus Rex, Procol Harum (before Deram had a chance to release an album) and the Jeff Beck Group.

When they started the Harvest label in the summer of 1969, EMI also had a bunch of newly signed and recorded acts, such as the Pretty Things, Barclay James Harvest, Climax Blues Band and the Edgar Broughton Band, ready for the label. Plus there was Deep Purple who’d already released one album and had a hit with Hush. Everyone had high hopes for them if only they could get a settled line-up together.

Deep Purple’s second album, Book Of Taliesyn, was the brightest of the first batch of Harvest albums, but the others – singer songwriter Michael Chapman, the eclectic Panama Limited Jig Band, the experimental Third Ear Band and the anarchic Pete Brown’s Battered Ornaments among them – sent a clear message that the label would support all forms of ‘anti-pop’ music.

Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett were natural in-house recruits to Harvest but it was Deep Purple who lit the label’s blue-touch paper in the summer of 1970. After being indulged with their Concerto For Group & Orchestra it was with In Rock that they forged their identity in metal. Harvest then watched Fireball explode across Europe and America.

By the time Deep Purple set up their own Purple Records to release Machine Head in 1972, Pink Floyd had repaid Harvest’s patience with Atom Heart Mother and Meddle and were about to reward them with Dark Side Of The Moon, one of the biggest- selling records the planet has ever seen.

The underground was now well and truly overground – but Harvest never lost sight of their manifesto and continued to sponsor Kevin Ayers, Roy Harper, Soft Machine, Babe Ruth, Electric Light Orchestra and Unicorn. They came tantalisingly close with Be Bop Deluxe and their reputation was strong enough to gain a grudging respect from the emerging punks, who stood in apparent opposition to most of what Harvest had released when they signed the Saints and Wire, and their credibility survived into the 80s. It’s still around for any likely band that fits the label’s ideals.

Philips/Vertigo

Harvest’s arrival in 1969 was swiftly followed by Vertigo, a label that parent company Philips hoped would achieve a similar credibility. Vertigo’s attitude was somewhat earthier than Harvest – more ‘fuck art, let’s dance’ – but at the end of their first year they were celebrating a No.1 album with Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. They had also released albums by Juicy Lucy, Uriah Heep, Rod Stewart and Manfred Mann’s Chapter Three.

Vertigo’s identity was considerably enhanced by a unique swirling-spiral design on the label that transfixed your average stoned Sabs fan as he watched it revolve on his turntable at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. It also may have hypnotised fans into buying other Vertigo releases by Fairfield Parlour, May Blitz, Cressida and Affinity, that some claimed were only listenable for as long as you were watching the squiggle go round. The only problem was that you could only play one side of the record and watch the squiggles; the other side contained the track-listing for both sides. There are probably some old hippies out there who never heard the second side of Paranoid.

Vertigo showed some artistic pretensions with jazz fusion bands Colosseum and Nucleus, although both erred on the heavy side of jazz. They could have also have cashed in with the Genesis-sounding Beggars Opera, the heavy rock Freedom (who admittedly changed direction in midstream) the critically acclaimed Patto or even the wilfully uncommercial Gentle Giant. They had little chance with the staggeringly unpopular Dr Z whose album is believed to have sold less than 100 copies.

The strangest act on the roster was the Greek whimsical psychedelic folk trio Aphrodite’s Child, who insisted on keeping their Greek folk roots in the mix. The British were bemused by them, although they were big in Europe, but they went on to provide two of the 70s’ more unlikely superstars: the pioneering electronic wizard Vangelis and the even larger but less pioneering singer Demis Roussos who was shipped back to the Philips label.

The arrival of Status Quo in 1972, followed by Thin Lizzy in 1974, kept faith with the hard rocking fraternity and although Vertigo never made any inroads into punk they picked up two of the more promising new wave rock bands: Dire Straits and Graham Parker & The Rumour. Like Harvest, Vertigo is still around for the right band.

Pye/Dawn

Pye, the other major record company, got their own underground label together in late 1969 called Dawn. Pye’s problem, however, was that while they had done reasonably well out of the immediate post-Beatles era with the Searchers, the Kinks, Donovan and Sandie Shaw, they’d signed virtually nothing since 1967, while their rivals had signed literally hundreds of acts, and were woefully out of touch. They still thought that singles were more important than albums.

So the bosses must have been delighted when Dawn scored a No. 1 single inside the first year with Mungo Jerry’s In The Summertime, which topped the charts for seven weeks. They probably never checked the album sales for John Kongos, Man, Trader Horne, Mike Cooper or the Trio. By the time they did, it was probably too late. The news wasn’t good.

Without a hit album Dawn were doomed. Their big names were all past their commercial peak – Donovan, Atomic Rooster, David McWilliams – and even the most avid 70s buff is unlikely to have too many albums by Titus Groan, Paul Brett’s Sage, Demon Fuzz, Noir, Pluto, Stephen Jameson, Jonesy, Brian Friel or Bronx Cheer.

By the law of averages you’d have expected Dawn to sign someone decent, if only by accident. Prog rockers Fruup and hard rockers Stray worked hard but were perennial losers in the play- offs. However, if Dawn had paid a bit more attention to pub rockers Kilburn & The High Roads they might have spotted the potential in frontman Ian Dury. But they didn’t. The miracle is that Dawn lasted until 1976.

Charisma

What 70s indie labels needed was personality and charm, like Tony Stratton Smith who founded Charisma in 1969 and signed acts just because he liked them. Hailing from the class of gentleman that most people thought had died out before the war, Strat, as everyone called him, had been a sports journalist in the 50s – narrowly missing the plane that crashed and killed most of the Manchester United team in 1958, and facilitating the transfer of Jimmy Greaves from Chelsea to AC Milan.

In the 60s he moved into music publishing and then into management, handling the Nice and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Exasperated by the incompetence of the record companies he was trying to deal with he decided to form his own. Charisma’s first release, Rare Bird’s Sympathy, was a hit single in Britain and much of Europe.

Strat’s policy for Charisma was simple – “anything good”. Among his earliest signings were Van Der Graaf Generator and Genesis, both unknown and both in need of exposure. So in 1971 he packed them off around the country on the Six Bob Tour.

Two years later, just as Lindisfarne had peaked, Genesis were beginning a more permanent breakthrough. Not that they were breaking even though – when Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975 the band were still £150,000 in debt to Charisma. But Strat, bless him, always put creativity ahead of profit. That’s why Gabriel stayed with Charisma when he went solo. As did Steve Hackett and Phil Collins’ jazz rock project Brand X. Not to mention all the splinters from Lindisfarne and Van Der Graaf Generator.

Strat’s eclectic taste encompassed Clifford T Ward, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, Hawkwind, Bert Jansch, G T Moore & The Reggae Guitars and the Alan Parsons Project. He also had a penchant for Yes keyboard players, releasing solo albums from Rick Wakeman and Patrick Moraz. Quite how he made it all work and still sponsor horse races nobody really knew. Charisma wasn’t restricted to music either; the label released half-a-dozen albums by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, four albums by Sir John Betjeman and reminiscences by cricket commentator John Arlott and racing commentator Peter O’Sullivan. Not to mention Vivian Stanshall’s Sir Henry At Rawlinson’s End.

Strat was seldom sober, though rarely drunk, and he gave and received loyalty in spades. When he’d finally had enough he sold the company to Virgin in 1985 and died two years later. In a perfect world all record companies would be run by Tony Stratton Smith.

Dandelion Records

Speaking of charisma and personality we should not forget John Peel’s Dandelion Records, formed in 1969 in response to the number of demos he was getting from bands who couldn’t get record deals. Dandelion was set up as a non-profit making venture and made no profit throughout its three-year existence, releasing 27 albums and one sampler, which rather pointlessly came out just as the whole operation was closing down.

Peel’s fiercely uncommercial tastes are now the stuff of legend and Dandelion’s roster featured performance art anarchists Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, vintage rocker Gene Vincent and the frankly dire Stackwaddy. However several acts – Clifford T Ward, Medicine Head, Kevin Coyne – did progress to other labels afterwards.

With no promotion budget and three different distributors in as many years, Dandelion were always going to struggle. And they were not really geared for success; when Medicine Head came dangerously close to a Top 20 single with Pictures In The Sky, Peel reportedly lost interest.

If Medicine Head’s 1972 album, Dark Side Of The Moon, had made any impact whatsoever then Pink Floyd’s history would read very differently. And if Peel had signed Roxy Music instead of turning them down who knows what might have happened?

United Artists

A more enlightened form of subversion took place at United Artists. The American record company opened up a UK division in 1969 that was effectively hijacked by the underground for the first half of the 70s. A&R manager Andrew Lauder was the opposite of Tony Stratton Smith in character but they had the same musical outlook. He was label manager at another American label, Liberty, with a handful of British acts including Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and the Groundhogs, when it was taken over by United Artists. Lauder was set the task of building up the UK label’s profile.

The budget included hiring a San Franciscan astrologer to design everyone’s star sign and fitting high-powered extractor fans to remove the dope smoke from the office. Into this fragrant atmosphere came pioneering space cadets Hawkwind, West Coast rockers (Welsh division) Man, the musically dextrous Cochise, the musically hopeless Haphash & The Coloured Coat and innovative proto-pub rockers Brinsley Schwarz.

There was a loose musical identity to the label that hardened after several bands were sent out on the All Good Clean Fun tour and started exchanging band members. It began to resemble a Cheech & Chong movie script as bands got out of it to get into it, and then got so far into it they couldn’t get out of it (man). Sometimes the only thing that kept the songs down to 20 minutes was that you couldn’t fit any more on one side of vinyl.

Hawkwind and Man became underground cult heroes but, with the notable exception of Hawkwind’s chart smash Silver Machine in 1972, United Artists never looked like becoming mainstream contenders. However, the label was comfortably self-sufficient and Andrew Lauder still had his eye on the musical ball, signing German electronic pioneers Can. He also spotted the laid-back scene becoming leaner and tougher in the mid-70s and signed Dr Feelgood and the Stranglers, setting up United Artists for the upcoming punk revolution.

Such nuances were lost on the American parent company, however, where a new bunch of bean counters noticed only that there were fewer beans. Lauder got out and set up Radar Records, ushering in the new wave with the likes of Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. But before he left he recorded an album with sacked Hawkwind bass player Lemmy and the new band he’d formed called Motörhead, with Larry Wallis on guitar and Lucas Fox on drums. 

The album lay buried until 1979 when Overkill was pummelling the nation’s youth and the tapes were exhumed and released as On Parole. Some people think that album is even more Motörhead than Motörhead.

The new alternative: the best of the rest

The new alternative labels didn’t have to be underground, they could be pop. Mickie Most, a producer who’d had dozens of hits in the 60s with the Animals, Jeff Beck, Hermans Hermits, the Nashville Teens and Donovan, created one of the strongest 70s labels with RAK Records. One of Most’s earliest signings to RAK was Hot Chocolate and he then proceeded to put the pop into glam rock with Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud. And who can forget Smokie, Kim Wilde or Racey? Quite what Chris Spedding was doing in among that lot was anyone’s guess.

As the new labels flourished, it wasn’t long before they began spawning new labels of their own. When Jethro Tull managers Chris Wright and Terry Ellis signed their deal with Island Records in 1968 the contract stipulated that once they’d notched up a certain number of hits they’d be awarded their own label. They exceeded the quota within a year and established Chrysalis Records. Along with Tull and Blodwyn Pig/Mick Abrahams, they also had Ten Years After, then at the peak of their popularity.

Tull reached their prime soon afterwards and Chrysalis spent much of the 70s reaping the benefit from various pit stops along the trail from folk rock to heavy rock – from Steeleye Span to the Michael Schenker Group via Frankie Miller, Procol Harum, Robin Trower and UFO. They were also one of the first of the new labels to open an office in the US and sign acts such as Pat Benatar and Blondie directly to the label. Back home they were also smart enough to spot the Midlands-based 2-Tone movement in the late seventies, and wasted little time in snapping up the indie label on a distribution deal.

Bronze Records was set up by manager Gerry Bron in 1971 when he decided that his acts – Uriah Heep, Colosseum and Juicy Lucy – that he’d licensed to Vertigo were getting lost in the release schedule. So he decided to do it himself. Bronze didn’t have much more than Bron’s acts to work on and although Colosseum’s live album made the Top 20, Uriah Heep’s Look At Yourself was still a formative album and Juicy Lucy were changing members faster than they were selling records.

Fortunately, Heep’s next album, Demons And Wizards, was a breakthrough for the band and the label. Their next two albums bankrolled the label, and Gerry Bron completed his revenge on Vertigo by luring Manfred Mann’s newly formed Earth Band away from them. And at the start of 1976, Bronze had an unexpected hit when the Afro-rock rhythms of Osibisa’s Sunshine Day danced into the Top 20.

Even more unexpected was the arrival of Motörhead in 1978. The band had a tour lined up but no record label, and Bron put out their Louie Louie single as a favour to the promoter. Despite being ignored by the label, Louie Louie still managed to get into the Top 75. Bronze promptly signed Motörhead and enjoyed increasing chart success with Overkill, Bomber and Ace Of Spades, culminating in the band and label’s only No.1 album with No Sleep Til Hammersmith – which Lemmy ironically had tried to prevent being released.

Bronze kept its roster tight and got over a third of its album releases during the 70s into the charts, an impressive statistic when 20 per cent was considered satisfactory. But the real bonus for the label came in Europe where both Heep and the Earth Band eclipsed their UK sales.

Virgin Records were latecomers, put together by Simon Draper at the back of Richard Branson’s mail order office in 1973. They launched with four simultaneous album releases. Gong, Steve York and Faust all flopped but Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells started to sell and never stopped. Oldfield became Virgin’s cash cow and was milked remorselessly as a succession of silly hats worn by Henry Cow, Hatfield & The North, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, Carol Grimes, Steve Hillage, Ivor Cutler, Supercharge and Yellow Dog (who released the world’s first luminous single) all failed to contribute to Virgin’s coffers.

Eventually Richard Branson saved the day when he picked up the Sex Pistols who’d been hastily dumped by EMI and A&M. The mad hatter acts were consigned to the bin as Virgin embraced punk, from XTC to X-Ray Spex. And then came the 80s – Culture Club, Phil Collins, Genesis, Simple Minds. The last thing Richard Branson did before selling out to EMI for £500 million in 1992 was to sign the Rolling Stones.

The Stones had set up their own Rolling Stones Records back in 1970 after getting out of their Decca contract, but it proved to be something of a vanity label and Peter Tosh was the only other act they signed, although Bill Wyman did manage to sneak a couple of solo albums out. 

Similarly, most people thought Led Zeppelin’s Swansong label was another vanity project when it started in 1974 until Bad Company defiantly proved everyone wrong. However, other albums by the Pretty Things, Detective and Maggie Bell all failed to live up to their expectations.

By the late 70s some of the labels that had been created a decade earlier were becoming as bloated and complacent as the labels they’d originally been set up to replace. They had become the establishment and punk was about to give the record label saga a whole new twist – which is another story.

Back in 1992, Peaceville Records, known for signing bands such as My Dying Bride and Autopsy, almost turned down releasing an album from a few black-clad, heavy metal obsessed lads from Norway. That record was A Blaze In The Northern Sky by Darkthrone, an album that would define the very aesthetic of black metal.

In his book, the previously out of print (Anything For A) Peaceville Life (due to be re-released on August 10) founder Hammy retells the journey of Peaceville Records, from its humble D.I.Y. punk rock beginnings to one of the most significant labels in heavy music – and his first reaction to receiving that now iconic record.

Take an exclusive peek inside and read about that fateful moment below: 

1992 

A great deal has already been written about the first album we released this year. Darkthrone’s ‘A Blaze In The Northern Sky’. We were riding on a high for once, sales wise. Paradise Lost’s ‘Gothic’, Autopsy’s ‘Mental Funeral’, My Dying Bride’s ‘Symphonaire...’ were all doing superbly. We were being feted by all of our distributors and the press likewise. It felt like we had most definitely become a happening label. 

We weren’t overly in touch with all of the bands on a regular basis. There was no widely available internet or cellphone still at that point. Letters took a week or so to get to Norway. Landline calls cost quite a lot of money, and not everyone had a landline. It’s amazing anything ever got done. 

Things would arrive in the post unannounced, and you just had to deal with whatever landed in the best way possible. When ABITNS arrived with a little black and white photo for the artwork – it seemed like a joke. I was waiting for the TV presenter to come in and tell me it was all some prank. You have to remember that we didn’t have the luxury of hindsight and there was no black metal scene, discounting one shop in Oslo. 

It honestly seemed like the band had lost the plot. I’ve always been very open-minded, musically, but I wasn’t up to speed with Norway’s sudden explosion/implosion. I didn’t think too long and hard about it, I just questioned it. The last thing I wanted was for them to fuck themselves over and come back a year later with their proverbial tails between their legs. There was a lot of expectation with the label and it was my job to question the quality and presentation of releases. Especially when we were doing so well. 

I wrote to the band and asked them to consider re-recording the album, or at the very least re-mixing it. Or I would. It didn’t go down well, they flatly refused to do anything to it, other than take it to another label, (the one run by their friend Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth) Deathlike Silence Productions. 

Fenriz: “At the time we would have been happy to have ABITNS released on Deathlike Silence Productions because it was the only label knowing what was going on in the black metal underground. In hindsight it would have been bad for both Darkthrone and Peaceville, I reckon. We just didn’t want anyone tampering with the sound of what had been a major life changing direction for the band, a change that got this reaction from Peaceville: ‘This is not the sound we signed you guys for.’ It was a ridiculous threat, but in hindsight understandable. That’s why I offered to withdraw from the label.” 

Leaving the label wasn’t an option. Relations with Gylve, however, were getting strained for sure. We started to receive calls each week from him – goading us, or downright insulting us. I’d always assumed that he had finished work early, because we had understood that he worked as a postman and had gone and got drunk, then called us up to sound off. I remember him once saying something along the lines of “You typically stupid fucking English people, always getting it wrong”. 

Fenriz: “I have vivid recollections of this. I was not working for the Post Office, as your patronising tone seems to infer. I was working at the Postgiro, the Norwegian Postal bank and there was no getting off work early. So I couldn’t have been that drunk. However you are right in your suspicion that I had been drinking as I would eat a dinner after work in the canteen and then go to Elm Street Rock Cafe and drink beers for a while. Office hours at Peaceville closed soon afterwards, so logically the timing would suggest me drinking around four beers before getting a hold of you (after all, I came home at 19:00 and you would still be in the office, because of the time difference). I would call and be angry at, what to you were tiny mistakes but to me were enormous mistakes. I am an angry man and I also want to be conveyed correctly. So when this failed to happen over a period of time, it created extreme frustration.” 

I was wrong about the album. It went on to become a classic. It still may have been different though had things not transpired in the way that they did…

Continued in (Anything For A) Peaceville Life - Extended Edition, signed by Hammy himself is available to order from Crypt Publications and Cult Never Dies publishing here, as well as all good book and heavy metal shops.

Zakk Wylde is happy as hell to be 50, and he’s especially thrilled at how some of his body parts are holding up. “My vagina is awesome!” he crows. “It’s more powerful than it’s ever been. You ought to see my labia lunges – that’s a sight to behold. I’ll tell you, my vagina can harness more power at 50 than it did when I was 27. This getting older thing isn’t so bad at all.”

He lets out a throaty, raucous chortle, which he does often. Taking a gulp of coffee, he sticks a pin in the notion that hitting the big 5-0 is diminishing his strengths in any way. “I’m doing great, bro. No Viagra for me. No blue pills. Everything’s workin’ like it should – bigger, bolder than ever. I’ve got no complaints.”

Indeed, these days everything about Zakk Wylde appears super-sized. For years he’s cultivated a larger-than-life image, and the advancement of time – and a serious commitment to weightlifting – has only increased his enormity. Style-wise, he’s a cross between Thor and an extra on Sons Of Anarchy, all leather vests and clanking chains, and with his lip-obscuring moustache, a nearly two-foot-long beard and a Fabio-like mane of hair, he’s not likely to blend into a crowd anytime soon.

He cut a dramatically different figure back in the day. In 1987, when he was first thrust into the spotlight as Jake E. Lee’s hotshot guitar replacement in Ozzy Osbourne’s band, he was a clean-shaven pretty boy, sporting the de rigueur poodle ’do popularised by pop-metal bands like Poison and Warrant. “Yeah, I had the poofy hair,” Wylde recalls. “After a while, I didn’t give a fuck about doing my hair. I don’t think I bought a can of Aqua Net after 1988. Once Guns N’ Roses hit, I had enough of that shit. I just rolled out of bed and it was like: ‘Here I am – let’s jam!’”

Wylde’s tenure with Ozzy has been an on-again/off-again arrangement, and as of right now, it’s on again: the guitarist, who rejoined him for a series of dates last year, will hit the road come May for the singer’s two-year “farewell” tour. During his first break with Ozzy, which lasted from 1995 to 2001, Wylde formed his own band, Black Label Society. The group has been through roughly half a dozen iterations, and out of the current line-up (Dario Lorina on rhythm guitar and Jeff Fabb on drums), bassist John DeServio is the longest-standing member, having worked with the outfit briefly in 1999 and rejoining in 2005.

“There’s never been any problems with any of the guys in the band,” Wylde explains. “No fights or blow-outs. I just try to surround myself with great musicians and cool guys, and it’s like: ‘Okay, we’re gonna make this record and we’re gonna tour – can you do it?’ There’s no drama. I don’t roll like that. Everybody I’ve ever played with is my brother.”

Despite the number of players to pass through BLS’s revolving doors, Wylde has established the band as a high-demand concert draw, and he hasn’t been stingy when it comes to issuing records. This month, the group is set to release its 10th studio album, Grimmest Hits, a righteous set of roiling, doomsday metal and poignant, Southern rock-tinged ballads. Each song features a boatload of Wylde’s prodigious six-string skills – there’s enough gnarly licks and nimble fretboard runs to satisfy the shred set – but throughout the record the guitarist deepens his reach as a gutsy, soulful vocalist and a world-weary, introspective lyricist. Does he feel he’s mellowing with age?

“I don’t know if age matters when it comes to songwriting,” he opines. “I mean, yeah, you get older and you have more things to write about – you’ve just seen more and you have more to draw from. Even when I was partying, I was never the type of guy to write about partying. That stuff just seemed goofy to me. It’s more interesting to write about life and religion and war. There’s inspiration everywhere. I might see a movie and go, ‘Oh, that’s a cool thing to write about.’ I guess I just gravitate toward that kind of thing than, you know, silly shit.

“All the bands I grew up loving, they didn’t write about orny stuff,” he continues. “Look at Zeppelin. It wasn’t always Whole Lotta Love; sometimes it was Stairway To Heaven. They were going for something pretty heavy there. And Sabbath, what are they talking about in Iron Man and War Pigs? So I think your maturity level can grow even when you’re rockin’. You can’t just stay in the same place as you were when you’re seventeen.”

The release of any new record brings with it the chance to tour, and for Wylde, there’s no place he’d rather be than on the road. “I don’t have any problems with touring,” he says. “I probably do three hundred shows a year, and I love it. I go batshit crazy when I’m not playing. I hear these guys, like, ‘Oh, man, touring’s such a drag,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, what the fuck did you get into this for?’ If you’re a musician, you go out and jam. Touring makes some guys insane, and I don’t get that. It keeps me sane, bro.”

During those brief spells when he’s not on tour, Wylde leads a quiet life at his home in California with his wife, Barbaranne. They married in 1985, but the two New Jersey natives have been together since their teens. “We don’t do anything crazy,” Wylde says. “We just like to hang out and enjoy ourselves with the family.” Two of their kids, Hayley Rae and Jesse, are in their 20s (“They’re doing their own things”), so that leaves sons Hendrix, 15, and Sabbath Page, 5, at home. “Hendrix has his own friends, so I mostly hang out with the little guy now,” Wylde says. “People might think it’s boring, but I have a great time. I love lifting weights, and other than that I just play the guitar. I wake up, and it’s practise, practise, practise. I feel like I’m learning something new every day.”

It all could have turned out very differently. In August of 2009, at the age of 42, after decades of heavy drinking, Wylde was hospitalised with blood clots in both lungs and his left leg. The guitarist admits that he never considered himself an alcoholic – this despite a brief stay at the Promises rehab center at the behest of Ozzy’s wife and manager, Sharon (Wylde jumped the facility’s fence and headed for the nearest bar) – but the news from his attending physician was brutal and direct: stop drinking or die.

“At first I thought, ‘Oh, I just gotta chill out on the drinking,’” Wylde recalls. “But the doc laid it out and said, ‘Zakk, I’m looking at your pancreas and your kidneys – your enzyme counts are off the charts. If you keep drinking, you’ll have a liver transplant before you’re 45. And then forget about your pancreas – that’s not too far behind. The guys who go through that either die on the table or they don’t leave here. They just say goodbye to everybody, and that’s that.’”

And that was that: Wylde made the decision to leave his hell-raising pub days behind him. “It was a no-brainer,” he concludes. “I had a good run with the drinking, but I drove it into the ground. I could keep drinking and bring down the curtain fast, or I could have a long life and career. I could listen to Jimmy Page and Zeppelin and Sabbath and Frank Marino and Al Di Meola. I could hang out with my family and my dogs. All I had to do was stop drinking.”

Even so, was he concerned that once on the road again the old temptations to drink would get the best of him? “I really didn’t think about it,” he claims. “I mean, sure, I liked to drink on the road. It was enjoyable. But it’s almost like asking, ‘Can you deal without a massage on the road?’ A massage is great – I enjoy it a lot – but can I do shows without getting one? Of course I can. Same goes for drinking. It used to relax me, but I just had to find other ways to relax.”

A little online porn on the road helps take the edge off. Wylde lets out an uproarious laugh when asked to choose between the works of legendary porn stars Rocco Siffredi and Nick Manning. “Let’s face it, both of them are a win-win,” he notes authoritatively. “If I had to choose, I’d probably go with Rocco. I discovered him first, and it’s always satisfaction guaranteed. You’re always gonna get a quality motion picture with Rocco. But Nick is amazing, too. Both guys are killin’. They’re doing their thing for humanity and mankind, and they make the world a more relaxed place.”

Sports also fill the gaps in Wylde’s life – he’s a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees and New York Giants, and he once hosted his own talk show, Wylde On Sports, on SiriusXM. Growing up in Jackson, New Jersey, he played little league baseball and scored a slot on his high school football team. He had tinkered around with the guitar aged eight, but when he started taking lessons from his football coach’s son, LeRoy Wright, a light went on.

“That’s when I got serious about the guitar, taking lessons from LeRoy [in high school],” he says. “He made me get good fast. This was all before YouTube. To physically see somebody playing all these songs right in front of me, I was completely hooked. LeRoy showed me how to play Back In Black, all these songs. He broke down the scales and showed me how to connect the dots. That just put me on the road to learning, and I couldn’t stop. I practised ten hours a day, and it wasn’t even work. LeRoy made it fun for me.”

For the next few years, Wylde played keg parties and local clubs with bands such as Stonehenge and Zyris, but he admits that he didn’t have much of a game plan. “I was just doing what I loved,” he says. “I was gigging and playing, and that was it. I didn’t think this guy behind the curtain was going to change everything, like in The Wizard Of Oz.”

But that’s more or less what happened: noted rock photographer Mark Weiss got a tape of Wylde’s playing, which he passed to Ozzy and Sharon. An audition was arranged, and before he knew it he’s got the coveted spot as Ozzy’s ace guitar guy.

“People ask me did I feel the pressure. And the answer is ‘no,’” Wylde says. “Being a Yankees fan, to me Randy Rhoads was Thurman Munson. He was the captain and then Jake E. Lee came in. So that was my mindset – I’m the new guy going into the Yankees. I wanted to do great. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to win the World Series, simple as that.”

Wylde has always had an affinity for Southern rock (“My buddies and I listened to Skynyrd and the Allmans – crack open some beers and turn it up”), and by 1991 he started slipping some non-shred metal licks into Ozzy’s music – most notably, there was his panoramic, cosmic country solo in Mama, I’m Coming Home. “Ozzy would bust my balls a little about that stuff, but if it fit the song, he was cool,” Wylde claims. While on his tour bus, the guitarist found himself chilling out to the Eagles, and soon got into the music of Sam Cooke and Percy Sledge. “After a while, I just wanted to play some different stuff. But let’s be honest, you can’t make Ozzy sound like the Eagles, so I thought: ‘Okay, let’s see what I can do on my own.’”

The time seemed to be right in 1992, when Ozzy announced his retirement following the No More Tears Tour. Wylde formed a band called Pride & Glory, signed a big-money deal with Geffen and released a self-titled album in 1994. The record was a faithful love letter to the music the guitarist had recently absorbed, but while it received positive notices, it failed to connect with listeners. A year later, Ozzy called off his retirement, and Wylde was back for the album Ozzmosis.

Wylde downplays the notion that he and Ozzy butted heads during the album’s recording, but upon its release he was spending less time with “the boss” in favour of jamming infrequently with Guns N’ Roses, with the idea that he might join Slash to form a mega, twin-lead guitar duo. “They were trying to figure out what they wanted to do, and it was taking a while,” Wylde recalls. “Finally, Oz said, ‘Hey, Zakk, I gotta know what you’re doing.’ It came down to the last minute ’cos Oz was going to go on tour, so that’s when he got Joe Holmes in. I was cool with that. I had all these songs lying around, so I put them out as Book Of Shadows, and right after that Black Label Society was born.”

To those on the outside, the relationship between Wylde and Ozzy is something of a head-scratcher. The guitarist hooked back up with the singer in 2001 for a series of tours and albums while he continued to lead BLS. The two appeared to reach a sort of peaceful accord, but in 2009 Ozzy made the surprising announcement that he had parted ways with Wylde and hired Greek guitarist Gus G from Firewind as his replacement.

Differing accounts for his decision made the news: the singer had reached his breaking point with Wylde’s drinking; he claimed that the guitarist was making his music too much like Black Label Society. Wylde, who was at first blindsided by his termination and expressed outrage in a radio interview (“Call me, man. It’s like, dude, you don’t wanna play with me anymore? Fine. Play with whoever the hell you wanna play with”), now stresses that the situation was overblown in the press.

“I had Black Label going, and I just wanted to jam with other people,” he says. “And Oz was like, ‘Zakk, look, I don’t wanna be the lead singer of Black Label Society.’ Totally understandable, I mean if Randy Rhoads was still jamming with Quiet Riot and he was going back to Oz, then Oz would’ve said, ‘I’m sounding like Quiet Riot.’ I get it. So Oz went out and played with Gus. That’s how it all rolls.”

And so it would seem that Wylde’s decision to rejoin Ozzy is just par for the course. “Any time the boss needs me, I’m there,” he says. Despite their storied history of starts and stops, Wylde remains fiercely loyal to the man who lifted him from obscurity and propelled him into the pantheon of guitar greats. “Everything I have is because of Ozzy,” he asserts. “Whether it’s the Black Label family and all the touring I do, playing Experience Hendrix [which he did in 2017 alongside Buddy Guy and Eric Johnson] and the whole thing, it’s all because Ozzy introduced me to the world. I’ll always be in debt to Oz and mom for giving me the incredible life I have.”

Black Label Society’s current tour wraps in May, and after that Wylde might have to put the band on ice for a while as he traverses the globe with Ozzy. Billing any tour as a “farewell” is a sure-fire way to sell tickets, and Wylde, perhaps owning up to Ozzy’s Sinatra-like penchant for false retirements, is already taking the matter with a pinch of salt. “We’ll play till 2020, and then we’ll all make some horrendously bad investments,” he says with a laugh. “Then you’ll see us again on the ‘We Made Some Horrendously Bad Investments Tour.’ That’ll give us a reason to come back. Or it’ll be the ‘We Developed a Bad Gambling Problem Tour.’ You never know, bro.”

Grimmest Hits is out on January 19 via Spinefarm Records. Black Label Society’s UK dates are on April 5, 7 and 8.

Black Label Society - Grimmest Hits album review

Zakk Wylde and Dave Mustaine set for Rock And Roll Fantasy Camp 2018

Zakk Wylde: The 10 Albums That Changed My Life

We always like this part of the week, in which we surf the world of new music and present you lot with a selection of the best. This week we've got an eclectic mix from robust riffage by Massive Wagons and Wilson, to dreamy retro tones from Lucifer and a dulcet number by an ex-Beatle. But first, as always, it's time to reveal last week's top three, listed below (as voted for by you) in reverse order:

3. The Night Flight Orchestra - Lovers In The Rain

2. Pink Cigar - Bombs

1. The Pineapple Thief - Far Below

Congratulations to The Pineapple Thief; this week's winners with over 50% of the vote! Now, who will you all rate the highest this week? A rising star or an established veteran? You know what to do; listen to this lot, then vote for your favourite at the foot of this page. Go forth, get stuck in, enjoy! Right after a final spin of last week's first prize winners The Pineapple Thief...

Massive Wagons - Robot (Trust In Me)

We're starting off this week with the new release from Carnforth's finest - taken from upcoming album, Full Nelson. No trickery or bullshit here, just straight-up, sock-you-in-the-teeth (in a friendly way) hard rock'n'roll, spearheaded by commanding vocals from Baz Mills that cut through guitar-led carbs. Yes of course they've borrowed from Motorhead, AC/DC etc etc but thoughtfully so – and laced the whole thing with some screaming guitar solo flashiness and a brooding, driving hook. Plenty to sink your teeth into, in other words.

Lucifer - Dreamer

Next up we've got a heavy yet psychy fusion of blues rock and 70s proto-metal (think Electric Wizard getting freaky with Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult, and you're on the right track) – with Johanna Sadonis's slightly dreamy vocals complementing the classic-sounding beef. Sadonis also rides a white horse in this video, through a forest, because...well, why the hell not? White horses always look cool... Find this and more good stuff on new album Lucifer II, out next month.

Black Label Society - Trampled Down Below

Don't let the quieter opening strings and atmospheric exterior shots fool you; Zakk Wylde and co aren't about to get all orchestra-ed up on your ass, even if this single/video is taken from their Royal Albert Hall show earlier this year. Instead you'll find jets of fire, skulls n' crosses and an amp stack the size of a carpark. And, crucially, a lot of axe-noodling and woozily majestic heavy riffing. Lip-smacking stuff.

Paul McCartney - Come On To Me

This week Sir Paul surprised everyone by announcing a brand new album (Egypt Station, set for release in September) and releasing two new songs; one of which is this toe-tapping slice of chipper, pop-charged rock'n'roll. It's not a total revelation (but then again with his back catalogue, that's a tall order), but we're very much enjoying it. Indeed, listening to it offers a reminder that underneath all the hype, tabloid-y gossip and persistent certitude of him being wheeled out to sing Hey Jude at any given major televised event, he's still a fecking good songwriter.

Diamante - Definitely Not In Love

Now for an artist from a wildly different generation, and perspective, and...well, everything. LA-based singer Diamante is 21 and bursts out of the speakers kicking and screaming ("If you think I tell my mom about you, I don't!...I do/if you think your tattoos make you hot, fuck off!" ). And yet her machine-gun petulance is funny and sassy here, not annoying; especially when flanked by a thumping hard rock framework.  If Joan Jett and Lzzy Hale had a kid, and fed her a lot of Red Bull, this would be the result.

Federal Charm - Choke

Stockport foursome Federal Charm are back with a new album, Passengers, in September – from which this suave, sharp hit of Rn'B-meets-rock is taken. Inspired by a guy that singer Tom Guyer knew in college (he was a "snobbish rich kid", there was a girl involved, Tom didn't like him...hey presto, Choke!), there's a venom-spitting undertone to the vocals that suggests it did indeed come from a real place. And it's worked out rather well for them, we'd say. 

At The Sun – Devil In Your Eyes

For their new video, London hard rock five-piece At The Sun called upon the lip-syncing services of their fans. As production methods go it's a budget-friendly but affectionate, appreciative nod to those who've supported them the most – and a jolly background for the beefy grooves and soul-infused vocals at work on this strapping, swaggering cut from debut EP Breathe. Leave the office, grab a beer with people you like and turn this up for weekend-friendly vibes.

Wilson - Like A Baller

Anyone who's already heard this Detroit troupe will be expecting fierce sounds (even the titles of their previous two releases, Full Blast Fuckery and Right To Rise, offer a pretty solid indication of what you're dealing with). If this sounds like you,  you won't be disappointed – even if Like A Baller may surprise you. Where Right To Rise was dirty and fuzzy, this is sharper and more cutting (the slick, satirical video is all suits and hummers instead of grubby sheds and fields, for a start), without sacrificing any of their resounding riffy oomph. Wilson in high definition, perhaps. Will the rest of new album, Tasty Nasty - on sale in August - be the same? We look forward to finding out...

On July 26, 1977, bang in the middle of the summer of punk, a flatbed Ford truck pulls up outside the London Hilton where the cream of the CBS record company are holding a high-level conference. A slight fellow sporting geeky Buddy Holly glasses and wearing a dark shirt and tie emerges from the passenger side clutching a guitar and a small amplifier. He sets himself up busker-style and proceeds to blast the bemused executives with a selection of rapid-fire, snarling ditties which he intersperses with the barked command: “I am Elvis Costello. Sign me!”

Meanwhile, West End police have just received an anonymous tip-off from a man with a decidedly Irish accent telling them that another Irishman of dodgy countenance is causing trouble on Park Lane. With the IRA’s bombing campaign subjecting London to non-stop paranoia and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee shenanigans turning England into a virtual police state, alarm bells go off. An unmarked police car arrives and promptly arrests Costello, who turns Queen’s Evidence and tells them to call his employers, Stiff Records of Alexander Street W2. But when the desk sergeant calls Stiff MD Dave Robinson – who had made the phone call to the fuzz – he tells them he has no idea who Costello is. The hapless Elvis is promptly arrested for causing an obstruction and spends the night fuming in the cells.

 “Was he pissed off!” Robinson now recalls. “He got the hump. But then he did get signed to CBS, so that publicity stunt not only got us on the news and in the next day’s papers, it gave him a career.”

Stiff Records was the brainchild of Robinson and his partner Andrew Jakeman, aka Jake Riviera, a couple of sharp-eyed wide-boy hustlers with music business form of their own as managers of the bands Kilburn And The High Roads and Chilli Willi And The Red Hot Peppers respectively. Their acquaintance became cemented in 1975 when English music was snowed under by nondescript guitar bands in thrall to far superior American music, while our local struggling pub rockers operated on the equivalent of the 1950s skittle circuit. Times were dire. Punk was fermenting, if not yet visible, but the smell of revolution was abroad. Robinson decided to exploit this deadly malaise with shock tactics that changed British music completely, and launched the independent music scene.

 “There were five weekly music papers desperate for copy,” Robinson points out. “Yet the record companies were clueless hippies. Jake was high on the hog after coming back from America after road managing Dr Feelgood [the Canvey Island R&B nutters who inadvertently kick-started punk], and we’d both been impressed by the growth of small labels in the USA. We were a couple of smart alecs with an ear for a slogan. By spring 1976 we were ready to go.”

Stiff was originally called Demon, but the rock biz phrase ‘It’s a stiff!’ provided a funnier alternative for their stable of misfits. In the long hot summer of 1976 Stiff released their debut single, So It Goes, by former Brinsley Schwartz bassist Nick Lowe, and started fly-posting London with posters declaring ‘If it ain’t Stiff It ain’t worth a fuck’. They also signed The Damned, whose single New Rose became the first officially recognised English punk rock record.

Riviera was shepherding The Damned around Britain as part of the Sex Pistols’ ill-fated Anarchy In The UK tour (which also included the Clash as bill openers), but he soon fell out with Pistols mentor Malcolm McLaren. Renowned for his volatile temper and an argumentative streak akin to an oxyacetylene blowtorch, Riviera was adamant that The Damned would trump Johnny Rotten’s mob. In the ensuing war of words Damned bassist Captain Sensible poured petrol on the rivalry when he declared that the Pistols’ single Anarchy In The UK was “Utter shit. We pissed ourselves. It sounded like some redundant Bad Company out-take, with old man Steptoe singing over the top.”

The Damned, the self-styled Bash Street Kids of punk, embodied Stiff’s unpretentious attitude. While McLaren cloaked his charges in situationist theories, Riviera and Robinson were peddling a B-movie/pulp-fiction brand of hard-boiled wit. ‘When you kill time you murder success’ became their mantra. They had it printed on badges. The five music papers acquiesced.

Costello was Stiff Records’ critics’ darling. Born Declan McManus, he’d been signed after demoing 36 songs in three hours at Riviera’s flat. “Jake didn’t like him originally, but we told him to change his name and we’d give it a go”, Robinson says. “Jake came up with ‘Elvis’ because he knew that would piss everyone off. I added the Costello, which was his mother’s maiden name, and told him to get rid of his frameless specs for frames – which became his trademark. Elvis would have done anything he was told then just to get signed. Same with The Damned. They were contrary fuckers but they didn’t want to spend their lives as a semi-pro outfit either. Those people were desperate to be on Stiff because otherwise they were going nowhere.”

The Riviera-Robinson axis lasted for two years. There were many altercations. Robinson remembers: “Jake lost his rag with me once so I took him into the back room, and he was prodding me. I’m slow to burn but I’ve a bad temper. We certainly weren’t good cop/bad cop. Jake had been in the pub, and there was plenty of chemical abuse around, amphetamine sulphate being rife; we all did it… Anyway, I pinned him against the wall and said: ‘Don’t ever talk to me like that again, because you’ll need a lot of people to pull me off, and when they have done you’ll be in a very terrible state.’

“Jake used to shout a lot. His skill was his cutting edge. When he walked away from an argument lesser men felt their bits dropping off. The Police’s manager Miles Copeland once made the mistake of going backstage to show off Sting’s success in America. We almost signed them, but passed because they had a shit French guitarist [Henry Padovani, later replaced by Andy Summers]. Miles made a big mistake. You do not beard Jake when he’s in front of Elvis, because he’ll threaten you when he’s got an audience. He ripped Copeland to pieces. He insulted his band, his clothes and his stupid accent. Miles left the room feeling like a fucking idiot. He called me and asked: ‘Why? What did I do?’ Well, hard luck, Miles. Don’t rub Jake up the wrong way in a dressing room. He’s a bully. You’ve got to stand up to him.”

In autumn 1977 a road show called the Stiffs Live Stiffs tour set off around the UK with Costello, Wreckless Eric, Nick Lowe, Larry Wallis and Ian Dury And The Blockheads in tow. While Dury was gaining many plaudits, Jake and Elvis hatched a plot to leave Stiff and sign to a newly formed label called Radar Records, bankrolled by Warner Brothers.

Robinson was furious. “Our finances were in good shape; we had the CBS deal, and the future looked bright for artists like Ian Dury and Lene Lovich [a prototype rag-doll screecher who begat Cyndi Lauper]. I tried to talk him round, but then I thought: ‘Oh fuck it. Let ’em go.’ 

“Of course I was annoyed. But I kept the office. And Jake was getting difficult. He’d burnt a lot of bridges even as we stood on them. Lots of people hated us. And there were some discrepancies over advertising: we’d overcooked the books to the tune of 160 grand. But we still had The Damned, and Dury was breaking. We were influential alright. Tony Wilson started the Manchester TV show So It Goes as a result of hearing Nick Lowe. And we inspired Rough Trade and the whole picture sleeve revolution, thanks to our graphic department, headed up by Barney Bubbles, who was mad as a fruitcake but a genius designer.”

In that heady period Stiff got rid of the American major-label sludge and cashed in on the whole street rock alternative of punk and new wave. They were only a flea on the back of a dinosaur. And while they were starting to bite hard, well, so were the creditors.

Salvation arrived in the unlikely shape of Ian Dury. One of the last endemic polio victims in post-war Britain, Dury’s working-class fusion of vaudeville/music-hall nonsense, rhyming slang and his band The Blockheads’ vicious swing made him Stiff’s first superstar. “We went big on [Dury’s] New Boots And Panties!! album,” Robinson recalls. “Luckily Ian gave fantastic copy. We came up with the slogan ‘Give Up Smoking, Give Us Your Money’ for him, and the rest fell into place. Here was this ex-art school nobody who suddenly took off with Reasons To Be Cheerful and Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.”

Dury’s fascination with the gangster underworld, and his own chippy propensity for belittling those who he took a dislike to meant that he was surrounded by East End heavies; his minder Fred Rowe, a big, black former villain, became the most obvious example in his freakish entourage.

Naturally aggressive on account of his disability, and the fact he’d had the shit beaten out of him at a home for the mentally disturbed where he was forced into callipers, Duty’s immense talent was offset by a pushy and bullying nature. According to Robinson Dury was fine in one-to-one relationships, but feed him with hashish and brandy and the demons emerged. “He used to antagonise people in bars and get beaten up, so I found him Rowe for his own protection. When the Sex and Drugs And Rock’n’Roll single came out he started making serious money, and Fred had to save his arse more and more frequently. 

“Trouble was, his manager, Pete Jenner [who had looked after Pink Floyd], was of the don’t-tell-the-artist-the-truth school. It went pear-shaped when his album Laughter came out [1980], and we laughed him out the door because it was so poor.”

Blockheads keyboards player Mickey Gallagher has great affection for his time with Stiff, while agreeing that Dury could be bloody hard work. “The first Stiff tour was a great success for us,” he says. “We were this eccentric bunch of characters who’d never have seen the light of day without them [the label]. They had creative energy, and we became synonymous with that ‘take it to the Nth degree’ attitude, at a time when the business was dominated by the Eagles – so no change there. 

“Ian was an awkward bugger. The first thousand pounds he made with the Kilburns, he burnt. Ian saw himself as the artist. He had an odd temperament; he wouldn’t pander to anyone. He was obsessed with [60s London gangster brothers] the Krays, and if he’d had all his faculties I’ve no doubt he would have been a very nasty piece of work indeed. He made people cry because he was heavy mentally; very caustic. He’d make grown men weep. He’d dig at your family, at your kids, and you couldn’t hit him because he was disabled. Lots of mind games ensued, especially towards any women around the band. He hated seeing any wives or girlfriends. He was a misogynist, so the Blockheads became a boys’ club. That wasn’t pleasant.”

Evidently, to work with Dury you had to take him warts and all. What made him so obnoxious also gave the Blockheads their edge. 

“He was a fantastic frontman in front of a very professional musical unit,” Gallagher says. “He expounded violence, so the atmosphere at the gigs was full of testosterone. It was fantastic to be a part of that, but later on, when he’d had too much Guinness and Budweiser, the Devil would come out. He used to bring people down when they wanted to be celebrating. It was a decadent time, lots of sex and drugs coupled with an ultra-punk, fuck-everything attitude. Stiff exploited that brilliantly – they were superb for the artist – although when they locked in with EMI they lost the creative playground. The changing atmosphere affected Ian more than us. At his peak he was a stimulating man, great to be around when he was on form. I liked him, but I never loved him.”

Not all of Stiff’s artists look back on their time on the label with such equanimity. Edward Tudor-Pole, of Tenpole Tudor infamy, had appeared in the Sex Pistols film, playing a cinema usher singing his own composition Who Killed Bambi? based on screenwriter Roger Ebert’s original movie title. Edward was mooted as a replacement for Johnny Rotten when the Pistols fragmented after the Sid Vicious debacle, but decided to front his own band, who he dressed up in suits of armour and any other period costumes he could wangle out of theatrical costumiers. Ideal Stiff fodder, then?

“Not at all,” reckons Eddie today, sounding remarkably like Terry Thomas. “Being signed to Dave Robinson was like entrusting your prized Stradivarius to a gorilla; it just gets bashed about. People harp on about the family atmosphere, but they were very unfriendly to me. I didn’t notice any friendliness. Everyone was cowering in the corner. They hated my eccentricities, didn’t get me at all. I thought they were a bunch of barrow boys. They knew we were a brilliant live band, but everything else was camouflage and advertising.”

Unrepentant to this day, Tudor-Pole maintains that Robinson was a despot and a martinet, as he lampoons his accent: “‘Just cos you’ve had a hit record doesn’t make you an artist.’ Deeply depressing. I suppose Dave could be charming. It was good and bad. I have to thank him for signing me. We played a gig at Dingwalls, sort of a showcase in front of the industry, and someone threw a glass at me because they thought I was taking the piss out of rockabilly. I had blood pouring down my face while we did a cover of My Girl – it was fucking brilliant. The only person who came to tend to my wounds was Robinson, and so we signed to him by default.”

Despite European success with the singles Swords Of A Thousand Men and Wunderbar, Tenpole Tudor fell out of grace and favour with their paymasters. During the 1980 Son Of Stiff coach tour, Edward wrote Swords… on the travelling toilet – “a fucking cess pit, but the only refuge for some p and q.” Unfortunately, when the tour continued in America the singer made some choice remarks about the death of John Lennon and his credit started to run out.

The Members, whose Sounds Of The Suburbs was a big hit for Virgin records, released one single for Stiff, Solitary Confinement, in 1978. Their lead singer Nick Tesco has mixed feelings about his sojourn on Alexander Street: “They didn’t make much time or effort for us, although we were a zeitgeist band for them. Still, I was proud to be on their label. We had a single out with a picture sleeve, and people are still impressed by that. Of course, we didn’t make any money, but that didn’t seem to be the point. Their attitude was: throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick. And I liked the way they sold records out of the back of a van and pressed the records up in reggae studios. The best thing about being on Stiff was that they were close to the epicentre of Ladbroke Grove, so it was easy for a nose and weed merchant to get the essential wiring that made punk work.”

Before the Members emerged, Stiff had signed the Adverts, after Jake Riviera and Nick Lowe took up a recommendation from Brian James of The Damned to catch them at the Roxy in Covent Garden, the club that became the spawning ground for would-be punk heroes. The Adverts’ Tim ‘TV’ Smith has fond(ish) memories of the label.

“It was a thrill,” Smith says. “I was already aware of Lowe and Costello, and when they put us together with the producer Larry Wallis, who had released Police Car for them, we were delighted to be on board. The single we made, One Chord Wonders, got great reviews, and loads of airplay on John Peel, but it was a failure commercially. I enjoyed the kudos of Stiff. The problem was they were so eclectic, and The Damned were always going to be their number one punk act. We were always second-best.”

The Adverts ran into a major stumbling block when they realised that TV Smith’s girlfriend and band bassist Gaye Advert was being used to sell the band to a music media who thought ‘Tits Mean Business’. “Jake’s thing was marketing, and they had a photo of Gaye – a head shot – on the single sleeve. We hadn’t expected that. The music press were just as bad. It was so misogynistic that it caused huge ructions in the band. Gaye was so annoyed she refused to have her picture taken at all later on, because she was being used as a sex symbol, like Debbie Harry.”

Today TV Smith credits Stiff for their sparky in-house wit. “I liked the anarchism of the label; they had funny slogans; the records were all one-offs that made you laugh. And considering I’d moved to London from Okehampton in Devon, where nothing was going on at all, it was all a step up the ladder.”

Stiff’s transformation from pub rock to street rock, via the maverick sensibilities of Ian Dury, reached fruition when they signed Madness. Camden Town’s Nutty Boys coincided with a seating in the music industry, as punk’s DIY ethics finally informed the mainstream. Madness enjoyed a straight run of 23 Top 20 hits, and that success allowed Robinson to explore the next medium before compact discs: the pop video.

Despite any unasked-for associations of the National Front and the British Movement with Madness and the so-called Two Tone scene, Stiff shed its reputation as a cottage industry label and made serious money via licensing deals with EMI, Island Records and Trevor Horn’s ZTT, all of which distanced Dave Robinson from his original objectives, ultimately sidelining the label as something whose time was up.

The cheap clocks they’d bought for 50 pence a unit, proclaiming When You Kill Time You Murder Success, seemed rather quaint once Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the whole E-soaked dance movement hit the sprung dance floors of Britain.

Different times also meant different drugs. According to Robinson the momentum had swung back to the majors, who were now adept at swallowing the indie labels that threatened their stranglehold. “We’d missed out on the Police and Dire Straits, which was annoying, but I really wanted to sign the Stray Cats. I’d seen how their psychobilly thing went down with the Madness fans. I went to the Portobello Hotel with a contract, and their singer Brian Setzer agreed to go with us. Unfortunately they’d run up a £40,000 cocaine bill with a record executive, and I wouldn’t undo that debt.

“Everyone was off their heads in the 1980s. I went into one record company one day and the entire staff were off their fucking boxes, in a state of high cocaine tension. I asked a bod what was going on and he told me: ‘There’s your man’. It was [a very famous British movie director]. ‘He’s a runner for the company and he’s a cocaine dealer’.”

Aghast at what he saw, Robinson realised the music business was condemned to repeating a history of mistakes. Having been Jimi Hendrix’s road manager in the late 60s, he’d seen the full cycle. “Hendrix was the most phenomenal talent and person I ever dealt with, but he was also the most stubborn and stupid. When I worked for him he had huge success but no money. I had to find him a flat in London, and I soon realised he knew nothing about his financial affairs. I was banking millions of his money, because I had the briefcase with the receipts in it, into a company in the Bahamas, and yet he was virtually broke.”

Now, a rock generation down the line, Robinson was about to realise that very few lessons had been learned. “Coke was rife, but it was a useless drug; occasionally good at parties. I was very leery about all that stuff. For fuck’s sake, Phil Lynott is buried three graves down from my mother! All that star bullshit! You’ll get burnt to a crisp unless you’ve got strong management. Of all the things at Stiff, I’m proudest of coming up with the slogan: A Star is Somebody Nobody Tells the Truth To.”

Today Dave Robinson thinks Stiff’s legacy could be embodied in a simple home truth: you could be this, or you could be that. Or you could be sensible – and have a lifetime career.

Or, in the words of the sozzled Irish drummer, who witnessed Robinson and Riviera coming close to fisticuffs in a Ladbroke Grove pub one evening in 1976, thus inspiring the little label that changed the music industry forever: if it ain’t stiff, mate, it ain’t worth a fook.

Cuneiform Records have announced that founder Steve Feigenbaum will take a year’s sabbatical to “determine what direction the label could or should take to be viable again in the future.”

The label, like many others, has seen a decline in CD, LP and digital sales in recent times, due to the rise in music streaming – and they say that 2018 will be a year to “rethink, retool and evolve the label” as it is “no longer feasible for us to run a record label in the same manner as we have for the past 35 years.”

A statement from the label reports that Feigenbaum will continue to maintain Cuneiform’s catalogue and oversee other responsibilities, but that the label, who released an average of 15 albums a year over the past three decades, have no new releases scheduled.

A statement from the label reads: “The digital revolution changed everything for everyone in the music industry. When Cuneiform began, its international business was conducted by mail or phone, and later, fax.

“When the internet arrived, we became ‘early adopters,’ embracing it as our ideal ‘dream’ tool for international commerce. But there was also a downside – digital theft.

“When digital theft began taking a toll on physical sales around 2009, we had to adapt to survive. We began releasing music in electronic format in addition to traditional physical ones, making it available for sale on a variety of digital platforms, and we embraced new media, expanding promotion to internet radio, online press and social media.”

• New Issue Of Prog On Sale Today
• 2017: The Prog critics' choice
• Cuneiform launch anniversary compilation
• Our TeamRock+ offer just got bigger. And louder.

Cuneiform say that as sales of recorded music in all formats have declined, “it’s become increasingly difficult to finance the release of new high-quality musical content.”

The statement adds: “A glut of free music on the internet and nearly free music on streaming platforms has devalued music.

“Surrounded/drowning in free music that’s ‘good enough’ for casual entertainment, there is little incentive to purchase music. This unsound climate endangers the future of professional music.

“Music that sustains deep listening costs money to create, record, release, distribute and promote. In 2018, Steve will explore how Cuneiform could further evolve to continue releasing music of substance.”

Cuneiform will remain in its current offices in Silver Spring, Maryland but as a result of the changes, the label’s Department of Publicity & Promotion will be dissolved at the end of January due to in-house production costs.

The statement concludes: “In 2018, Cuneiform Records remains a precious resource for musicians, for fans, and for cutting-edge music itself. Steve Feigenbaum welcomes your encouragement and support as he resets Cuneiform for the future.”

Everything you need to know about Cuneiform Records

How about some new music to get your weekend off to a good start? Plus one stone-cold classic, revisited? Oh go on then. But first of all let’s look at last week’s top three:

3. Wo Fat – There’s Something Sinister In The Wind (Live At The Double Wide)

2. Joe Satriani – Energy

1. Kansas – Carry On My Wayward Son (live)

Congratulations to them all. Now let’s see who’ll triumph this week: we have no idea as the power lies with YOU, the astute reader/listener/rock connoisseur. Have a listen, then vote for the one that rocks your socks the hardest and best. Once you’ve had yourself a bit of last week’s winners Kansas, that is…

King King – Long Time Running

Alan Nimmo and his bluesy crew embraced their classic rock mojo on new album Exile And Grace (out on October 13), and by the sound of this swaggering, soulful latest taste they had a lovely time doing it. Which transfers onto the listener most agreeably.

Kadavar – Tribulation Nation

Everything seemed to come together on the Berlin trio’s latest album Rough Times. This particular cut is deliciously expansive; woozy yet hard-hitting and politically charged. Yes the facial hair and visual effects are from a bygone, Sabbath-fuelled era, but the sentiment is much more current.

Body Count – This Is Why We Ride

Brand new video from the mighty mission statement that is Body Count’s Bloodlust, in which riffy metal, classy guitar and hard-hitting politics come together in the best possible way. Highly recommended, especially if you’re angry and need some articulate rage in your life.

Buffalo Killers – Black Halo

Pleasingly trippy psych-meets-Americana from a group described by Chris Robinson as “one of the best fucking rock ‘n’ roll bands in the world”. Black Halo manages to be both off-kilter (almost jazzy in spirit) but highly melodious as well – with sweet-as-honey harmonies and lead guitar lines.

Santa Cruz – Young Blood Rising

Taken from the Finnish rockers’ third album Bad Blood Rising (out 10 November), this is a fist-thumping, upbeat shot of heavy AOR adrenaline, with a singalong-friendly chorus and some tastily flashy axe work. Solid stick-it-to-the-man stuff.

Black Label Society – Room Of Nightmares

In which Zakk Wylde and his posse play brooding fuzzy hard rock for a children’s party – complete with ninjas, pirates, vikings, Wylde in a gorilla suit, a priest punching a zombie and…yeah, a lot of punching generally. What the mother was thinking we’re not entirely sure.

Four Dead Crows – That’s What You Get

Now for some dirty, smouldering, slightly sinister blues from darkest Gloucester, built around a slow blues shuffle that steadily grows a meaty, Black Keys-meets-Royal Blood kinda racket. Plus it comes with an atmospheric, cinematically composed video, packed with shootings and steely-eyed villains. Nice.

Jeff Coffey – Free Falling

Sadly it wasn’t all new life this week. The unexpected death of Tom Petty is a tragic loss for rock’n’roll; he was responsible for an immense wealth of music, some of it in the form of hidden gems, some of it mega hits like this. Covered here by Chicago singer/bassist Jeff Coffey, it’s not hard to see why the Grammy-winning Free Falling is as iconic as it is.

RIP Petty, you’ll be much missed.

There are many excellent places to watch a thunderstorm break on the horizon, but 50 feet off the ground in a steel gantry at a Bavarian metal festival isn’t one of them. In any other situation, the cracking thunder, forked lightning and sheets of biblical rain heading towards us would be an impressive spectacle. Right now, the threat of imminent death by electrocution or drowning is putting a bit of a dampener on the situation.

Still, it’s a fitting backdrop to today’s entertainment. The Friday of the Summer Breeze festival has been rechristened the Blast Bash to mark the 30th anniversary of powerhouse German label Nuclear Blast. The whole of the main stage bill is given over entirely to NB bands, from Battle Beast, Hatebreed and Epica to Children Of Bodom and Teutonic thrash icons Kreator. The storm heading our way has got nothing on the one that’s been happening onstage all day.

At ground level, a 49-year-old blond-haired man is watching everything unfold with a quiet pride. This is Markus Staiger, the man who founded Nuclear Blast 30 years ago in the small town of Donzdorf and has successfully steered it through the sort of choppy waters that have holed so many other labels. Like the rest of the 40,000-strong Summer Breeze crowd, Markus is a huge music fan. What separates him is that he happens to run one of the most successful metal labels in history. One that started out as a strictly DIY operation run from his parents’ house to put out records by US death, grind and hardcore bands has branched out in unimaginable ways, musically and commercially. Today, 30 years after he started it, Nuclear Blast is one of metal’s biggest players.

“I listened to Slayer when I was 15 years old – I didn’t know then that I would start a label, let alone that they would be on it,” says Markus. “The same with Kreator and Testament and Exodus. That’s fucking extraordinary. It makes me very happy.” Nuclear Blast was far from the first independent label to emerge from the primal soup of the 1980s underground metal scene. The likes of Roadrunner, Metal Blade, Music For Nations, Megaforce and Earache were all already home to a battalion of influential (and some not-so-influential) bands who couldn’t get a look-in on major labels.

Markus had set up a mail order company to sell his favourite bands’ albums. But he wanted to take it to another level. And so, at the age of 21, armed with 7,000 German Marks (roughly £3,300), he founded Nuclear Blast, its name partly inspired by US hardcore band Bl’ast. “I first knew Markus before he set up Nuclear Blast,” says Kreator singer Mille Petrozza, whose band signed to the label in 2010. “He was a tape trader. He was super-passionate about music even back then.”

The first album to be released on Nuclear Blast was Senseless Death, a compilation of US hardcore and crossover bands including Attitude, Dehumanizers and Sacred Denial (the album’s cover was designed by Markus’s brother-in-law). It was followed in short order by Condemned’s Humanoid Or Biomechanoid and Impulse Manslaughter’s debut album.

The early years were hard. Markus would work through the night in his parents’ house, speaking to bands and packaging up albums to be mailed out. There were cashflow problems – at one point he even handed over the papers for his car as security. “You sell some records, you get some money, you sign bigger bands, you need more money for bigger advances,” says Markus. “It took me about seven or eight years until my bank account was back at zero.” The financial high-wire act was worth it. Nuclear Blast began to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with on the underground scene, thanks to a roster that included the likes of Benediction (featuring future Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway), New Orleans thrashers Incubus (not to be confused with the nu metal band of the same name) and Chicago death metal heavyweights Master.

One key early signing was a bunch of greenhorn Swedish thrashers named Meshuggah, whose debut album, Contradictions Collapse, was released in 1991 (catalogue number NB409). Another was fellow Swedes Hypocrisy, whose own debut, Penetralia, emerged the following year. “I wasn’t aware of Nuclear Blast until we started looking to get a label,” says Hypocrisy frontman Peter Tägtgren. “We sent our music to everyone and Nuclear Blast was the only one that answered back, two days after we sent it. We were an unknown band, so we only got a very small budget to record the album. But no one else would give us a chance.”

With their most notable contemporary, Roadrunner, outgrowing its own death metal and hardcore roots, Markus spotted a gap in the market. Over the next few years, he bulked out the NB roster with quality extreme metal. “All the bands that I liked when I was young were on Nuclear Blast, like Amorphis,” says Mark Jansen of Dutch symphonic metallers Epica, who’ve been with NB since the late 00s. “But I didn’t recognise a sound, more like an attitude. You didn’t get that anywhere else.” A turning point came in 1997 when the label released pivotal albums by two radically different bands: Glory To The Brave by power metal kingpins Hammerfall and Dimmu Borgir’s symphonic Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. Suddenly, Nuclear Blast had transcended its roots as an extreme metal label. The flipside is that it was perceived as a distinctly German proposition peddling a uniquely – some might say cheesy – strain of Middle- European metal.

“I’m not sure that’s accurate,” argues Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta, whose band signed to NB worldwide for their 2016 album The Concrete Confessional. “I had a Meshuggah Destroy Erase Improve poster on my bedroom wall next to Slash and Axl and Ozzy and Randy. I actually think it really came into its own in America way before people think it did.”

The last two decades have been a boom time for Nuclear Blast. Its successes are etched in company lore: Meshuggah’s Nothing (the first NB album to crack the US Top 200 in 2002); Nightwish’s Once (the label’s best-selling album when it was released in 2004, a record it still holds today); Slayer’s Repentless (reached Number 4 in the US in 2015, the highest-charting Stateside album). There are other, less tangible triumphs – not least the unexpected resurrection of the moribund thrash genre courtesy of acclaimed albums from the likes of Exodus, Testament, Kreator, Overkill and more.

“One of my proudest moments was basically telling the world in 2003 that Exodus were super-relevant,” says Gerardo Martinez, general manager of Nuclear Blast’s US wing. “You gotta remember that no one gave a flying eff about thrash bands. Then there’s a band like Dimmu Borgir, who were on the Hellboy trailer – that was some achievement.”

Inevitably, there have been plenty of failures, too. Gerardo names Virginia death metallers Arsis as one of the label’s biggest disappointments. “They had so much potential but they basically self-destructed,” he says. Similarly, there have been those bands who slipped through the net; Gerardo says current NB mainstays Lamb Of God received knockbacks from the label early in their career.

But perhaps the biggest reflection of Nuclear Blast’s success is its continued existence. Where many of its original peers have either gone under or been subsumed into major labels, NB hasn’t just survived, it has prospered. The demise of Roadrunner in its original independent form undoubtedly helped strengthen Nuclear Blast’s position in the market, though Gerardo denies that it has all been positive. “If anything, it was bad for the scene,” he says. “The less independent labels that are out there, the harder it is for bands to get their music out there. Sure, we were able to get bands out of that explosion, like Fear Factory or Machine Head. But we were already really established by that point.”

But then the German label is different to many of its current and former contemporaries, in that it has no distinct musical identity. Or rather it has many: death metal sits next to metalcore, symphonic metal bands rub shoulders with dyed-in-the-wool hardcore, retro-rock shares oxygen with doom metal.

• Slayer, Anthrax and more in Nuclear Blast anniversary box set
• Inside the mind of Tomas Haake, Meshuggah's modern musical genius
• In Flames: "This music and genre will last forever"
• Epica headline the first Metal Hammer tour of 2018

As the worst of the storm passes just off to our left at Summer Breeze, leaving the crowd drenched but thankfully not electrocuted, Markus Staiger continues to be the centre of everyone’s offstage attention. “I like his passion,” says Jamey Jasta. “Anybody who knows the old bands, the Exploiteds, the Agnostic Fronts, the Discharges, but then is telling me about fucking Suicide Silence and We Came As Romans with the same fervour and enthusiasm is a real music guy.”

This much is true. A few hours earlier, Hammer bumped into Marcus at our shared hotel. Before introductions had been properly made, he was already playing a song on his iPhone by new US band Sink The Ship, one of the latest signings to Sharptone, an NB offshoot label that focuses on rock and alternative music (another subsidiary label, Arising Empire, is home to up-and-coming metalcore and punk bands).

“It was important to open the label to all subgenres,” says Markus. “After the death metal boom, it was important to have bands like Hammerfall or Primal Fear. Today, on the one hand you have Meshuggah, on the other you have a band like Threshold and on the other you have Sink The Ship. I love every second of it all.” That, as much as anything, is the secret of Nuclear Blast’s success: like all the best labels, NB is run by the fans for the fans. Metal needs its mavericks and its maverick labels. “It goes against the grain,” says Epica’s Mark Jansen. “Every time I come in their office, everybody’s listening to metal. That’s what I want. I don’t want to be with a label where everyone’s thinking about money and profit.”

The 30 Years of Nuclear Blast anniversary compilation DVD+4CD is out now, featuring bands such as Nightwish, Mershuggah and Cradle of Filth. Epica play a Hammer-sponsored tour next April.

A brief history of the last three decades of heavy

1987: Markus Staiger founds Nuclear Blast in his hometown of Donzdorf. The first record released on the label is the compilation _Senseless Deat_h.

1990: Albums by death metal bands Atrocity, Master and Incubus sell more than 30,000 copies each.

1991: Meshuggah’s debut album, Contradictions Collapse, is released. The band remain on Nuclear Blast to this day.

1995: Gorefest’s Erase becomes the first Nuclear Blast album to enter the German charts, reaching Number 82.

1996: In Flames’ breakthrough second album, The Jester Race, is released.

1997: Hammerfall become the label’s first power metal success story when their debut album, Glory To The Brave, reaches the German Top 40.

2002: Meshuggah become the first Nuclear Blast band to break into the US Top 200, when Nothing reaches Number 165.

2004: Nightwish’s Once becomes the biggest-selling album released by Nuclear Blast. Dimmu Borgir become the first black metal band to play on the US Ozzfest tour, helping to properly establish the label as a force on the US metal scene.

2008: Testament release their acclaimed comeback album, The Formation Of Damnation, adding weight to a thrash revival that also includes NB labelmates Exodus, Overkill and Death Angel.

2012: Nuclear Blast recruit several former executives from the recently downsized Roadrunner Records, including A&R guru Monte Conner and UK MD Mark Palmer.

2013: The label dips its toes into the world of retro rock with Devil Man, the second EP from Swedish psych-rockers Blues Pills.

2014: Nuclear Blast release Suicide Silence’s You Can’t Stop Me – the first album since the death of frontman Mitch Lucker.

2015: Slayer’s Repentless debuts at Number 4 in the Billboard Chart – Nuclear Blast’s highest charting album in the US.

2016: Offshoot Sharptone Records is launched as a home for rock and alternative music. Its roster includes Miss May I, Don Broco and Emmure.

2017: Nuclear Blast celebrates its 30th birthday.

VIDEO: Slayer on writing Repentless

The early 1990s was fast becoming a turbulent time for metal. Grunge and alternative rock had stolen the spotlight, and six-string heroics, gut-punching riffs and flailing hair were seen as passé. The success of Pantera aside, metal’s days as a mainstream force seemed numbered.

Except that wasn’t quite the whole picture. On the fringes, exciting things were still happening. Death metal had outgrown its gore-obsessed adolescence and headed into more melodic waters. A new wave of Scandinavian black metal bands were causing mayhem in the name of Satan. Brazil’s Sepultura were waiting in the wings for their shot at the big-time. And on both sides of the Atlantic, an underground record company was on the verge of becoming one of the most powerful and influential record labels of the decade.

That label was Roadrunner Records, and 1993 would be its watershed year. From its beginnings as a cradle of death metal, Roadrunner exploded into metal’s mainstream thanks to a trio of key albums – Sepultura’s Arise, Type O Negative’s Bloody Kisses and Life Of Agony’s debut, River Runs Red. It would be at the vanguard of rap-metal, 90s hardcore and nu metal. By the decade’s end, it was home for everyone from Slipknot to Nickelback.

“Our goal was to be the biggest metal label in the world,” says Monte Conner, Roadrunner’s former head of A&R and the man who signed Sepultura, Machine Head, Slipknot and countless others. “I felt like we were leaders and innovators.”

Founded in Holland in 1980 by Cees Wessels, Roadrunner started out licensing albums by artists as diverse as British jazz-rocker Robert Wyatt and hardcore punk pioneers Black Flag. By the mid-80s, they had pinned their colours to the metal mast, picking up albums by Metallica, Slayer and Mercyful Fate, and opened an office in New York. Their first breakthrough release came in 1987 with King Diamond’s Abigail, but it was their focus on the late 80s death metal scene that helped give them an identity as a cutting-edge underground label.

“We were still very much an underground metal label in those days,” says Monte. “But we were in clear ascent, due to the label’s massive success in the death metal world with bands like Obituary, Deicide, Fear Factory, Suffocation and others, but mostly due to Sepultura emerging as a major band.”

Sepultura were one of the hottest bands of the early 90s. Formed in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1984, they were signed by Roadrunner for their second album, Schizophrenia. But it was their brutal third album, 1989’s Beneath The Remains, that brought them to worldwide attention. By the time of its follow-up, 1991’s Arise, the Brazilians were one of the few metal bands in a position to take on the incoming grunge hordes.

“We weren’t scared of grunge or alternative rock,” says Sepultura guitarist Andreas Kisser. “We loved Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, we took influence from that scene. And I think they felt the same about us as well. We would see [then-Nirvana drummer] Dave Grohl wearing Sepultura t-shirts.”

For Roadrunner, it was apparent that the landscape was changing and they had to move beyond the boundaries of extreme metal. Under orders from Cees Wessels to “abandon that world”, Monte began searching out different sounds – starting on his doorstep in New York.

“The label started to seriously branch beyond thrash with Type O Negative, Biohazard and Life Of Agony,” he says. “All bands that had their roots in New York hardcore, before moving far beyond it.”

All three bands were coming at things from different places. Brooklyn’s Biohazard were rap-metal hardmen whose violent street-level worldview of life was laid out on their Roadrunner debut, 1992’s Urban Discipline. Life Of Agony were the young pups of the hardcore scene, with singer Keith Caputo using the band as cathartic release for his tumultuous family background and mental state. Type O Negative were something else entirely, a unique hybrid of hardcore, metal and goth that was the brainchild of towering frontman Peter Steele, former singer with controversial race-baiting 80s metal outfit Carnivore. What bound the bands together was Roadrunner, and the sense of community that came with it.

“Monte would come and see us, although he didn’t sign us immediately because he wasn’t sure about our vocals,” says Life Of Agony bassist Alan Robert. “He took a lot of convincing. But once we were on the label, it was great. We knew everyone there personally and hung out. It was the easiest, coolest place to work, and when it all took off it was really exciting to see other bands getting success.”

1992 saw those success stories simmering. But it wasn’t until the following year that they reached boiling point.

The first half of 1993 was fairly quiet for Roadrunner, but all that changed in August with the release of Type O Negative’s third album, Bloody Kisses. The band’s first two records, 1991’s Slow, Deep And Hard and 1992’s faux-live The Origin Of The Feces, interspersed Sabbath-esque dirges with bursts of face-pummelling hardcore. But Bloody Kisses was where they turned everything up to another level, combining heaviness, melody and Peter Steele’s fathoms-deep croon. This was the true birth of goth-metal.

“They were doing so much that was different with heaviness and melody on Bloody Kisses that it just deserved to be heard by so many people,” says Alan Robert.

Remarkably, it was. The album’s two big singles were the brilliantly blasphemous Christian Woman and gothic tour de force Black No.1. In their original form, they were both lengthy epics, but significantly edited versions that wisely focused on the songs’ innate catchiness were soon picked up by radio. This was Roadrunner’s first taste of success.

“Those songs gave us our first hit singles,” says Monte Conner. “Once we got our hands on those Type O hits, we were determined to break through that wall and put Roadrunner on the map at rock radio. Our radio guy worked his ass off to get us in that position.

It would take two years for Bloody Kisses to sell 500,000 copies in the US and become Roadrunner’s first Gold record, but as the label had neither the budgets nor the infrastructure of a major, that was still some achievement. Plus, they had plenty more up their sleeve.

Where Type O Negative were a surprise hit, the success of Sepultura’s fifth album was less of a shock. The Brazilians had been gradually easing themselves away from guttural thrash metal since the start of the decade, but Chaos A.D. – released in October 1993 – was something else. While it was still brutal, it added groove, ambition and, on the percussive Refuse/Resist and Kaiowas, the first flowerings of the world music influences that would come to full fruition two years later on Roots.

“This was the album where the band transcended the death/thrash genre and simply became a timeless metal band,” says Monte. “When I signed them in 1988, did I foresee that growth in ’93? Of course not, no one could have.”

So confident were Roadrunner in the album that they launched it with a huge party at Caerphilly Castle in Wales. Journalists and radio producers were flown in from around the world to be wined and dined with Brazilian food and drink. The evening’s entertainment even included a dance troupe from the band’s home country. “It cost a fortune,” laughs Monty. “But Cees was not going to let the label’s greatest achievement to date go by without making a huge deal of it.”

Their faith paid off. Chaos A.D. reached Number 11 in the UK and became the first Roadrunner album to break into the US Top 40, peaking at Number 32.

“It was the most important period of our lives,” says Andreas. “We were coming into it in a really good place. It was just the four of us, we had the right unity and balance, and the label let us express what we wanted to express. That is the only way to make the best art.”

While Roots might be Sepultura’s marquee album, Chaos A.D. remains arguably more important in the development of the band, the label and heavy music in the 90s. You can trace a line from it through Roots and onto the likes of Machine Head and, later, Slipknot.

“I’d say Chaos A.D. is the album that started that whole deep, heavy groove thing,” says Jami Morgan, vocalist and drummer with Code Orange, one of Roadrunner’s current standout young bands. “Without that record, I don’t know where heavy music would have gone. You’ll always see Reba [Meyers, Code Orange guitarist] wearing a Sepultura shirt onstage because they were such a huge influence on us. All of those bands were.”

Life Of Agony may not have the A-list status of Sepultura or the sheer otherwordliness of Type O Negative, but they were no less crucial to Roadrunner’s success. Where Max Cavalera’s crew drew from thrash and death metal, and Type O represented the label’s goth-metal wing, the Brooklyn four-piece bridged New York’s hardcore scene and the burgeoning alt-rock movement, bringing self-lacerating introspection to the sonic melting pot.

“We were young and angry and pissed off,” says Alan Robert. “I think we were initially thought of as too weird a band for anyone to get; we didn’t identify as metal, or punk, or hardcore; we just did the thing we did.”

While River Runs Red wasn’t as commercially successful as Bloody Kisses or Chaos A.D., it was still a big part of Roadrunner’s breakthrough year and helped pave the way for Life Of Agony’s own success with 1995’s Ugly. Its displays of emotional self-loathing became a trope of the nu metal movement, as did the downtuned grooves of Chaos A.D.

“I saw that coming,” states Andreas Kisser, who kept the Sepultura flag flying after Max Cavalera quit in 1996. “We were in a strong position on Chaos A.D. but then things changed and we became so fragile that it was always going to fall apart. So other bands took that sound and they made their choices, and it became more commercially successful. I knew this music always had that potential, we just couldn’t capitalise fully on it.”

Those three albums weren’t the only ones the label released in 1993, but they were the ones that pointed to the future. Roadrunner began building on their success immediately, releasing Machine Head’s game-changing debut, Burn My Eyes, the following year, while Fear Factory’s Demanufacture was released in 1995 and Sepultura’s titanic Roots followed in 1996. Roadrunner also became home to such influential bands as Coal Chamber, Soulfly and Slipknot, as well as a diverse array of acts that included hardcore luminaries Vision Of Disorder, Dutch gabber kingpin Junkie XL and, ultimately, multimillion-selling arena rock giants Nickelback.

“Honestly, while it was all happening, I could never appreciate the true scope of the success we were having,” chuckles Monte Conner. “Why? It all seemed so easy. The success achieved with the class of ’93 paved the highway that all the follow-up bands were to travel down. After 1993, Roadrunner became a very attractive place for metal bands.”

Roadrunner continued to be one of the most successful labels of the 2000s, as well as a hothouse for new talent, before being bought out by Warners in 2010. But despite a change of owners, it remains one of metal’s prime movers.

“The reason people are still talking about it is simple,” says Jami Morgan. “That music still sounds fresh and interesting and heavy today. Those weren’t just bands – they were ideas. Look at the way Type O portrayed themselves in their videos, look at the aesthetics of Sepultura, look at the t-shirts! I still collect those bands’ t-shirts! And it is happening again. Look at the roster of bands Roadrunner has now: Code Orange, Turnstile, Creeper. We’re all products of how those bands conducted themselves and conceived their art. What happened in 1993 is going to happen again, mark my words.”

In the unstable world of the music industry, instinct and intuition are invaluable commodities. When Karl Walterbach founded the legendary Noise Records back in 1983, he was undoubtedly using both. A diehard punk rock fan from Berlin, Karl didn’t even like heavy metal when he branched out from his earlier project, Modern Music: a prolific underground label primarily dedicated to German and US punk bands. Having started in the DIY scene, putting on shows in basements and squats in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, Karl had forged a strong relationship with US-based SST imprint and, through that, hardcore punk legends Black Flag, and it was through this international meeting of minds that Noise emerged.

“In fact, Greg Ginn [Black Flag guitarist] introduced me to metal,” Karl says today. “Every time he played in Hanover he was raving about the Scorpions. I didn’t understand it because I found them goofy! But in Los Angeles he took me to some of their shows with local metal bands, and then I was more interested. That was the time when the first Metallica and Slayer records and the first Metal Massacre compilation album from Metal Blade came out. I took all that stuff home and I thought, ‘This is great stuff, it’s so out of the box!’”

It’s not hard to see the parallels between the punk underground and the nascent thrash metal scene that caught Karl’s eye. Metallica and Slayer were kickstarting a musical revolution and it was one that knowingly shunned the polish and politeness that were deemed necessary for mainstream success.

“Punk was in decline and I could see something exciting in the metal scene,” Karl recalls. “So I started Noise, picked up a few bands and did compilations, including the so-called Death Metal compilation in ’84. I signed Grave Digger, Hellhammer, Helloween, Running Wild and Kreator… but if I was signing bands today I probably wouldn’t sign a single one of them! Standards are much higher these days, ha ha ha!”

Having taken a punt on the metal scene, with a firmly European focus, Karl had inadvertently stumbled upon a handful of bands that would go on to completely alter the face of heavy music. More traditional fare like Helloween and Running Wild would have a great impact on the power metal scene that erupted during the late 90s, but it was the signing of a peculiar band of Swiss youngsters called Hellhammer that would send the strongest ripples around the metal world, as they soon transformed into one of the most influential bands in metal history.

“Hellhammer was a copy of Venom, and a bad copy!” Karl laughs. “Venom had balls, even if the music was very badly played. It was that bigger-than-life image that I liked. If I look at Hellhammer it was there too, the same vibe, and then they turned into Celtic Frost. They really stood out and made an impact. It was a lesson learned because you really need big balls as a band to stick out and be different. Today there are so many copycats all over, and that’s a shame.”

Signed to Noise Records when they were still teenagers, Kreator were effectively the label’s response to the burgeoning US thrash scene. Now firmly established as one of Europe’s most revered metal bands, Mille Petrozza’s crew brought new levels of intensity and chaos to thrash, as showcased on their thrillingly primitive 1985 debut, Endless Pain, and its immortal follow-up, Pleasure To Kill. Today, Mille cheerfully regards Karl’s decision to sign his band as a miraculous event.

“We were incredibly surprised that anyone wanted to sign us!” he laughs. “A friend sent Karl our demo tape, but we didn’t feel like we were as good as other bands at the time and we were still very young. My mother had to sign my record contract! I was only 16 or 17 years old at the time, so it was like, ‘OK, let’s make an album…’ It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and maybe we’d never get to make another album, so we just hoped it would sound cool. That was our career plan, ha ha ha!”

More than three decades on from signing with Noise, Mille is happy to salute his former collaborator.

“Karl was always very supportive and if he hadn’t signed us, maybe we would have signed to a shitty label that wasn’t able to support us in the same way,” he muses. “Noise was the perfect label for us at the time. I don’t think a major label would’ve touched us, so we’re very thankful.”

Kreator were soon joined on Noise by thrash brethren Tankard, Coroner and the UK’s own Sabbat: proof that Noise’s contribution to the European thrash scene cannot be overstated. Karl was also savvy enough to look to the other side of the Atlantic and sign progressive Canadian oddballs Voivod, who were momentarily unsigned after releasing their War And Pain debut via Metal Blade in ’84.

“We moved to Montreal in the summer of 1985 and started working on our second album, Rrröööaaarrr, but we had no record deal,” drummer Michel ‘Away’ Langevin explains. “We had our gear stolen and were living above a strip bar downtown, getting poorer and poorer. But we organised a big show in Montreal with Celtic Frost and we gave a rough mix cassette to [Frost bassist] Martin Ain. He took it back to Europe, gave it to Noise and we ended up with a three- album deal. It was an amazing turn of events!

“Thanks to Noise we have great memories of being in Berlin to record our album, Killing Technology, in 1986,” the drummer continues. “It was very strange, because the Berlin Wall was still there. We tried to get to East Germany a couple of times but they said we looked funny and we had to turn around, ha ha ha!”

Albums like Celtic Frost’s Into The Pandemonium and Voivod’s Dimension Hatröss brought unprecedented levels of creative bravery to heavy music, and it’s impossible to imagine today’s metal scene looking even vaguely similar without their impact. However, Noise Records’ greatest commercial triumph belonged firmly in more traditional realms, as early signings Helloween rocketed from nowhere to international glory. Widely viewed as Germany’s answer to Iron Maiden, at least at the time, Helloween’s second and third albums – Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Parts 1 and 2 – made them chart-busting heroes around the world, much to Karl’s delight.

“They sold a million worldwide, with gold records in Japan and Germany,” he recalls. “It was really amazing. Those are huge numbers for an independent label. That’s why Keeper 1 and 2 stick out in my memory. Helloween had great songs. They had the cool, cartoonish image. They sounded fresh and young and they had the looks. It was the perfect mixture at the perfect time. But it can kill a label, a big success like that. You’re constantly re-pressing the records, 50,000 or 100,000 units, and you’ve got to pay the bills! One day I received a call from the pressing plant and it was the owner, saying ‘You owe us 400,000 Marks! This can’t go on!’ I said, ‘But I’m a big hit!’ and he said, ‘That’s great, but I don’t care. Send me some money!’”

After the good years came the not-so- good years. The 90s was a tricky time for metal generally, of course, but Helloween’s success at least enabled Noise to enter the decade in good shape. Unfortunately, a proposed deal with EMI Germany involving Helloween and several other acts disintegrated into a flurry of lawsuits that briefly threatened to kill the label off. The courts eventually found in Karl’s favour, but the musical wind was blowing in a different direction and so he took the plunge and moved to Los Angeles for the rest of the decade.

“I needed to change my life and to get some fresh air!” Karl recalls. “We survived the lawsuits but I became very demotivated. It’s logical that metal would decline. Any successes we had in the 90s were overshadowed by changes in market tastes and then the internet changed everything.”

Despite having notched up some huge triumphs while changing the course of heavy music on several occasions, Karl witnessed the dawn of the downloading age and realised the music industry was about to implode. He sold Noise in 2001 and has since been working in management, still helping bands but from a different viewpoint.

“Ultimately, how can you compete against free music?” he shrugs. “I was ahead of the curve and sold up for a decent price. I sold my publishing company in 2006 and its value had decreased by three-quarters. That tells you what happened to the industry.”

2016 saw a series of lavish re-releases from Noise’s inestimable catalogue, including classic albums from Celtic Frost, Voivod and Kreator. Damn The Machine, a book detailing the life and times of the label that must surely rate as one of the smartest leaps of faith ever made, was released in March (see Tome Raiders, right).

“No, I wasn’t a metalhead but I just felt that something was brewing all those years ago,” he concludes. “I liked the energy and the attitude. What matters is persistence, building a fanbase, good live performance and identity. If you play metal, you’re in there for the long haul.”

Tome Raiders

Olivier Badin talks to David E. GeHLke, author of Damn The Machine – The Story Of Noise Records

Written by Pittsburgh-based heavy metal journalist, David E. Gehlke, Damn The Machine is centred around Noise Records’ key bands but also the complex personality of Karl Walterbach. A great read, it chronicles the trials, tribulations and inner workings of a record label in the 80s and 90s.

How did this project come about?

“I initially interviewed Karl in 2013 for one of the websites I write for and we ended up talking loosely for two or three hours, as he’s a natural storyteller, so I remember getting off the phone and saying to my wife, ‘This guy’s so interesting, I should write a book about him and Noise Records!’ But he first said no – a few times actually! – until I offered to chronicle his early days as a squatter living in Berlin in the punk community as well as capturing both the music business side and the musical side of things.”

Some of the big bands had a negative experience with Noise in general and with Karl in particular. How do you find the right balance in between his vision and others’?

“Indeed, the entire book could have been a big love letter about Noise Records, but what really interested me was the relationship between Karl and his bands as well the behind the scenes aspect of the music industry. People often forget that what goes on behind the scene has a tremendous effect on how albums are released or how bands’ careers develop. Look at Helloween: after the Keepers albums, they were on their way to the top but in 1989, they tried to get off from Noise after they got involved with both EMI and Rod Smallwood. It didn’t work out and as a result, their career was derailed. Had none of that happened, do we get the notoriously hated Pink Bubbles Go Ape album? Does Kai Hansen leave the band? We’ll never know.”

Did anyone refuse to be interviewed for the book?

“I was turned down by only two people. First, Rod Smallwood; although he’s known as Iron Maiden manager, he was also taking care of Helloween in the late 80s and throughout the 90s and, of course, was behind Sanctuary Records, who bought Noise back in 2001, so it would have been great to pick his brain about how he and Karl confronted each other, but his office answered politely that Rod doesn’t do any interview when it’s not about Maiden. I also really wanted to talk to Tairrie B, the frontwoman of Manhole and later Tura Satana. They were two of the label’s biggest metal bands in the late 90s but Tairrie said she had such an acrimonious relationship with Karl that she felt she wouldn’t be able to talk objectively about her days on the label.”

Deadly Dins

Top 10 Classic Noise Tracks

Grave Digger - Headbanging Man [Heavy Metal Breakdown, 1984]

Snapping at the heels of Scorpions and Accept, Grave Digger’s thunderous assault was integral to the 80s German metal blueprint.

Hellhammer - Triumph Of Death [Apocalyptic Raids EP, 1984]

Essentially – and intentionally – like listening to Venom at half-speed, Tom G Warrior’s first band were an ugly but seminal sonic nightmare.

Kreator - Flag Of Hate [Endless Pain, 1985]

The kings of German thrash summed up their homegrown scene’s feral intensity at the first attempt. An immortal anthem. Raise! The Flag Of Hate!

Celtic Frost - Circle Of The Tyrants [To Mega Therion, 1985]

Emerging from Hellhammer’s primitive ashes, Celtic Frost’s creative blossoming produced numerous hellish classics, none more fearsome than this one.

Helloween - Future World [Keeper Of The Seven Keys Part 1, 1987]

The most successful band in Noise Records history, Helloween’s speed metal singalongs were a cartoon riot made flesh. No wonder the world succumbed.

Voivod - Tribal Convictions [Dimension Hatröss, 1988]

Thrash metal’s pioneering Canadian weirdoes were so far ahead of their time, angular mini-epics like this one still sound like the future. Canucking genius.

Sabbat - A Cautionary Tale [History Of A Time To Come, 1988]

This face-melting opener from Sabbat’s debut remains a thrillingly vicious reminder of their unique, evocative and hugely influential thrash attack.

Running Wild - Under Jolly Roger [Under Jolly Roger, 1987]

Long before Alestorm reared their heads, Running Wild were bringing metal and nautical criminality together, with thunderously daft consequences.

Skyclad - The Widdershins Jig - [The Wayward Sons Of Mother Earth, 1991]

After leaving Sabbat in 1990, Martin Walkyier formed Skyclad and, with this boisterous, fiddle-driven anthem, produced a handy template for the entire folk metal scene.

Coroner - Internal Conflicts [Grin, 1993]

Switzerland’s answer to Voivod, Coroner hit a creative peak in the mid-90s. Put Celtic Frost, Ministry and Rush in a blender and you’re halfway there.

Damn The Machine: The Story Of Noise Records by David E Gehlke review

Making good art against all odds is a sentiment that Sel Belamir agrees with 100 per cent, and it’s the ethos behind his new record label.

As the frontman of Amplifier, Belamir has both been signed to major indie labels and released material independently. But it was shortly after 2014’s Mystoria, which came out via Superball, that he began thinking about a new DIY approach that would benefit other bands as well.

“[Our touring buddies] Awooga wanted to make a sort of community-based record label and asked me if I’d like to get involved,” reveals Belamir. “We spent a bit of time setting it up, but then with all the austerity cut-backs, the funding disappeared. Around the same time, Sony acquired Superball, so it just made sense to carry on with the idea. I knew I could put a record out because I’d already done it with The Octopus and having a label meant I could put Amplifier out, as well as bands like Awooga.”

Belamir defines Rockosmos as “eclectic rock music for travellers” – the first physical release was the trippy vinyl edition of Awooga’s Alpha – and he’s keen to push the multi-disciplinary approach of his new collective. “I don’t really want the label to work in a conventional sense,” he explains. “There will be a small roster, 10 acts at most, and I want it to function as an artist’s studio. In the music industry, there’s a clear and sharp distinction between creativity and commercial activity, but it doesn’t have to be like that. I’m going to try to bridge that chasm.”

• Have A Cigar - MoonJune Records
• Have A Cigar: Blacklake - the team behind Haken and Headspace's album covers
• Have A Cigar: Doffing a cap to Progulus Radio's Mike Klemmer
• Blues Pills: from cigars and ski-hire to heavy soul and international success

Although the label is a one-man enterprise, Belamir has the support of sales and distribution company Red Essential, who are also involved with the day-to-day running. “It would be impossible for me to hire staff,
I couldn’t afford it,” he says, “but if there’s ever any problem, it can be resolved within 48 hours, which makes a big difference to my stress levels. Now I can just get stressed about putting stamps on things.”

It’s early days for Rockosmos, but the future is looking very bright. Amplifier’s Trippin’ With Dr Faustus and the new Thumpermonkey album are both due out this year. “I’m super-excited,” Belamir says of his plans. And so are we!

Visit www.rockosmos.com

Lurking on a high street in East London sits a small, unassuming, black-fronted shop with a gothic title above its door. It might not sound much on paper (or your screen), but it’s a portal into the deepest, darkest recesses of heavy metal. Crypt Of The Wizard is London’s newest record store and the only one 100% dedicated to defending the faith. The soundproofed black walls house a plethora of albums across the wide spectrum of heavy music – from Anvil and Sepultura to Hexvessel and Twisted Sister to Mayhem and Solstafir. There’s even a sofa and coffee machine to chill out and admire your purchases.

Dedicated to promoting the best in metal, the store has an abundance of underground records unavailable anywhere else in the city. From self-released tapes to a wealth of Mexican black metal, your craving for new noise will be sated.

But how did this metal mecca begin? And what sets it apart from the other splatter-vinyl vendors across London? We paid a visit to the store for a chat with manager and ‘Heavy Metal Consultant’ Charlie Woolley to find out.

Why did you start a metal record store?

“Well there wasn’t one in London, and we were bored of complaining, so we thought ‘Why not us? Why shouldn’t we do it?’ So we did. The scene’s healthy enough to support one. There’s so many good bands in the UK and all over Europe, and the shipping costs on records from abroad are ridiculous, so we thought there was a way of getting stuff in people’s hands slightly cheaper without doing the boring internet side of things as well. But mostly it’s so we can create our jobs and listen to metal all day.”

How did you get into metal?

“I’m from East London so my first true love was Iron Maiden. I think an older friend put a bit of Maiden in my hand when I was seven or eight and the album covers got me, then it went on from there. I’ve never not been into metal as far as I can remember. My dad bought me my first leather jacket when I was ten – I was a bit confused then, I had the Sex Pistols patch, the Iron Maiden back patch, the Nirvana patch… I’ve always been into heavy music but metal has been at the core of it for me. It just feels like it hasn’t been this good for years and that keeps you going with so many good releases each year.”

The store is called Crypt Of The Wizard, is that a reference to the Mortiis song?

“It’s a little nod to Mortiis. We threw around a lot of names but that one just stuck. About two days after opening we got an email from Mortiis saying he liked the name and good luck with the shop, which felt like a blessing. We were just happy it wasn’t a cease and desist letter!”

Are you trying to promote more independent records alongside the likes of Maiden?

“We’ve got a lot of the classics, especially stuff that’s really difficult to get and have to pay stupid money for on Discogs. We’ll have reissued versions of those, so people can have the album on vinyl, but not have to pay hundreds of pounds. But I’d say the vast majority of our stock is smaller bands and smaller labels, that’s what we’re really interested in. We’ve got very little second-hand stock at the moment, we’re mostly interested in promoting small distributors, small bands – we do tape releases for smaller bands as well.”

Alongside all the independent smaller releases, how mainstream is the collection likely to get?

“We’ve got room for all sorts of things in here. Lots of people like lots of different stuff, and here are a lot worse things you can do in the world than make bad music. We are guided mostly by our tastes, so some things we feel like we should stock, some things we feel like we know people will buy, but predominantly the stock is stuff we think is good. Luckily we’ve got excellent tastes.”

Is there anything here you wish was yours?

“The Reverend Bizarre boxset of their last album So Long Suckers is gonna be a hard thing to sell for me. It was never supposed to come out on vinyl because three of the songs are 20 minutes long, but they eventually put it out on a four-disc boxset and it’s a beautiful thing.”

What else can we expect from Crypt Of The Wizard?

“We’re definitely putting gigs on, but we won’t be putting many on in here. Although we have just started to organise the first one, which will be live-streamed by Hotel Radio. We’ll be promoting shows, we’ve started working with Live Evil to promote some shows, we’ve got DJ nights coming up. We’re hoping to do a little label as well. There’s a lot of different avenues it could go in, but for now we need to actually finish pricing up all the records. We’ve been so busy we haven’t had chance to sit down.”

Crypt Of The Wizard is open 11am - 7pm, Tuesday to Sunday, and can be found at 324C Hackney Road, London E2 7AX.

Value of vinyl sales overtakes digital downloads in the UK

Earache Records launch on-demand vinyl service

It’s a famous story. Back in 1962, Jim Marshall built a prototype amplifier and put it on sale in his drum shop in west London. By the end of the day he had orders for another 22, and Marshall Amplification was born. It went on to provide a backline for rock’s great and good. “There’s nothing that can beat my old Marshall tube amps,” Jimi Hendrix said in 1967. “Nothing in the whole world.”

Since then, Marshall’s distinctive signature logo has become one of the most iconic brands in rock, not least because Marshall himself was determined to ensure that everything produced by the company was of the highest quality. “It’s the name that means something to me,” he said. “Because it is my name.”

In 2017 Marshall is a different beast. The company still produces those amps, that logo is as popular as it’s ever been, but it’s finding its way onto other products. The Marshall fridge is a big seller, and even includes a volume control that goes up to 11. You can buy Marshall sunglasses. And Marshall headphones. Last year the company produced their first smartphone. And now they’ve launched a record label.

You have to wonder what Jim Marshall would have made of it all.

“Jim Marshall was first and foremost a music lover (as well as being quite a drummer and singer!),” says Marshall Records Managing Director Steve Tannett, “and this latest part of the story continues his legacy of being a company that at all times tries to maintain the highest quality in everything it does.

“Marshall have been around for over 50 years, and have always been at the forefront of the rock’n’roll business with their hardware and more recently lifestyle products. When we got together with the team in Milton Keynes we all felt that as they make equipment to play instruments through and equipment to listen to that music, why not make some music to go with it?”

It makes sense. Whatever you think of the Marshall fridge, the company has always had close ties to musicians, and both Tannett and joint MD Rob Cass aren’t short of experience, either running labels or producing records (Cass was an in-house producer at Abbey Road Studios for six years and has worked with the likes of Slash, Brian May and Jack Bruce, while former Menace guitarist Tannett — readers with a fondness for early punk may remember their anti-Greater London Council rant GLC — ran Miles Copeland’s IRS record label).

“We both felt that the time was right to go back to some old fashioned A&R working with acts we love and creating a whole team spirit around the artists rather than just simply ‘licensing in’ finished masters,” says Tannett. “We are working with the bands on every level of their careers and hopefully creating long term relationships.”

The first band to sign to the label are The Dirty Youth, the South Wales rockers who formed in 2009 and already have a couple of album under their belt. “It all came about by fate,” says the band’s Matt Bond. “We were having a beer at Tileyard Studios with our Publishing Company to discuss new material we had been writing and were introduced to Steve and we hit it off.

“We instantly connected with Steve’s enthusiasm and attitude towards the music business and he had a good giggle at our tales from the road. Steve got home that night had a listen and researched The Dirty Youth. The following morning he called us up and asked for a meeting.”

But what can Marshall offer a band that other labels can’t?

“The support they can offer us is second to none,” says Bond. “Marshall is such a massive brand that is highly regarded amongst musicians and music lovers the world over, it carries a lot of weight. Not only can they provide us with the best amps in the world but they offer us a great team of people to help steer the ship. I think the business knowledge of the company partnered with their passion is a great combination.”

The admiration works both ways. “The band have a fantastic work ethic,” says Tannett. “They write cracking tunes and they have a drop dead gorgeous lead singer. Whats not to love? It’s been exciting to watch them working with Rob at Abbey Road. There is something in those walls that gets into the DNA of the bands and amazing things start to happen .”

• Marshall amps, Lemmy, Slash, and the film that needs your help
• Guitar amp giants Marshall launch new record label

So that’s where we’re at. The Dirty Youth are recording new music this month for release on Marshall Records later in the year, at which point they’ll hit the road.

And the label? They’re thinking long-term.

“We’re developing several concepts encompassing exclusive live albums from classic artists which will be recorded at our custom built venue located at the Marshall factory, and also blues and country releases,” says Tannett. “We have several new signings, and all our bands are with us because we love their music and we love them as people.”

Bond won’t disagree. “Marshall’s philosophy has always been forward thinking,” he says, “Where do they stop? The answer is they won’t, and Marshall Records is definitely the next logical step forward for Marshall.”

10 of the best rock bands from Wales

Metal doesn’t need to be complicated. Irish trio Dead Label have steadily built a reputation as one of their homeland’s most explosive young bands, and second album Throne Of Bones is such a joyful eruption of hard-grooving and unpretentious modern thrash that it’s hard to imagine the band heading anywhere but up from here. It also helps that they have a way with words.

“The song Throne Of Bones set the tone for the album, so we decided to make that the title,” says drummer Claire Percival. “The song itself was inspired by corrupt governments abusing their own citizens and all the messed up things happening in the world right now. Plus it’s a badass title, it’s a metal album, and that’s what you need for a metal album… a badass title!”

• The Top 10 Best Metallica Songs From the 1980s
• Rise Of The Machine: The untold story of Fear Factory's Demanufacture
• Fear Factory: Burton C Bell's Guide To Life
• The Best New Metal Album Releases This Week

Hailing from Celbridge, a small town in County Kildare, Dead Label could be forgiven for not having ventured too far from their home, but this band have toured relentlessly over the last few years. As a result, they’ve experienced the highs and lows of life on the road and seem more than well-equipped for the arduous journey ahead.

“On tour last year we slept in what can only be described as a crack den in Kraków,” Claire recalls. “On tour with Fear Factory last year we slept in the attic of a Chinese restaurant somewhere in Germany and we are pretty sure we stayed in the hotel from The Shining too. One supreme low was playing at a Starbucks in Eugene, Oregon, but only to the sound guy… and then the sound guy left.”

Minor setbacks aside, Dead Label are clearly a driven bunch and Throne Of Bones sounds like the work of a band with energy and commitment to spare.

“We’ve had our share of low points, but we love touring and no amount of them will ever stop us from achieving our goals,” Claire grins. “It’s the lows that make the tours so unpredictable and awesome!”

2016: A year in metal

London band The One Hundred have signed a worldwide deal with Spinefarm Records.

The up-and-coming four-piece have previously supported Papa Roach, Crossfaith and Motley Crue in their short career so far. Their debut album is expected in early 2017.

Frontman Jacob Fields says: “Not long ago, we played our first shows, and even less time ago we put out five songs, hoping people might take notice.

“We’ve had one hell of a ride so far and it really is just the beginning. We can’t wait to unleash some new music and we’re incredibly excited to be working with Spinefarm globally to achieve our goals.”

Spinefarm’s head of A&R Dante Bonutto adds: “The One Hundred are impressive on a number of different levels, two of the main ones being their refusal to be limited by genre, plus their desire to set the song-writing bar very high.

“It’s exciting to work with a band where you can think on broad terms, and where you can look to compete and make a difference. These guys are ready to leave their mark – and they rock.”

In October, The One Hundred support Don Broco on a number of European dates.

The One Hundred tour dates 2016

Oct 07: Salamandra L’hospitalet De Llobregat, Spain (with Don Broco)
Oct 08: Madrid Sala Cats, Spain (with Don Broco)
Oct 10: Milan Magazzini Generali, Italy (with Merge)
Oct 11: Ciampino Orion, Italy (with Merge)

• Angus Young hails AC/DC fans as Rock Or Bust tour wraps up
• Megadeth guitarist was jealous of Metallica's Master Of Puppets
• Max Cavalera: I should have kept Sepultura name
• Extreme's Nuno Bettencourt sorry for naked pictures leak

Bullet For My Valentine sign with Spinefarm Records

This article first appeared in The Blues #8, August 2013.

Earlier this year, Chicago-based Alligator Records released Cotton Mouth Man, a new album by legendary Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters sideman, James Cotton. In typical Alligator style, no opportunity was missed to get ‘Mr Superharp’s’ album into the right hands. The label got completely behind the release, as it does with every record it produces.

Even if Mr Cotton had been a complete unknown, the fact that his album carried the Alligator Records logo would have been enough to grab our attention anyway. It’s a stamp of quality at a time when blues records are churned out at an incredible rate and then left to fend for themselves.

So, you’re preaching to the choir when it comes to Alligator Records round these parts. Not only is it home to some of our favourite artists – Hound Dog Taylor, Albert Collins and, more recently, JJ Grey & Mofro and Anders Osborne – but few other labels have done more to keep the blues alive and thriving over the past 40 years. You can sign us up for the fan club and a T-shirt.

Despite our positive vibes, Alligator founder Bruce Iglauer was nervous about doing this interview. While he’s justly proud of his label’s contribution to Chicago blues history, he’s in no mood to have his creation portrayed as some noble museum piece. He said that. Not in so many words, but we got the message. That’s fair enough. For 42 years, Bruce has put his arm round the shoulders of blues legends and fresh-faced hopefuls alike, steering them towards the right audience and making sure their message is heard. The label owner’s message is that blues cannot survive by beautifully repackaged back catalogue alone. The blues needs a steady supply of fresh blood.

In fact, as we were talking with Bruce, he mentioned that he was nurturing a young artist from Mississippi who may go on to record as an Alligator artist. So, what does it take to get your name added to that distinguished roster?

“Ultimately it’s my gut that tells me whom to sign,” says Iglauer. “I listen for someone with deep blues feeling, emotional honesty, good storytelling, and the kind of catharsis and intensity that I love. I’m not worried about whether their music has traditional blues structures or lyrics. It’s how the music feels and how I respond emotionally.

“Also, I look for artists who can communicate to a live audience,” Iglauer continues. “Blues music is created by the interaction between artist and audience. If the blues is going to have that ‘healing feeling’, the artist must be able to reach into his or her deepest emotions and deliver them to the audience. It’s soul-to-soul communication.”

It was the need for ‘soul-to-soul communication’ that first brought Iglauer to Chicago by bus in the late 60s and into the gravitational pull of the man who would ultimately inspire him to form his own record label: Theodore Roosevelt ‘Hound Dog’ Taylor.

“I had one piece of information that I remembered from a folk music magazine I had picked up years before,” recalls Iglauer. “‘If you want to hear some real Chicago blues, go to the Jazz Record Mart at 7 W. Grand Ave., and Bob Koester, the owner and also the founder of Delmark Records, will take you out to the black neighbourhoods to hear the real thing.’

“I showed up at 7 W. Grand to discover a seedy little record store with an amazing jazz and blues selection. Bob Koester, the very outgoing and talkative owner, introduced me to John Fishel, a long-haired college student roughly my age, who was working behind the counter. Later that year, John and his friends organised the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which was the first national blues festival ever.

“It was John who took me out that night to Eddie Shaw’s little blues bar on the West Side of the city. We went on the bus through very poor and often burnt-out streets (from the riots after Martin Luther King was killed) to a storefront bar where we were the only white patrons. It was filled with musicians because it was Blue Monday, the day that everyone jammed and tried to ‘cut heads’ musically. Otis Rush was there, as was Jimmy ‘Fast Fingers’ Dawkins. Eddie, the West Side’s favourite tenor sax man, was tending bar, and the house band was led by a drummer named Little Addison and a guitar player named Boston Blackie, both stalwarts of the West Side scene.

“Also hanging out was a tall, gangly man with an almost dog-like face, big teeth and a loud, cackling laugh. He was clearly everyone’s friend, and someone told me his name was Hound Dog Taylor.”

Long story short, Hound Dog’s stint onstage that night was not a triumph. As Bruce recalls: “I dismissed him as a friendly, outgoing and hard-drinking guy whom the others let sit in because he was the life of the party… but not a good musician. Boy, was I wrong.”

Iglauer moved to Chicago at the beginning of January 1970 to take up the position of shipping clerk at Delmark Records. Soon after he found himself at Florence’s Lounge at 54th Place and Shields to catch a Sunday afternoon Hound Dog set, backed by Brewer Phillips on second guitar and Ted Harvey on drums. There was no bass player.

“It was magical!” says Iglauer. “The music was wild and full of energy, raw and raucous. Hound Dog played slide with the fifth of the six fingers on his left hand, playing a cheap Kingston Japanese guitar that distorted like crazy, while Phillips (everyone called him Phillip) played fast and ever-changing bass parts on his Fender Telecaster.

“The guitar sounds were filthy, in a good way, and Hound Dog sang in a high, true blues voice, through a cheap microphone plugged into his Silvertone amplifier. I had never seen anyone have so much fun making music, and I had never had so much fun listening to it. I knew it had to be recorded.”

It’s now the stuff of legend that Bruce tried to persuade Bob Koester to sign Hound Dog to Delmark. No dice.

“He had never heard Hound Dog with his own band and thought, as I had, that Hound Dog was more of a clown than a musician. Finally, I began to dream of recording him myself. At that time, Hound Dog had only recorded two 45s, both for small, local labels, as well as an unreleased session for a Chess slide guitar anthology. His 45s were still on the jukeboxes in some of the clubs where he played.

“When I asked him about cutting an album one night, he said the same thing he said when a fan made a request: “I’m with you, baby, I’m with you.”

When I raised the subject of money, he was clearly surprised. I doubt he’d been paid to record his 45s, and I think he was prepared to cut an album free, hoping it would lead to some gigs. I offered him $480 up front, and $240 each for Phillip and Ted, with royalties later if we sold enough. This was in line with the Musicians’ Union scale at the time.

“Of course, down the road Hound Dog made a whole lot of money from that album, as did his heirs after he died. He was happy to record, and I don’t think that he had a moment of concern about recording for Bruce, his hippie fan. No one else was asking him to record, so he had nothing to lose. Also, he knew that there was a growing white audience for the blues, and I’m sure he was thinking that this might be his doorway to it. Little did he know…”

Released in 1971, Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers eponymous debut album is a landmark in electric blues. It established Alligator Records and created a blueprint for future bass-less blues groups like The White Stripes and The Black Keys.

If the album had been Bruce’s only success as a label owner, he would still be considered one of the guardian angels of Chicago blues. In truth, though, he continued cutting classics like it was no effort at all.

“My second signing was one of the all-time great blues harmonica players, Big Walter Horton. He had recorded since the early 1950s, but mostly as a sideman. I had loved his music for years and in early 1970 I was thrilled by seeing him sit in with Hound Dog Taylor, playing harp duets with his protégé and my friend Carey Bell, who was a Delmark artist. So I asked Carey to help me make a record with Walter, who was notoriously shy.

“We cut an album called simply Big Walter Horton With Carey Bell that turned out to be one of the best harp albums to come out of Chicago. Over the years it’s achieved classic status. I followed Walter’s record with the debut of a completely unknown young blues guitar player named Son Seals. After Son, I recorded Fenton Robinson, one of the classiest, subtlest bluesmen ever, and then signed another major talent, Koko Taylor, who had earned great success with her hit single of Wang Dang Doodle on Chess in the 1960s, but was back to working a day job when I signed her in 1974.”

• Albert Collins Buyer's Guide
• BB King: the life of riley
• Stevie Ray Vaughan: I Was Recording Without Drugs And Nervous As Hell
• The Blue Horizon Story

Iglauer would also sign one of the greatest blues guitarists that ever lived.

“When I started Alligator, I never dreamed of recording anyone as popular or famous as Albert Collins, ‘The Master Of The Telecaster.’

“When I was just learning about blues, Albert’s name was one of the first I heard, along with those of the three Kings. I remember seeing a big ad for his Blue Thumb album (which turned out to be a reissue of older sides) in Rolling Stone. He looked like a badass! When I moved to Chicago in 1970, I found a used copy of The Cool Sounds Of Albert Collins, which was the original album that Blue Thumb had reissued, for $1.77 – wow! It was a collection of his early 45s from his Houston days. I was fascinated with his unusual, ‘cool’ stinging guitar sound; I knew there was something different about it, but I didn’t know that it was partly because of his special open minor-chord tuning.

“The other signature factor was, of course, the large amount of reverb that he loved so much, and which was probably the inspiration for the titles of his ‘cool’ instrumentals like Frosty, Sno-Cone and Don’t Lose Your Cool. Later I heard the albums he cut for Imperial in the late 60s, but they were disappointing to me. I would often start my day listening to the Cool Sounds album. It was a great inspiration!

“In 1974, I found out that Albert was passing through the Midwest on a tour. I booked him at a club in Champaign, Illinois and I drove down there, about 120 miles, to see him close up for the first time. I was truly overwhelmed by the power of his music and his intensity. Along with Freddie King and Luther Allison, he was the most physical electric guitar player I ever saw. When he bent a string, he seemed to play with his whole body, from his toes on up to the top of his head.”

Despite his reputation as a live performer, Collins’ career was in free fall in the 70s. It was to Bruce’s delight, then, that a little bit further down the road he was in a position to throw the bluesman a lifeline by offering to cut a record.

“I was excited but nervous,” remembers Iglauer. “For one thing, Albert wanted an advance of $1,000! This was more than I had ever paid anyone up front to do an album (though those early artists ended up earning much more in royalties) and a lot of money for a label with one employee operating from my house, with only 12 albums out.

“But Albert was a hero for me, so it was really impossible to say ‘no’ – though I didn’t say ‘yes’ immediately; I was too scared about the money! Finally, when I decided to make the album, I thought that we might want to bring back those ‘frosty’ titles like his early instrumentals. I was thinking about some ‘cold’ words and I thought of ‘ice pick’. That led me to the idea of Ice Pickin’ as a title. I might have even envisioned the guitar plugged into the block of ice as a cover before we had recorded.

Released in 1978, Ice Pickin’ was, in Bruce’s words, “an immediate hit by Alligator and blues standards of the time”. Acknowledged by both critics and fans alike as the best album he’d recorded up to that time, it relaunched Albert’s career.

“The album has certainly stood the test of time. I continue to be very proud of it.” However, just because it was successful doesn’t mean it was an easy album to make…

“Preparing for the album was quite a challenge,” admits Iglauer. “One thing we learned very quickly was that Albert wasn’t much of a songwriter. Albert and his wife Gwen drove in from California just before rehearsals were to begin. He had promised to bring a bunch of original songs. Instead, he arrived with one instrumental idea, which became Ice Pick, and the words for Master Charge, which Gwen had written.”

A selection of covers were hastily pulled together: “As Albert had a dry voice, I thought of Lowell Fulson and remembered a song of his called Talking Woman Blues that we renamed Honey Hush. When The Welfare Turns Its Back On You was an obscure Freddie King recording that I knew. Cold Cold Feeling was, of course, by the creator of electric Texas guitar blues and one of Albert’s heroes, T-Bone Walker. And Too Tired came from Albert’s contemporary, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. Both Albert and Johnny had been very influenced by Gatemouth Brown, so thinking of Johnny wasn’t much of a stretch.

“We cut Ice Pickin’ in three sessions, on May 22, 24 and 25, 1978, recording at Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom Studios where my favourite engineer, Freddie Breitberg, was working. It was a small room, and we had to put Albert’s very loud Fender Quad-Reverb amplifier in an isolation booth, which was actually a walk-in safe – the building had been a savings and Above loan [a type of bank] in the past. As usual, we cut totally ‘live,’ with the band all in the same room and Albert singing and playing his solos with them, not overdubbing later. The rapport was very good, with everyone laughing and joking constantly.”

Albert would go on to record three other solo records full of cold cuts for Alligator: Frostbite (1980), Don’t Lose Your Cool (1983), and Cold Snap (1986). He also took part in the well-received Showdown! (1985), a Grammy-winning collaboration with Robert Cray and Johnny Copeland. Full of piss and vinegar, Showdown! reflects the blistering sound of contemporary blues in the mid-80s, not too far down the road from a style being popularised by a young Albert King obsessive from Texas.

“The emergence of Stevie Ray Vaughan was a huge boon to the blues, though it also created a generation of less stellar SRV imitators,” says Bruce. “I admit that I didn’t get Stevie at first – he sounded like he was the world’s loudest Albert King imitator. Later on, as he developed his own sound and voice, it all became clear to me.

“I think his best music was yet to come, but I thought In Step was a major personal statement, especially with the lyrics of his originals. I knew Stevie from around 1979 and watched him grow as an artist. In 1984, he produced an album for us – Strike Like Lightning, 1985 – by one of his huge inspirations, Lonnie Mack, who was perhaps the first true blues/rock guitar hero back in the mid-1960s. Lonnie was a brilliant player and an incredibly soulful singer who grew up in southern Indiana, dirt poor. His inspirations on guitar were Robert Ward and Merle Travis, and his favourite singers were Bobby Bland and George Jones. So his music fused blues and country into rock’n’roll.

“His 60s singles, like Memphis and Wham, are amazing slices of guitar chops and energy. Supposedly the whammy bar is named after Wham, and it was definitely the first single that Stevie ever bought and learned.

“Lonnie lived in Cincinnati, Nashville, California, upstate New York and finally moved to the Austin area at Stevie’s insistence. They jammed together and when I decided to record an album with Lonnie, Stevie wanted to be in on the project. Lonnie decided to call him ‘producer’ but he was really more of a guest guitarist.

“His duets with Lonnie on Strike Like Lightning are amazing I think, as are Lonnie’s performances without Stevie. I was there for the recording of the album, and watched the two of them feed off each other’s guitar ideas. The whole album was recorded in just three and a half days and it’s stood the test of time.”

Hound Dog Taylor And HouseRockers, Strike Like Lightning and Ice Pickin’ are just a few of the classic albums that pack out the Alligator catalogue. But as we said before, this is not a museum exhibit. Bruce is all about finding the talent that will produce the future classics.

Few are better qualified to analyse the state of the current scene and what we need to do to keep moving forward.

“This is a critical time for the blues,” says Iglauer. “A lot of the established blues masters have died, and the international icons of the blues, BB King and Buddy Guy, are in their 80s and 70s respectively. It’s time for some new blues heroes to capture the public’s imagination. No single artist has emerged as the next giant.”

That’s not the only problem, either. As Iglauer explains, “Blues has gotten to be formulaic, and it’s necessary, if the blues is going to be more than a museum piece, for artists to create a ‘new blues’ that is true to the tradition without repeating it. Blues/rock and guitar heroes have gotten to be pretty formulaic too, and the flashy solo is not the answer. Ultimately, the music must have a blues message and a blues story, and a conscious connection to the tradition, but it doesn’t have to have a shuffle beat or try to repeat what Muddy, Wolf, BB, Albert, Freddie and so many others have already done to perfection.

“From the beginnings of blues until recently, blues evolved, though old styles of blues and new styles often lived side by side. I’m always looking for the artist who is going to create the new blues for the new millennium.”

So, should we be holding out for a new Muddy, Wolf or Hound Dog?

“All of those artists began playing in the black community for black fans, and began as local musicians playing for local fans,” Iglauer says. “They were consciously carrying on a tradition, never thinking about being recording artists or finding a national audience – just playing for their neighbours. That kind of culture is gone so I don’t think we’ll see other artists who perceive the blues like they did. But we can certainly expect more great blues artists, just ones who come with different cultural values and preconceptions.

“We’re all media babies now, and can hear music from all over the world. There are no isolated communities, at least in the Western world, where musicians learn from their elders and not from radio, the internet, recordings, video, etc. That’s how the blues started, but it won’t happen again that way. New blues will be affected by lots of other forms of music, from African to hip-hop to country.”

Whatever form the blues is going to take over the next few years, Bruce Iglauer and his label will be heavily involved in finding its stars… and its audience. You could say he stumbled into this whole record label thing, but he still enjoys the challenge of running Alligator some 40-odd years down the line.

“I love the music we record,” he says proudly. “I love being part of the creative process, which mostly happens when I’m producing – I’ve produced or co-produced about 125 albums. I’m not crazy about being a businessman, but I found out early on that I had to be really good at that or Alligator would fail.

“I’m proud that Alligator has made a modest profit almost every year of its existence. But the old rules don’t apply in this millennium, so I’m constantly keeping up with new technology, new ways people experience music, and trying to be savvy about the present and the future. Right now, no one in the record business really knows how to make enough money to pay for the cost of recording, promoting and marketing music.

“Tens of thousands of people can make their own records, but very few of them have the slightest idea how to get the public to know those records exist. The internet is not a miracle for musicians – it’s jammed with music that isn’t getting heard and that no one may want to hear.

“I have to be very smart and very driven if my label is going to survive for another 42 years!”

The spiral logo. The eclectic range of bands and albums…Vertigo Records represented the vibrancy and expectation of progressive rock in its infancy. But if the heritage left behind by the imprint has inspired and impressed for the past 40 years, then its birth was far more prosaic. In fact, it happened simply because of the impotency of its parent company, Philips.

“You have to understand where things were when I joined Philips,” recalls Olav Wyper, the man who created the Vertigo concept. “I’d started off in the music business with EMI, before spending three years at CBS from 1966, as head of marketing and sales. Then I took over running Philips’ UK operation in 1969. And the company I inherited had lost its way. They had two separate A&R departments, each following their own policies. There was nothing at all unifying everyone.”

Wyper’s first task was to get the whole of the label working on the David Bowie single Space Oddity, ensuring that this was a massive hit, thereby giving the whole of Philips a much needed boost. However, such was the complete lack of credibility at the label that Wyper determined a new subsidiary had to be introduced, which could actively pursue hot young bands.

“I already had an interest in progressive music through my time at CBS. When I joined, we had a lot of progressively-inclined names – from Laura Nyro to Big Brother & The Holding Company – who enjoyed considerable media coverage in Britain, but couldn’t sell anything. So, I came up with the idea of sample albums like The Rock Machine and The Rock Machine Moves On, which showcased all these acts, and gave them the chance to get noticed. As a result, we sold loads of records.

“What I wanted from Vertigo was to create a progressive music label. I already had the name in my mind – as a former advertising copywriter and journalist, I was always good at coming up with that sort of thing – so now we just needed the bands to go with it.”

Working together with young A&R executives Mike Everett and Dick Leahy, Wyper went out in active search of talent: “In those days, no label would think of signing anyone who wasn’t already working with a solid fan base, so we saw loads of gigs, looking for the sort of acts who fitted in with our vision.”

The first signing to Vertigo were Colosseum, who were already working on their second album.

“Gerry Bron, who was a manager and booking agent at the time, was producing the new album from Colosseum, Valentyne Suite. And, as the first record (Those Who Are About To Die Salute You) had been on Philips, we met up to discuss things. That’s how they became the first band to sign to the new label. I was a fan of theirs anyway; I loved the band’s jazz-rock approach, and also knew many of the band personally. Through Gerry I also picked up Juicy Lucy, Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann Chapter Three, which was the new, progressive project from Manfred Mann.”

Wyper also momentously signed Black Sabbath – almost by accident.

“I’d gone up to Birmingham for a meeting, but gone a day too early. So, I ended up in my hotel that evening with nothing to do.”

On the advice of a young hotel worker, he ended up seeing Black Sabbath play a local pub. He was so impressed that…

“I took them and their manager Jim Simpson out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant three doors down from the venue. And we ended up signing a heads of agreement [a tentative contact] on the tablecloth.”

With this first batch of signees, Wyper set the tone for the next two years, a period which would also see the likes of Jade Warrior, Magna Carta, Dr. Strangely Strange, Nirvana (the original one), Warhorse and Gentle Giant sign to Vertigo.

“Our attitude was, obviously, that anything we signed had to be good. But it should also broadly fit into the progressive style, whether it was folk, jazz or rock. We did pick up a surprising range of acts, but they were all characterised by being ‘progressive’ in nature.”

However, what made the label stand apart was its attention to detail, and the fact that each release was presented as a work of art.

“I was determined that the packaging would be fresh and innovative, that every record would be seen as totally artistic. So, we put out our records in gatefold sleeves. Back then, this rarely happened, and only for big names. The idea of having new acts treated in this way was unheard of.”

On top of this, Wyper also hired an aspiring young photographer to design most of those initial sleeves, giving them a coherence that helped to create a label style.

“The first British pop promo was for Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross, and I’d gone down to the shoot, when I was at CBS. I got talking to the young guy who was the focus puller, and he’d told me that he was studying photography at the Royal College Of Art. In the end, he invited me down to an exhibition he was mounting there at the end of term. It was stunning. His work and ideas were just incredible. So, I hired him on the spot. His name was Keith MacMillan, who did a lot of those early Vertigo covers under the name of Keef; that helped us to have an identity.”

• The Top 20 Proggiest Prog Epics
• Prog Crossover Quiz
• Black Sabbath: the madness behind Master Of Reality
• Buyer's Guide: Vertigo Records

Equally as vital was the famed spiral logo, which has become so much a part of the Vertigo lore. The initial idea was created by Wyper himself.

“I wanted something on the A-side of a record that drew you in. So that when the record spun you felt as if everything was pulling you towards the record. I did the rough designs, and then a lady – Maggie – in our art department came up with the final version. What we did was use this to take up the whole of the label on the first side of a record, so it really stood out. For collectors, it was these releases that are especially sought-after today. After I left, the powers-that-be reduced the size and the impact, which was such a shame.”

The Vertigo imprint enjoyed considerable artistic and commercial success in its infancy, fuelled by Wyper’s desire to drag Philips as a whole into a fresh era.

“I changed so much about the company. Even the reception area, which I completely overhauled, and made sure that it was staffed by young people who were music fans. Before there had been a very unwelcoming concierge.”

However, Wyper’s tenure at Philips and Vertigo lasted only two years. In 1971, he was headhunted by RCA and their boss Keith Glancey. Once more inheriting a label in total disarray, Wyper tried the same trick as he’d pulled off with Vertigo, by establishing Neon Records, and signing the likes of Quintessence, Centipede (Canterbury band led by pianist Keith Tippett) and Fair Weather (with Andy Fairweather Low). However, this time it didn’t quite work as well.

“We had a few successes, but couldn’t do it again. I think everything about Vertigo was just aligned so well…the people at the label, the artists we signed, the way we packaged and marketed the albums. It was a special time.”

Some have suggested that Vertigo was Philips’ direct response to the fact that EMI had launched the Harvest label so successfully. But Wyper sees things a little differently.

“To my way of thinking, if you look at where Harvest were in 1969, they really had lost their way artistically. So yes, they were the first to do this sort of thing – create a special label for young progressive acts who reflected the times – but they’d gone past their best by the time we arrived on the scene.”

Vertigo, too, suffered from a loss of focus once Wyper left. He himself attributes this to the way the parent Dutch company took control of things, to the detriment of the original vision.

“When I first joined Philips, the UK office was regarded as a lame duck by the rest of the European companies. Anything we released they automatically rejected. So, when the first batch of releases was ready for Vertigo, I personally went round to every managing director of Philips at each office round the continent, to get them on our side. The German company, in particular, was very enthusiastic about it all.

“But it was always a constant struggle to convince the Dutch that it was worthwhile putting records out on Vertigo. They were always badgering me to put them on Philips releases instead, and could never understand the advantages which Vertigo offered. They hadn’t fully appreciated the battle I had to wage because of Philips’ bad reputation when I joined. So, there were a succession of arguments between me and them, which I won, but it was a battle.”

So, when Wyper left, Philips began to impose their own ideas…

“The people who took over from me suddenly found themselves under intense pressure. Philips decided to dump a load of inappropriate bands onto the label. For instance they put Status Quo onto Vertigo – which to my mind was just crass lunacy.”

There’s little doubt that the glory years for Vertigo were those early times, when Wyper and his team proved than an innovative, imaginative and quality-fuelled approach to a label could reap dividends. It’s for this reason that Vertigo has remained among the most acclaimed of labels.

“There was a long period of time, when Vertigo’s stock fell dramatically, mainly because of the way it was handled by the parent company – which is now Universal. But in the past few years, the early releases – with the original logo – have become collectible again, and I am quite proud of the way there is now a real respect for what we tried to do – and for the most part delivered. There was even a three-CD box set a few years ago (Time Machine, 2005), which helped to underline what we achieved.

“My philosophy with Vertigo was always to involve everyone. Even the head of classical music for Philips at the time, Jack Boyce, came up with ideas for the label. At its height, the whole of Philips became a hive of activity, centred around Vertigo.”

Therein lies the secret to why Vertigo was such a considerable success. It was a specialist label that was inclusive, rather than exclusive. A unique vision from a record company visionary. A one-off that’s left a legacy so dynamic and enormous that, when the label was activated a few years ago, even the likes of Metallica deemed it an honour to have the famous spiral logo swirling on their releases.

John Mitchell and Chris Hillman’s White Star Records have signed former Tesseract man Ashe O’Hara’s band Voices From The Fuselage.

The five-piece prog rock outfit say they draw their influences from Karnivool, Anberlin and This Will Destroy You. Voices From The Fuselage formed in Northampton in 2010 and as well as O’Hara, the lineup features guitarists Mitch Ramsay and Josh Galloway, drummer Scott Lockhart on drums and bassist Dale Gorham.

VFTF came to the attention of John Mitchell when they booked in to his Outhouse Recording Studio in 2015 to record their debut album Odyssey: The Destroyer Of Worlds. Mitchell contributed a guest guitar slot to the track A Principle God.

When bass player Gorham later spotted an article in Prog magazine about the launch of Mitchell and Hillman’s label, he asked them to consider signing the band.

After seeing the band perform at a small venue in Basingstoke, they agreed to offer them contract and as a result, Odyssey: The Destroyer Of Worlds will be reissued by White Star Records on CD and digital formats in October, with a vinyl version to follow.

• Opeth's Martin Mendez says Sorceress was 'most fun' to record
• Karnivool: "We think we fucking know everything, but we don’t"
• First Look: John Mitchell's Lonely Robot
• Anderson Rabin Wakeman are 5-piece says Rick

Gorham says: “With John being such a high profile producer, on top of the fact that we have a great relationship with him, it felt natural and perfect for us to try and get picked up by White Star as the label begins.

“We hadn’t met Chris before but once we did and dug into his background, it only made the drive to be part of the label bigger.”

Mitchell adds: “Both myself and Chris are very excited to be working with Voices From The Fuselage. They are all extremely talented musicians with a lot of potential and are fun to work with too.

“I’m really looking forward to more people getting to hear their first album and to working with them in the studio to produce a brand new album.”

Voices From The Fuselage have a number of UK tour dates to come this month.

TesseracT singer switch 'seamless', says Williams

Guitar amplifier giants Marshall have launched their own record label.

Marshall Records is headed up by producer Rob Cass, music industry veteran Steve Tannett and Marshall Brand Licensing Director Grace Pantony.

Marshall say: “If we make the amplifiers that enable guitarists to make music, and we produce products for their fans and music lovers to listen to their music, then it makes sense that we join those two things together and help bands and musicians record, promote and perform their music.

“And that is exactly why we have created Marshall Records. Marshall Records is the next logical step in Marshall’s evolution and is a keystone in the Marshall story.

“Now, through the Marshall brand the medium of creation is manufactured, music is made and music is brought to the people.”

So far, Marshall have not revealed which acts will be signed to their label.

• Babymetal perform with Judas Priest's Rob Halford
• How AC/DC Changed My Life, by Dave Mustaine
• Kiss star Gene Simmons falls on stage
• News in brief: Against Me, Anthrax, 5FDP, Devildriver, Ramones & more

Marshall phone coming soon

Ask any strident prog fan to pick out the defining decade in the movement’s history, and nearly all will point to the 70s – the era of glittery capes and hour-long synth solos. For Bert Hodds, founder of The Uranium Club, it was the engine room behind the decade’s virtuoso musicianship that prompted him to start a label.

“I look in admiration at those 70s record labels and managers like Tony Stratton-Smith who created Charisma. Back then, it was the whole idea of being an ‘agent provocateur’ for artists – to be business-like but to ultimately put art and the artist first.”

The notion that music falls into a wider artistic palette is something that Hodds is well acquainted with. He founded the press/design/tour entity Wedobandstuff seven years ago, but his latest venture goes even further.

“The idea is to create a community around a really well-curated set of artists and become a byword for some quality music, while paying real attention to the packaging and the finished article.”

He adds, “One of the criticisms I hear from musicians is that almost anyone can create an album now. The Uranium Club seeks to more discerning. Today you need to give fans something extra.”

• Opeth release Sorceress studio tour video
• Stick Men announce Prog Noir album
• Is drumming actually good for you?
• The Prog Lyrics Quiz

The ‘club’ aspect aims to bring fans back to a time when artists, labels and fans were a lot closer. Prog has been buoyed by the social aspects of the internet and its continent-spanning capabilities. That said, it was word of mouth that led him to form an allegiance with the label’s very first signing Ghost Medicine.

“Colin Edwin [Porcupine Tree] was approached to play on their debut, and put them my way. The album is so mature in its breadth but so different!”

Hodds wants bands and fans alike to make an “event of music,” and he’s determined to create an experience around Ghost Medicine’s upcoming debut Discontinuance.

“A mark of success isn’t Ghost Medicine producing a record and it selling 100k. I want them to be picked up by bigger labels,” he says. So watch this space! DK

For more, visit the website: www.uraniumclub.rocks.

Ghost Medicine - Discontinuance album review

Have A Cigar: Valnoir On Experimental Art

When you settle down to speak with former Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson about the constituent parts of his recently curated Wilko Johnson Presents The First Time I Met The Blues: The Chess Masters collection, you must first recalibrate your definition of the word ‘enthusiastic’. To bear witness to Wilko considering the recorded legacy of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Chuck Berry is an inspiring spectacle indeed.

Wilko possesses what one might call a quite extraordinarily expressive face at the best of times, but when called upon to describe Hubert Sumlin’s Smokestack Lightning licks, Otis Rush’s train whistle sibilance or Little Walter’s wordless scowl it’s quite a sight to survey.

The eyes bulge, the jaw slackens, pregnant pauses hang heavy in the air between heartfelt and awestruck ‘Wow!’s. Riffs are sung as they’re recalled, beats stomped emphatically. The head jerks spasmodically from left to right in a gesture so familiar from the stage. Wilko’s restless animation is no mere stage act though, this is the actual, skull-spinning rate at which he chooses to live his life. And, for a man whose last chess opponent was The Grim Reaper himself, he’s the most entirely alive person you’re ever likely to meet.

So what is the secret of Chess Records’ immense success and continuing influence? “I’ve absolutely no idea,” admits our pallid expert with a delighted, eyebrows-aloft beam, “But I was asked to compile this selection, and what an easy job! With Chess you just dip your hand in the bucket and come up with gold.”

Wilko first encountered the delights of Chess R&B in 1964: “I really started finding out about rhythm’n’blues because of The Rolling Stones. I was mad for the Stones and wanted to know where they were deriving this music from. Their first album was nearly all covers and a great many of those covers were by artists associated with Chess, Muddy Waters and people like that. So then you’d start finding and checking out these artists for yourself, and their music was a revelation. It was so powerful you didn’t know how they were doing it. I remember back then that if you saw a disc with a Chess label, it made you excited just to look at it, because you knew there was something great on that disc.”

Living on the outer edge of the Thames Delta, on Canvey Island, and saving every spare penny for a Telecaster of his own made record-buying almost impossible: “But you could borrow records from school friends.” There were, however, a pair of truly essential albums that effectively changed the direction of Wilko’s young life: “Two great compilations from the Chess label were released on the Pye International R&B label – which had a very distinctive yellow and orange label that used to give me the shivers as well – The Blues Volume One and The Blues Volume Two. A whole lot of my early R&B education came from those records.”

Here’s hoping these timelessly visceral recordings, many of which have been re-compiled by Wilko himself on The First Time I Met The Blues, will inspire a whole new generation.

Muddy Waters

I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man (1954)

“The power and expressiveness of Muddy Waters’ voice is just miraculous, so direct, and the song’s marvellous. Willie Dixon wrote so many great songs. I first heard Muddy when the first Rolling Stones album came out. I also remember there was this fantastic television programme, a live British blues show filmed on a railway station in the rain [Granada TV’s Blues And Gospel Train of 1964, which also featured Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Otis Spann, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee]. Muddy made his entrance walking along the railroad track. He was playing a Fender Telecaster, which excited me because my hero, Mick Green [of Johnny Kidd’s Pirates], played one and I wanted one. Muddy played it with a slide, and when he hit this first note… Oh man, it just sounded so good. All these blues guys were just so cool.”

Little Walter

My Babe (1955)

“Little Walter was a bit of a dark character. Came to a sticky end. I saw him at Newcastle City Hall in 1967. He came out on stage, did My Babe and Juke, and didn’t say a word. He just scowled at the audience, which was great. Hear one note from Walter and you know who it is, he’s just the sound of the blues. He’d been in Muddy Waters’ band and his harmonica playing was a huge influence on Lee [Brilleaux, Dr Feelgood frontman]. Lew Lewis loved him. When I first heard these records, I didn’t have a clue who was doing what or how they were doing it, and now I’ve been at it for 50 years, I’ve got half a clue. This wasn’t pop music, this was dark, heavy stuff that made you feel like a little white schoolboy. Little Walter really was spooky, all that ‘Get me a mojo hand’ stuff, so exciting and so strange. The blues wasn’t just a catchy tune and a chorus at all.”

John Lee Hooker

Sugar Mama (1952)

“I probably listen to more John Lee Hooker at home than anything else. I first heard Sugar Mama on The Blues Volume One, it’s just John Lee Hooker and his guitar. Oh man, that’s a mysterious one. He’s not playing a regular riff, he don’t give a damn about no 12-bar, he’s going to change the chords where he feels like it. It’s not flashy guitar, but it’s powerful. His voice is so vibrant and heavy, it sounds so free and natural. It’s hard to put into words the power that these people exuded. Obviously, it came from black culture in America, it was something they were born into, but you could live for a hundred years and never play the boogie like John Lee Hooker.

“There’s menace lurking in all this music, a potential for violence, an unspoken threat. ‘I’m drinking TNT and smoking dynamite, I hope some screwball starts a fight’. One of the things we used to love in Dr Feelgood was putting on the violence. We’d stare people down and my guitar was my machine gun. It was all just absolute pure enjoyment, everybody loves playing cops and robbers. When you’re a kid playing cops and robbers your fingers really are a gun, they really are, and it’s the same with my guitar. It really is a machine gun: ‘bang, bang, bang’, and you’re feeling that violence. Lee would be standing there – and to me Lee was always the leader of Dr Feelgood, look at any pictures of Dr Feelgood and I’m looking at Lee, taking my cue from him – and he’d go, ‘It’s time for the guitar solo… boom’, and I’d go ‘whoom’, do my thing and ‘whoom’, I’m back by his side again. It was just like a gang. He was the leader and I was the guy that… killed people.”

Bo Diddley

Gunslinger (1960)

“I became aware of Bo Diddley before discovering the Stones because Buddy Holly had a posthumous hit with the song Bo Diddley, and I’d heard Bo’s version of that. I got given Bo Diddley’s 16 Greatest Hits – again on the Pye International label – for my 17th birthday. Every track was just so exciting: real jungle music, just… Wow. The drums and guitar are just so off the wall. He had this vibrato effect on the guitar and was known as a bit of an experimental guitarist, but he was also a poet: ‘Bo Diddley didn’t stand no mess. He wore a gun on his hip and a rose on his chest.’ Oh, what! He was like a forerunner of rap music, that song Say Man is even delivered like a rap. He played Dingwalls one time and me and my band backed him and, well… It was good.”

Sonny Boy Williamson

Don’t Start Me Talkin’ (1955)

“Although there were two Sonny Boy Williamsons, it’s the second Sonny Boy that we all know and are most familiar with. He had this kind of cool voice. It wasn’t intense like Muddy Waters, it was more laid-back. He was a great harmonica player too. I remember he used to do this thing where he played it with his nose. He looked like a jazzer, he had this hat… I don’t know much about jazz, but he looked a bit be-bop; a bit cool jazz. He used to radiate a very friendly, groovy feeling in his music. And this is a great song, I often use that expression myself, someone will ask me about somebody or something and I still say, ‘Don’t start me talkin’ or I’ll tell everything I know’. It’s such a great phrase, and while he has that whimsical jazz delivery, he’s singing with absolute authority. I never saw him, even though he was in England a lot. In those days I was a schoolboy on Canvey Island, going to a gig in Southend involved big expenditure for me. London? You might has well have asked me to go to the moon. I never went to The Marquee until I played there with Dr Feelgood.”

Howlin’ Wolf

Smokestack Lightning (1956)

“Oh, The Wolf, what can you say? His voice is like a force of nature, extraordinary. When he’s singing he sounds like the microphone is going to explode and the speakers are going to blow, because his voice is just so powerful. You have to hear it. It’s hard to describe. He was such a big man, and he sounded like it. When he held a Fender Stratocaster it looked like a little ukulele. His band featured Hubert Sumlin of course, a man that was responsible for some of the most powerful and expressive guitar playing you can hear anywhere. Smokestack Lightning? Now there is some spooky stuff. What an evocative record. That riff, and The Wolf’s singing, ‘woo-ooo’ and all that. You get this picture of a shack by a railroad track, lightning striking and this guy literally howling for his baby. The phenomenal voice of the Howlin’ Wolf, the sound of Hubert Sumlin, the songs of Willie Dixon. Even after all these years, there’s nothing to touch it… Nothing.

“And there never can be, because all of these people came from a time and a place, all of these extraordinary musicians gathered around the Chess label. Oh, to have been in that room while they were making that music.”

Otis Rush

So Many Roads, So Many Trains (1960)

“Again, this song was on that Pye International The Blues Volume One album, and it’s just got the most amazing guitar sound on it. When me and my brother first heard it we were trying to work out what it was: ‘Is it a saxophone?’ [Sings] ‘doodle-doodle-doo’… Wow! And his voice was so soulful. He was one of those people that had that whistle on his sibilance. So he’s singing ‘So many roads, so many trains’ with a whistle on every single ‘s’. ‘I was standing at the window, When I heard that whistle blow’ [whistles Wilko, laughing]. Me and my band played with Otis at The Town And Country Club a few years ago.

“When I discovered authentic blues, I never went off The Rolling Stones though. I was led into this by The Rolling Stones, they were just so phenomenally exciting, and as a schoolboy they just seemed so incredibly anarchic. I loved the Stones. Thought they were great, I’ve never lost my enthusiasm for The Rolling Stones, they had their own take on the blues and went on to do stuff like Brown Sugar which is absolutely great, and developed from the blues.”

Buddy Guy

First Time I Met The Blues (1960)

“Wow! Another one. What a voice. What a guitar. I remember him appearing on Ready Steady Go!, and I was already into him. First Time I Met The Blues is such an amazing song. Another spooky one. What’s he talking about, man? The blues is chasing him. He’s going, ‘Blues, blues don’t murder me’, and he’s running through the woods, tremolo guitar chords are hitting and saxophones droning and it sounds like a bloody nightmare, and you can hear this guy screaming, ‘The blues are after me’.

“Back then Buddy Guy was a technically brilliant guitar player. In later times he did achieve some more success, but I think he went too much in the direction of Hendrix, and don’t go there, cos nobody can get there. Though many have tried.

“In about 1967, I used to play this regular Thursday gig at the London Hotel in Southend, and sometimes nobody would turn up apart from [British musician] Mickey Jupp, his brilliant guitarist Mo Witham and Robin Trower, and I can remember sitting at the back of the hall in the break and they were playing records. There was this girl I was looking at, and they were playing Rex Garvin & The Mighty Cravers’ Sock It To ‘Em JB. [Sings] ‘ba-dup, buppa-duppa-dup’, and every time it went ‘buppa-duppa-dup’ she’d wiggle her backside and… What! Then they played Jimi Hendrix’s Stone Free and Robin Trower went ‘That’s what I wanna do’. And, well, that’s what he did.”

Tommy Tucker

Hi-Heel Sneakers (1964)

“Tommy Tucker is a keyboard player and Hi-Heel Sneakers was a massive hit record, very groovy, very danceable, but the guitar playing on it is absolutely great. There’s this organ bit, but the guitar part is just sweet and beautiful. On the B-side of Long Tall Shorty there’s a track called Mo’ Shorty, which is the backing track of Long Tall Shorty with lead guitar over the top playing the tune, and it sounds brilliant. He’s obviously using a Stratocaster because it’s got that sweet Stratocaster sound, and he’s shaking on the tremolo arm. I don’t know who the guitar player is [it’s Weldon Young, by all accounts], but Tommy Tucker made these two absolutely superb records, Long Tall Shorty and Hi-Heel Sneakers, which had I Don’t Want ‘Cha on the B-side, with yet another great guitar part. Everyone in the world knows Hi-Heel Sneakers, but I’m sure very few people could tell you who’s doing it.

“Very few of these artists made any money out of any of these records, they were all being ridiculously exploited. What we’ve come to know now as a fair return for doing it just wasn’t there then. It’s a situation that led to John Lee Hooker moonlighting as John Lee Booker, recording for all sorts of people because he was only paid a few dollars per track. Of all the money that Hi-Heel Sneakers made, how much got back to Tommy Tucker? Probably not a lot. I’ve spent a fair amount of my career without a record deal and every now and then I’ve made a record for an independent label. Even as you’re doing it, you know you’re never going to see any money… Bastards [laughs].

“But I’ve had a pukka deal too, I still get royalties and statements back from the stuff that I did with Dr Feelgood. I’ve probably made a million by comparison with what Muddy Waters got. Which can’t be right. They should have paid Muddy much more, not me less [laughs].”

Chuck Berry

No Particular Place To Go (1964)

“What can you say about his achievements? Chuck Berry is absolutely one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century, and has said absolutely everything that there is to say about American cars. If you go and buy a greatest hits selection of Chuck Berry, it’s just one classic after another. I’ll always remember the first time I heard Memphis, Tennessee, which is another strange one. It’s got such a plaintive sound and the lyric is so brilliant, and it pays off in the last line when you realise he’s singing about his little daughter. Everything that comes before takes on a different significance when you realise that. What a brilliant lyric. And, of course, the opening riff to Johnny B Goode, I mean everyone’s got to know that, ain’t they? But I think the guitar solo on No Particular Place To Go is one of the greatest pieces of guitar playing on record. And its opening chord? Someone taught it to me at school and one of my favourite tricks is to walk up to somebody with my fingers on that chord, go ‘What’s that?’ They go, ‘I don’t know’ and you go ‘duddle-a, duddle-a, duddle-a-duh’, and they all know it, because it’s so distinctive. Yeah, Chuck Berry, what a showman. All those songs, it’s mind-boggling, there are literally hundreds, and so much of rock’n’roll was defined by what he did.

“I’ve seen him play a few times, but the first time was at Southend Odeon. I knew all his records, but didn’t know about the duck walk. It was mental. During the second or third number I jumped out of my seat and ran to the front, then the whole audience got up, and as I ran towards the stage he looked at me. I can remember boasting about it later. It was great. Anyway, as I say, stick on a Chuck Berry greatest hits album and you realise that he’s created a songbook that’s entered the consciousness of the human race, and it is just so glorious and happy and… Oh wow, how much joy has that bloke brought to the world?”

Wilko Johnson Presents The First Time I Met The Blues: The Chess Masters is out now on Spectrum.

Miss May I, We Came As Romans and Attila are among six acts signed up by new label SharpTone Records.

It’s the brainchild of Nuclear Blast execs Markus Staiger and Shawn Keith, and the launch roster also includes Don Broco, Loathe and World War Me.

SharpTone say they’ll “encompass many multitude of genres and subgenres in rock music.” Their HQ is in Los Angeles with offices in the UK, Germany and Australia.

Keith reports: “We’re not just another record label – we’re a new music company, allowing artists to be as creative and passionate as they choose to be.”

• We Came As Romans: Building An Empire
• "Our World Was Falling Apart" - Why Miss May I Got Their Rage On
• Attila boast about their Guilty Pleasure
• Don Broco reveal Automatic

All acts have confirmed SharpTone releases in the near future, while Loathe have issued a video for new track In Death and World War Me have streamed a promo for War Zone.

Attila frontman Fronz says: “We’re at an amazing point in our career, and we know these guys have the power we need to take things to the next level.

“We’re ready to dominate the planet with our new album – let’s fucking crush the world!”

Attila’s seventh album will be released later this year, as will Loathe’s Prepare Consume Proceed EP, Don Broco’s North American launch of Automatic and World War Me’s debut. We Came As Romans unveil new music in 2016 while Miss May I will deliver their sixth record in 2017.

Five Finger Death Punch producer Kevin Churko has taken the band’s side in their legal battle with their record label.

And he’s spoken of his frustration over Prospect Park LLC’s failure to pay him on time for his work on their last five albums.

The company last month launched a lawsuit against Ivan Moody and co, accusing them of breaching contract over a best-of compilation and the recording schedule for their next title – and adding that they were attempting to “cash in” before Moody became too ill to remain on board.

Five Finger Death Punch responded in detail, saying the frontman had received medical attention for his addiction issues and saying of label boss Jeff Kwatinetz: “Desperate people do desperate things.”

Now Churko has said in a statement: “Prospect Park claims that if Five Finger Death Punch were to hire a different producer, they could sell well over a million records, maybe even two million.

“Honestly, there hasn’t been a record in the hard rock genre that has achieved anywhere close to those sales in a two-year period of time.

“With 5FDP, I have the privilege of working with gifted and prolific songwriters, whose singer, Ivan Moody, has a truly special and distinctive voice.

“Not only have they sold over four million records at a time when general album sales are diminishing – 5FDP have created a solid brand and raised thousands of dollars for veteran charities.”

He adds that he wishes Prospect Park hadn’t brought his name into the argument, but continues: “I feel a moral obligation to go on the record and protect Five Finger Death Punch’s name, and mine.”

Addressing the suggestion that Kwatinetz wants to take creative control of the band’s output, Churko says: “Every record I’ve ever recorded for 5FDP has been finished in the studio in which I’ve never seen him present. I’ve never met Jeff, never had a conversation with him, not even an email. I’ve never submitted demos for approval while recording and I’ve had no direction given to me by Jeff.”

He goes on: “Having worked with many record companies, I found it frustrating that Prospect Park repeatedly did not pay me on time. I feel if it wasn’t for the direct efforts of the band members themselves, their management and their business manager, I may still remain unpaid.

“They were champions for me from the beginning and I’ll be a champion for them to the end.”

Five Finger Death Punch intend to start work on their seventh album in the coming weeks, between tour dates that include appearances at the Reading and Leeds festivals.

Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Jason Hook has 3 albums stockpiled

Five Finger Death Punch tour dates 2016

May 20-22: Columbus Rock On The Range, OH
May 20-22: Schaghticoke Rock’N Derby, NY
May 27-29: Pryor Rocklahoma Festival, OK
Aug 26-28: Reading and Leeds Festivals, UK
Oct 18: Little Rock Verizon Arena, AR
Oct 22: Wichita Intrust Bank Arena, KS
Oct 23: Denver Pepsi Center, CO
Oct 25: West Valley City Maverik Center, UT
Oct 27: Phoenix Talking Stick Resort Arena, AZ
Oct 28: Las Vegas T-Mobile Arena, NV
Oct 29: Anaheim Honda Center, CA
Nov 02: Portland Moda Center, OR
Nov 03: Spokane Arena, WA
Nov 05: Tacoma Dome, WA
Nov 07: Boise Taco Bell Arena, ID
Nov 09: Billings MetraPark Fairgrounds, MT
Nov 11: Bismarck Civic Center, ND
Nov 17: Cincinnati US Bank Arena, OH
Nov 18: Louisville KFC Yum! Center, KY

Five Finger Death Punch have slammed their record label as “desperate” for suing the band.

And they’ve accused Prospect Park LLC and its boss Jeff Kwatinetz of “abusive bullying tactics to extract money and wield power” against them.

Prospect Park allege that Ivan Moody and co have reneged on a contract to supply a greatest hits package, and have also breached terms concerning their next original album.

In legal papers filed on April 21, the company claimed the band were “shamelessly attempting to cash in before the anticipated downfall of their addicted bandmate,” describing frontman Moody as “placing both the future of 5FDP, and indeed his life, at risk.”

Now the band say: “Desperate people do desperate things. We are saddened, but no surprised, by the recent lawsuit.

“Jeff Kwatinetz is well-known as a former music industry powerhouse whose erratic behaviour and affiliated corporate bankruptcies have caused most of his companies’ clients to flee in droves.

“We fired Prospect Park management four years ago in an effort to escape an arrangement that more resembled indentured servitude. Five Finger Death Punch’s recordings are now one of Prospect Park’s last remaining and most valuable assets still under contract.”

They argue that they were ready to record their last album in the deal this year, but that Prospect Park have interrupted the process in order to “hold us for ransom and squeeze extra money out of its rights by attempting to sell an interest in future recordings.”

Citing the success of latest album Got Your Six, they add: “There is not one shred of evidence to suggest that Five Finger Death Punch’s career remains on any trajectory other than an upward one.”

And they say of Moody: “His issues are no secret, and were recently and successfully addressed with the love and support of his family and bandmates in a rehabilitation facility. Never once did Prospect Park support any efforts to get him sober, preferring the band continue making albums and touring.”

They intend to commence a cross-complaint that they believe will result in the payment of “substantial damages” and their release from their contract.

Five Finger Death Punch have confirmed a co-headlining US tour with Shinedown, also featuring Sixx: AM and As Lions, in addition to previously-announced summer dates including appearances at this year’s Reading and Leeds festivals.

Five Finger Death Punch, Shinedown, Sixx: AM, As Lions US tour 2016

Oct 18: Little Rock Verizon Arena, AR
Oct 22: Wichita Intrust Bank Arena, KS
Oct 23: Denver Pepsi Center, CO
Oct 25: West Valley City Maverik Center, UT
Oct 27: Phoenix Talking Stick Resort Arena, AZ
Oct 28: Las Vegas T-Mobile Arena, NV
Oct 29: Anaheim Honda Center, CA
Nov 02: Portland Moda Center, OR
Nov 03: Spokane Arena, WA
Nov 05: Tacoma Dome, WA
Nov 07: Boise Taco Bell Arena, ID
Nov 09: Billings MetraPark Fairgrounds, MT
Nov 11: Bismarck Civic Center, ND
Nov 17: Cincinnati US Bank Arena, OH
Nov 18: Louisville KFC Yum! Center, KY

Ginger Wildheart has launched his own record label in partnership with crowdfunding site Pledgemusic.

Round Records will issue releases by The Wildhearts and Ginger’s Hey! Hello! project, among others.

He says: “Round Records allows me to further explore what can be achieved using the direct-to-fan formula. My last project was a fan club, something that I had always enjoyed as a kid. When I realised that a lot of people didn’t even know what a fan club was, the logical next step was to introduce a record label whose logo was as iconic and the music it releases.

“Growing up with Stiff, Sub Pop and Def Jam, I always loved the idea of a ‘fair’ record company, but I’ve had precious little personal experience in record companies being anything more than a smokescreen run by corporate suits with very little understanding let alone love for the music.

“This time around I’m the boss, and this boss is all about the music.”

In August 2011, Ginger launched his Triple Album Project via Pledgemusic. The pitch was to record a 30-song triple album and the campaign met with immediate success, hitting 100% of the funding target within six hours of launching.

The resulting album released in 2012 won Classic Rock magazine’s Event Of The Year award.

Round Records will kick off with the Hey! Hello!’s Hey! Hello! Too! album on June 3, followed by The Wildhearts’ PHUQ Live on July 1.

Ginger’s solo album boxset is out on August 5 before Mutation’s Mutation III album on September 2.

Visit the label’s Pledgemusic page for full details.

Ginger Wildheart: Year Of The Fanclub

Record label Numero Group has unearthed a collection of rare and obscure rock, country and soul tracks for an upcoming release

The 19 songs will feature on Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music, set for release on March 18.

The compilation contains songs recorded between 1968 and 1980 from albums that were released on small labels including Sugarbush and Hobbit – most of which sold poorly at launch. Hear a four-track preview below.

Artists on the compilation include Californian singer-songwriter FJ McMahon, who says the distribution process of records and their sales figures came as a shock to him.

He reports: “My concept of albums and musicians was, you came out with an album and went on TV and you had some money and you lived off it and you made another album.

“I had no concept of you make an album and it goes nowhere, which it did. It was a harpoon to the heart for a long time.”

Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music is available for pre-order on CD, 2LP and digital formats direct from the label’s website.

Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music tracklist

1. Jimmy Carter and Dallas County Green – Travelin’
2. Mistress Mary – And I Didn’t Want You
3. Plain Jane – You Can’t Make It Alone
4. Dan Pavlides – Lily of the Valley
5. Angel Oak – I Saw Her Cry
6. Kathy Heideman – Sleep a Million Years
7. Deerfield – Me Lovin’ You
8. Arrogance – To See Her Smile
9. Jeff Cowell – Not Down This Low
10. Kenny Knight – Baby’s Back
11. The Black Canyon Gang – Lonesome City
12. Allan Wachs – Mountain Roads
13. Mike And Pam Martin – Lonely Entertainer
14. Bill Madison – Buffalo Skinners
15. White Cloud – All Cried Out
16. Ethel-Ann Powell – Gentle One
17. Sandy Harless – I Knew Her Well
18. FJ McMahon – The Spirit of the Golden Juice
19. Doug Firebaugh – Alabama Railroad Town

Relive the magic of some of the greatest imprints of all time in Prog’s new bite-sized label guide.

Threshold Records is a curious addition to this series. Although seen as a vanity label for its founders, The Moody Blues, it was a much-loved and well-run operation that spawned a handful of interesting acts. Although none of the artists signed to the label achieved great commercial success, Threshold was an artistic winner for the Moodies, and in also running a chain of record shops with that name, they looked at giving something back to their fans.

Of course, The Beatles are to blame. The formation of Apple Records in spring 1968 seemed like such a utopian ideal for groups to follow. The Moody Blues had proved their worth several times over at Decca, with their initial releases (in their second phase) on Deram topping charts and gaining a strong showing in America. No one ever knew quite what to do with the Moodies at Decca, which was led by Sir Edward Lewis. However, they were incredibly successful and were treated with utmost respect as their records proved popular around the world.

The group discussed forming their own label, and Lewis gave them the green light. Moodies bassist John Lodge explained the reasons behind creating the label in 1970: “It got to the point where we were doing more and more of the things ourselves,” he said. “Like we began working up our own designs for the packages. And it got more and more us, so we finally went to them and said, ‘How about giving us the complete bill, and you just distribute?’ and they said yes!”

With this free hand, the Moodies and their label were to flourish.

HOW IT BEGAN:

Since The Moody Blues had made their leap from increasingly unloved R&B outfit to psychedelic troubadours in 1967, they had recorded three albums, which had all performed better than the last. With their distinctive artwork designed by Phil Travers, gatefold sleeves and weighty concepts, they struck a (lost?) chord with the times. Yet they felt adrift within the regimented Decca Records, where a dispute over packaging for On The Threshold Of A Dream had created some protest from the group. “We didn’t actually fit into any of the labels,” John Lodge recalls today. “The group and Sir Edward collectively thought of having our own label within Decca.”

Initially, there could have been a fellow traveller with them. “In actual fact, [drummer] Graeme Edge and I had a meeting with Mick Jagger to see if we could start a label together,” Lodge says. The Stones were keen to move on from Decca and within two years had established their own Rolling Stones imprint.

The Moodies decided that with producer Tony Clarke (who was to have a share in the label), and their tried and trusted team, they would establish a bespoke label that would be both selective and exclusive. “We were Sir Edward’s ‘boys’, as he called us, and was happy for us to record, produce and create the artwork which was so important to our creativity. He never let anyone interfere.”

With such artistic freedom, the group established Threshold, its name taken from their recent chart-topping album. With great fervour (and while recording their next album), the Moody Blues started work as executives at their offices, though they soon tired of being businessmen.

“We opened an office in London’s Soho Square and we all gave ourselves ‘positions’ within the company. I can’t remember whose position was what, but I do remember we all wore paper hats with our positions on!” Lodge says. “We would travel most days into London. That didn’t last long though, because administrators we were not.”

This approach was to prove liberating, and saved the group from the endless meetings that had so stymied the Beatles in their final year together. “We employed professional people to take care of business and we got on with making records.”

They took on executive Gerry Hoff to look after the label. Lodge says: “Gerry was working as a promotion man on the West Coast of America for London Records, which was a subsidiary of the Decca label. That’s how we met him.”

With Hoff, the group were to see Threshold mainly as the way to get their records to the marketplace, as well as indulge solo projects.

“Threshold Records gives us a lot bigger scope,” John Lodge explained to Circus magazine in 1970. “Like I want to do an acoustic album, and the others want to do things individually as well. We can do these various things now… Decca is the distributor in England and London does it here, but they don’t own us. You’ve got to get the records into the shops and they do that. The best way we know how is by working with the people we’ve been working with for the past four years.”

The group set about establishing a small, select roster, and with just a handful of acts, they could all receive a degree of personal guidance.

“We’ve got four other acts signed to Threshold and we don’t want to interfere with their thing at all,” Lodge said in 1970. “So with Threshold we’re doing all the things we’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

An article at the time spoke of four signed artists – Trapeze, Providence, Asgard and Nicky James. As well as these, there were to be single releases from Timon (who later became known as Tymon Dogg and later still played with Joe Strummer) and Sue Vickers.

THE GOLDEN PERIOD:

The Moody Blues’ continued success gave them the opportunity to do whatever they wanted. The release of 1970’s A Question Of Balance really saw the Moodies’ US success take off, with the album reaching No.3 in the Billboard chart. Unlike other labels at the time, they kept their roster small and looked after their signings directly.

Relocated to an office in Cobham nearer their homes, Threshold was growing its acts. Trapeze – mainly known today for introducing Glenn Hughes – was an outfit Lodge took special interest in, even producing their second album, Medusa. “I think Trapeze at that time were one of the great English rock bands,” he recalls. “[Manager] Tony Perry sent me a demo tape of songs that they had written and I took them into Decca Studios.”

Nicky James was a friend of the band from Birmingham’s Brumbeat days, and Gerry Hoff and Lodge were to produce songs with him. “He got in touch with us – a wonderful singer,” Lodge recalls.

There was one that got away, though: Moodies’ keyboard player Mike Pinder was interested in signing former Decca act Genesis to Threshold. According to Tony Banks, he went so far as to record them. Banks played a wrong note at the end of Looking For Someone. Pinder was fine to keep it in, Banks was not. Pinder was out. “We had a whole evening with Mike Pinder and he paid for a recording,” Richard MacPhail revealed in 2013. “Tony didn’t really take to Mike. It’s funny because the mellotron would never have happened had it not been for Mike Pinder, and Tony did great things with the mellotron subsequently.”

The Moodies’ success in America was truly underlined when 1967’s Nights In White Satin was unexpectedly reactivated in the US in 1972. “There was no grand plan behind the whole thing. In fact, the record company tried to suppress it,” its writer Justin Hayward says on his website.

The group found themselves competing against their old Deram recording with their latest Threshold release, The Seventh Sojourn.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT:

Threshold diversified into a chain of record shops. “We had the offices in Cobham and we had a shop,” Lodge recalls.

Further shops opened in Andover, Chichester, Swindon and what was then the Birmingham Shopping Centre, later the Pallasades. Threshold Records was seen as a ‘service to the community’. Flautist Ray Thomas said in Rolling Stone in 1972 that, “If the shops are prospering, the community is prospering – businessmen making money makes businesses make money.”

In 1974, The Moody Blues took over Decca Studio One in North London, renaming it Threshold Studios, intending to use it as a base for their future recordings. “We built a Westlake audio studio, the first one in England as a quadraphonic studio control room.”

With the Moodies on sabbatical, each (aside from Pinder, who was now in Malibu) recorded their solo and duo albums there.

By 1977, Threshold was over as a going concern, while Hoff continued in music management in America. “Having recorded Octave, we were going back on the road again,” Lodge says. “You have to decide: am I a musician or in the record business? I’ve never been interested in the business side of the record industry – I just want to create and perform music.”

In 1986, the Moodies left Decca after 20 years and found a new home at Polydor, which marked the end of the Threshold imprint altogether.

The retail operation reduced to the one store in Cobham, and they found a dream manager in ex-Our Price music aficionado Phil Pavling, who ran the shop for 23 years before its final closure in 2011. Although frequently dotted around the globe, the group kept an eye on the store.

“John was the one who was primarily interested in the shop so I saw a lot of him during my time at Threshold,” Pavling remembers. “He was absolutely passionate about having a local music shop and definitely the one who showed the most interest in how we were doing. He was always very encouraging and constantly full of praise for the shop. We had quite a few special in-store signings and it was great that all four band members put in at least one appearance at these. Oh, and I have to say that Ray Thomas is an absolute gent!”

Pavling recalls many people making the journey to Cobham. “As the address was printed on most of their albums, we had fans visiting us on an almost daily basis. For most of my time there, I ran Threshold as a one-man band, but even if I was really busy, I’d try to make time for anyone who’d made the trip down. The vast majority were delightful and seemed really, really happy just to be there. Many came to visit more than once and some even made it an annual pilgrimage.”

TODAY:

Threshold’s final store in Cobham closed along with the group’s office in February 2011. “With the advent of IT, emails and Dropbox, an office really lost its viability and we moved on,” Lodge says. And with it an era ended, of pop stars being businessmen in the utopian 60s sense.

The Threshold imprint lives on in name only on reissues, and the Moodies – now a trio of Edge, Hayward and Lodge – go from strength to strength, their fan base stretching far and wide across the world. Their next outing, the Fly Me High tour, is scheduled to run in the US in April 2016.

WHY WE SHOULD CARE:

Threshold worked as it didn’t have the lofty ambitions of other band-led imprints, Apple being a key role model for what went wrong as much as what worked. The group quickly realised they were not businessmen and it was run professionally with its handful of artists, and shut up shop just at the right time.

The shops gave a great adjunct to the label and brought the Moodies into your town, with music as opposed to high-falutin’ clothes or art.

Further Listening: The Albums And Tracks You Need To Hear

Question

Moody Blues

(from A Question Of Balance, 1970)

Arguably The Moody Blues’ greatest moment on 45, this No.2 hit from 1970 saw two Justin Hayward songs pieced together as an indictment of the Vietnam war. “We went into the studio one Saturday just to do Question,” Hayward says. “We’d rehearsed it beforehand. We did it with no overdubbing or anything like that – no double-tracking. We mixed it in the evening and we had it out in a couple of weeks.”

Black Cloud

Trapeze

(from Medusa, 1970)

Trapeze may just be one of the best-kept secrets in the entire realm of British rock. The strident, countrified blues rock of Black Cloud, from 1970 album Medusa, has the forward propulsion of Free, The Doobie Brothers and the 70s Isley Brothers at their very best. Sheer class.

Mountain

Providence

(from Ever Sense The Dawn, 1972)

The US six-piece who blended soft rock and classical music (no, really) are captured in a particularly pastoral mood on this, the opening track on their sole Threshold release. Brothers Tim and Tom Tompkins later worked with Hayward and Lodge on their Blue Jays album.

Starquest

Asgard

(from In The Realm Of Asgard, 1972)

Starquest is the closing track of Asgard’s only Threshold release, the super-rare In The Realm Of Asgard. Little is known about the five-piece, comprising vocalist James Smith, guitarist Rod Harrison, Dave Cook on bass, Peter Orgill on violin and with Ian Snow rounding off the line-up on drums. On this album, they made a succinct prog sound.

The Troubadour

Nicky James

(from Thunderthroat, 1976)

One of the avatars of the Brumbeat scene, Nicky James had worked with Bev Bevan, John Bonham and Denny Laine in the 60s. Never receiving the critical acclaim he deserved, his rich, sweet voice can be heard on this wistful 1976 recording from one of the last Threshold releases.

Threshold Facts: The Details Behind The Label

First single release: Watching And Waiting/Out And In by The Moody Blues (TH-1, ¹⁰⁄₆₉)

First album release: To Our Children’s Children’s Children by The Moody Blues (THS-1, ¹¹⁄₆₉)

First non-Moodies single release: And Now She Says She’s Young/I’m Just A Travelling Man by Timon (TH-3, ³⁄₇₀)

First non-Moodies album release: Trapeze by Trapeze (THS-2, ³⁄₇₀)

First No.1 album: A Question Of Balance by The Moody Blues (THS-3, ⁸⁄₇₀)

First Moodies solo album release: Blue Jays by Justin Hayward and John Lodge (THS-12, ³⁄₇₅)

Most collectible release: In The Realm Of Asgard by Asgard (THS 6,1972 – copies regularly change hands for around £100)

Final single release: Maggie/Botella De Vino Tinto by Nicky James (THS-25, 1976)

Highest charting single: Question/Candle Of Life by The Moody Blues (TH-4, ⁴⁄₇₀, No.2 UK/No.3 US)

Outside of the traditional major labels, Virgin is probably the one record company the person in the street will be aware of. And that is, of course, due to the charisma of its founder, Richard Branson.

No matter how many years have passed since he tended the day-to-day, or the fact that a team of people, most notably Simon Draper and Nik Powell, ran the enterprise for him, the label is often associated solely with the adventures of Branson. With his unique blend of everyman and superman, his unparalleled capacity for PR saw his baby undergo several rebirths across its long history.

Although the label was sold firstly to EMI in 1992, Branson was still highly visible in celebrating Virgin’s 40th anniversary in 2013. Through a mixture of astute A&R, luck and circumstance, it has a remarkable ability to find, or court away from other labels, towering acts within their genre, such as Mike Oldfield – who, lest we forget, kept the operation afloat in its early days with the success of Tubular Bells – Tangerine Dream, the Sex Pistols, The Human League, Phil Collins, Culture Club, the Rolling Stones and the Spice Girls.

Branson has remained astute, which goes all the way back to his first venture, the Student magazine. When his overdraft was running high, his bank manager told him in no uncertain terms that investors always have to be looked after. “I’ve very much remembered that. It gave me a bit of a fright,” he told Paul Rambali in 1984.

HOW IT BEGAN:

Stowe-educated Branson showed early entrepreneurial skills and, as biographer Tom Bower suggests, “unlike his friends raging against the Vietnam war, Branson was a putative trader in search of ideas that would earn him money”.

Although he wasn’t a music fan, he saw that there could be money in a record label and a recording studio. He had been the editor of Student, and hit upon the idea of selling records by mail order, taking full advantage of the abolition of the Retail Price Maintenance Agreement.

Virgin was born. The name arose from Virgin office staffer Tessa Watts, who suggested that they were virgins in business. It was soon to expand: Draper recalled to Prog that Branson “took me out to lunch and described to me his plans for a recording studio, a record label, a publishing company and a management company. It all sounded very ambitious and rather unlikely to me.”

The initial success of the mail order business led to the opening of the very first Virgin retail outlet on London’s Oxford Street. The store reflected the times: beanbags, joss sticks and headphones meant a customer could sprawl out and, like, be.

Plans were made to acquire a recording studio in Oxfordshire, The Manor, and set up the label. But what indeed would be its premiere release? An instrumental suite, Opus One by the 19-year-old Mike Oldfield, who had been Kevin Ayers’ bass player, was brought to Branson and Nik Powell’s attention by producer Tom Newman.

Oldfield was given downtime at The Manor, and Opus One’s fate was sealed when Oldfield spied the tubular bells, which had been hired for John Cale’s Academy In Peril, being removed. An idea was hatched. Tubular Bells – as the album, of course, became – was one of four releases that came out on May 25, 1973, all testament to Simon Draper’s adventurous A&R policy. The others were The Faust Tapes, which sold for 49p and introduced Krautrock into the homes of 100,000 people within its first month; Gong’s The Flying Teapot, which built on the success of Camembert Electrique; and the Manor Live, a jam album by ‘Camelo Pardarlis’ with characters such as Lol Coxhill, Elkie Brooks and Boz Burrell. Tubular Bells rolled on and on. The record stores would expand and, for many, that was their interface with the Virgin brand.

“It’s hard now to get across what a big deal those stores were – not every town had one and you felt privileged if there was one in your town,” Mitchell Edmond, who worked in Virgin shops from the 70s to 80s, recalls. “And also how central records were to most people’s lives. Music and records were cool, Virgin stocked records and magazines you couldn’t buy anywhere else and, particularly in a smaller store, and in a smaller town like Swansea, Virgin became the place for like-minded and young, impressionable souls to meet. It was literally like a grown-up youth club.”

THE GOLDEN PERIOD:

Tubular Bells, as we know, became a global phenomenon when its opening theme was used in William Friedkin’s movie The Exorcist. The absolute maverick spirit the label had was reflected in its A&R policy. Former Marketing Director John Varnom says on Virgin.com: “In an age now when most companies have every single release triple-checked by lawyers, accountants and middlemen, it’s refreshing to see how much freedom we had.”

Branson personally signed Tangerine Dream because of how well their imports sold and he firmly believed that they could be “as big as Floyd”.

“We thought it was dead easy,” Simon Draper said in 1984. “I thought we’d be able to consistently sell records by unconventional, difficult people. I indulged my fantasies of being able to make records with heroes of mine, people like Robert Wyatt.”

Branson said in 1984: “Simon loves records and his whole involvement is through that. With me it’s different. It’s not a love of music. I enjoy people, I enjoy working with friends, I like finding out about new things, new areas I know nothing about.”

With bands like Hatfield And The North, Egg and Henry Cow, Press Officer Al Clarke described Virgin in this era as being the equivalent of an “audio Arts Council”.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT:

Oldfield’s ongoing success bankrolled some of the label’s more extreme acts, and the Sex Pistols’ much-vaunted signing in 1977 gave the label new credibility among punks, with Branson epitomising the ‘never trust a hippy’ ethos of Malcolm McLaren. The label embraced post-punk, with acts such as the Skids and Magazine.

Virgin also played a key role in distributing labels such as Stiff. “Virgin was like an older brother to us,” Paul Conroy, Stiff’s General Manager (who would go on to be Virgin’s MD in the 90s), says. “They had more money, structure and acts than us. They enabled us to get into the shops via their sales force and therefore have hits.”

Virgin really stepped out of the prog shadows with the success first of The Human League and then Culture Club’s unprecedented US triumph. Phil Collins signed as a solo artist to Virgin in the UK and enjoyed a stellar career.

Branson realised the power of the brand and by using the best mavericks in their field, along came – with varying degrees of success – Virgin airlines, cola, vodka, trains, cosmetics, condoms. The shops became megastores, thrusting retail operations that subsumed the Our Price brand, run by operations people with checklists – and with considerably less love for Mallard than their predecessors.

“The sea change in public interest really came in the mid-80s when the airline started and made him a household name,” Edmond says. “Then the stores were selling Virgin condoms, there was RB’s newsworthy plot with Thatcher to clear the UK of litter, supermarkets selling Virgin coke and a constant stream of new businesses launched under the Virgin name, always with a wacky PR stunt featuring RB, always with a leggy lovely, in a costumed attempt to get on the front pages.”

Back at the old business, in 1983 Charisma came under Virgin’s wing, bringing with it the catalogues of Genesis and Peter Gabriel. The year was also the label’s best to date, with Culture Club going from strength to strength, but also with Oldfield delivering Moonlight Shadow, which was one of his biggest hits.

In 1992, the label was sold to EMI and Paul Conroy took over as MD. “Some of the ghosts did float around – and the ‘Well, we’ve always done it that way’ people – but we adapted to the new situation and managed to go on and break many new artists,” he explains. “It was a mixture of some great Virgin institutions like the Friday HODS [Heads Of Department] breakfast meeting and a more focused company with a tight set of labels and a brilliant team.”

Conroy left a decade later.

TODAY:

Still very much a going concern with artists such as Naughty Boy, Catfish And The Bottlemen and Bastille. When EMI was sold in 2012, the Virgin label moved across to Universal and was merged with EMI, creating VirginEMI, incorporating Mercury Records. Virgin’s heritage is well tended.

And the Virgin brand itself? From Virgin Media to Virgin Galactic, the proposed first commercial space travel line, to banking, health provision and beyond, it’s simply inescapable.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE:

Although relatively late to the world of label set-ups, Virgin introduced the notion of the hippie entrepreneur. Richard Branson is now one of the most recognised figures in the world, and his astute marshalling of people who know how to run stuff has seen him build many businesses, all of which are loosely based on the original Virgin model.

The fact that many assume he has a close involvement with every business is testament to what he and his team created. However, it would have been nothing without the power and the mystical allure in the first instance of Tubular Bells. The album kept the label afloat through its early years before the Pistols and then the full commercial rebirth of the label in the 80s.

Oldfield in the 70s, The Human League and Culture Club in the 80s, Spice Girls in the 90s, to Emeli Sandé in the 00s, Virgin always seems able to locate the big hitters. But for many, it will always be epitomised by that free spirit encapsulated by the record stores. Succeeding where others didn’t, the stores were a living embodiment of your taste. Yeah, man.

Virgin Facts:

The details behind the label.

First album release: Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield (Virgin Records, V2001, ⁵⁄₇₃)

First single release: Marlene/Everybody Says by Kevin Coyne (Virgin Records, VS102, ⁸⁄₇₃)

First UK No. 1 album: Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield (Virgin Records V2013, ⁹⁄₇₄)

Fascinating fact: Hergest Ridge leapfrogged Tubular Bells to No.1 in September 1974, then Tubular Bells went to No.1, replacing Hergest Ridge. It was the first time at No.1 for Tubular Bells, 16 months after its release, at the apex of Oldfield/Exorcist mania

First UK No. 1 single: Don’t You Want Me Baby/Seconds by the Human League (Virgin Records VS 466, ¹¹⁄₈₁ – No.1 for five weeks. It was US No.1 for three weeks in June 1982)

A curio: The Womble Bashers/Womble Basher Wock by The Bashers (Virgin Records VS 154, ⁶⁄₇₆ – the band’s name was a pseudonym for Mike McGear and Roger McGough, and the song was re-recording of a Grimms album track.)

Losing Our Virginity

The First 4 Years ’73-’77
(Virgin Records, 2013):
One of a series of five three-CD sets released in 2013 to celebrate the label’s 40th anniversary, the first collection is exactly what you would expect on such a compilation of Virgin’s early days: boundary‑pushing progressive rock, symphonic suites, Krautrock and strangely queer pop episodes. All your favourites and more.

Tubular Bells Parts I & II
Mike Oldfield
(from Tubular Bells, 1973)

“Two slightly distorted guitars.” An album that manages to sound innovative no matter how many times you hear it. Two mesmerising suites, glued together on tape, held together by screwdrivers and made on less technology that can be found on a mobile telephone these days. Its iconic status grows as the years pass, and its importance was underlined when it was performed by Oldfield at the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Phaedra
Tangerine Dream
(from Phaedra, 1974)

Possibly the purest distillation of Tangerine Dream’s work at Virgin, the pulse-oriented synthesizer of Phaedra can certainly lay claim to influencing later electronic movements, especially trance. After seven minutes, the sequencers truly get inside your head and a brilliantly uneasy skirmish between comfort and disquiet ensues.

Let’s Eat (Real Soon)
Hatfield & The North
(single, 1974)

Premium plummy prog; a veritable feast of food-related lyrics over what could be called a pop song. ‘You’ll want to slip me in your kitchen/ How’d you like to mother me?’ A super-rare one-off single, it remains a much‑loved artefact of one of the touchstone acts in prog.

Love Is How U Make It
Gong
(from Angel’s Egg, 1974)

The beauty of Gong remains their inherent strangeness – they leap from mellow jazz to complex time structures to perfect pop, all often in the space of several minutes. One of the groups that personified the early incarnation of Virgin, Love Is How U Make It is a spiritual ballad that then trips off into drum-heavy mayhem, before disappearing before our very ears.

The Light Pours Out Of Me
Magazine
(from Real Life, 1978)

In the wake of the Sex Pistols, Virgin had an astute ear for what would later become known as post-punk, and Magazine were one of the key outfits of the movement. The coda to this could have graced any prog record.

Her Story
The Flying Lizards
(from The Flying Lizards, 1979)

Although seen purely as a novelty act for their version of Money (That’s What I Want), which reached the UK Top 5 in 1979, The Flying Lizards were an amalgam of leading UK improvisational musicians David Toop, Steve Beresford and David Cunningham. Described as feminist dub disco, Her Story, sung by former Sounds journalist Vivien Goldman, is a strangely off-kilter capture of the spirit of the age.

Curious to find out more about Dawn Records? Here’s our selection of songs that you simply must hear.

The Pye And Dawn Records Underground Trip 1967-1975
Cave Of Clear Light
(Esoteric, 2010)

Compiled with love and attention from Esoteric, Mark Powell pieces together the fractured tale of Dawn, choosing the heaviest selections from their diverse repertoire. Dick Emery and Brotherhood Of Man are not on here.

Confusions About A Goldfish
John Kongos
(from Confusions About A Goldfish, 1969)

“Does the goldfish in the bowl celebrate thanksgiving and can he see me?” was one of several questions posited by Kongos, who had made a name for himself in South Africa in Johnny and the G-Men and latterly in the UK in Floribunda Rose. Confusions About A Goldfish, produced and directed by Schroeder, was Kongos’ sole album for Dawn, before departing for Fly Records and success with He’s Gonna Step On You Again.

First Utterance
Comus
(Dawn, 1971)

Named not after the Greek god but a John Milton masque, the folk inspired Comus were big favourites of one David Bowie, himself a Bromley resident and who they supported in 1969. They signed to Dawn around the same time, recording this, their debut. Harrowing artwork, songs about violence (Drip, Drip) and rape (Diana) made them very much an acquired taste. Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt is a huge fan and they’re still active today.

Decision
Fruupp
(from Future Legends, 1973)

Signed to the label by A&R Robin Blanchflower, Fruupp were Dawn’s premier progressive band. Led by guitarist Vince McCusker, they were formed out of the northern Irish showband circuit. The band’s first gig in 1971 was with Rory Gallagher and they gained a reputation as support act of choice by many key acts. Decision is perhaps their very sweetest song.

Morning Way
Trader Horne
(from Morning Way, 1970)

Named after John Peel’s nanny Florence Horne, the group – a union between Jackie McAuley from Them and Judy Dyble, the original singer in Fairport Convention, produced one highly sought-after album in 1970. In doing so, they invented what many were to call later nu-folk. This song, the only Dyble-penned number on the album, is absolutely beautiful.

Baby Jump
Mungo Jerry
(from Electronically Tested, 1971)

Surely one of the weirdest and heaviest records ever to crown the UK charts (sitting there in between My Sweet Lord and Hot Love), Baby Jump underlines quite how popular Mungo Jerry were at the start of the 70s. Listen to it again, it’s like Beefheart suddenly became a pop superstar.

Pharaoh’s March
Mike Cooper
(from Trout Steel, 1971)

Produced by Peter Eden, this is one of the very best examples of ‘International musical explorer’ Mike Cooper’s work. With free jazz, bluegrass and delicate melodies all weaving in to one another, it is like a three-hour soundtrack to a lost epic condensed into seven minutes.

Australian prog-psych critical darlings Tame Impala have just made an album of phantasmagoric funkadelia. Which is all well and good, but where the hell do we locate it in what remain of the globe’s vinyl and CD emporia? “I haven’t been to one recently,” drawls Kevin Parker, who on record is Tame Impala, handling all of the writing, production and performing duties himself. “I figure it’s still in the new releases.”

Okay, what section would he be least offended to find it in? Space-age disco? “Um,” he pauses for a moment of reflection, ahead of a gig by the five-piece live version of Tame in Glasgow, one that will be hailed by a national newspaper for its “mood-altering effects and sonic showmanship”. “How about easy listening?” he wonders aloud. “Or adult contemporary?”

He jests, of course. But it is getting harder to categorise Tame Impala. Their 2010 debut album of freak rock, Innerspeaker, with the Pink Floyd circa Ummagumma-echoing sleeve, grabbed the attention of stoners everywhere, while follow-up Lonerism saw Parker proclaimed as rock’s new wizard with an album as cosmic as it was melodic.

I write pop songs sometimes as a release from writing other, more complex songs.

Third album Currents amps up the synths and funk: think Yes produced by Barry White. Some Tame fans – and diehard prog/psych-heads – are concerned about this shift in direction. Just wait till they hear that Parker has amassed a batch of songs for Kylie Minogue. Are the rumours true about him and the pop princess?

“Yes and no,” he vacillates. “I write pop songs sometimes as a release from writing other, more complex songs. Anyway, I was saying that to someone in an interview and he asked who I wrote these songs for, and I said, ‘I don’t know – Kylie Minogue,’ or something. When the article came out, that was the headline: ‘Kevin Parker Has Written An Album For Kylie Minogue!’ But I hadn’t.”

There must be something in the air. Has he heard Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, the team-up between Billy Ray’s wayward daughter and Wayne Coyne?

“Yeah, I listened to it the other day,” he says. “I thought it was cool; pretty different. Put it this way: it’s exactly what I’d expect from those two. It’s weird, in a good way. I like it when people from opposite extremes of the musical spectrum get together. That’s when the most interesting things happen.”

Does he believe the idea of the dramatic changes between Tame albums has been overplayed?

“I guess so,” he replies. “Right now, this is my favourite kind of music. In some ways I’m getting closer to the ultimate music I’d want to listen to.”

One thing unlikely to happen at any time in the future is Parker delegating in the studio: the vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, synths and drums that you hear on his records? That’s all him. He describes himself as “a Jack of all trades and master of none”.

“I’m probably the best at drums but I’m not even that good,” he admits. “If I was to have a jam behind a bunch of people, I’d go for the drums because that’s the instrument I can play without thinking. And guitar and bass I’m pretty good at; keyboards I’m pretty average but I can just about feel my way around.”

Of all rock’s feted do-it-all wunderkinds – Paul McCartney, Emitt Rhodes, Todd Rundgren, Jeff Lynne, Prince, Stevie Wonder – who does he most respect? (The Rundgren connection was made circa Lonerism, when Parker cited Rundgren’s album A Wizard, A True Star as one of his prime influences; later, Rundgren would remix a Lonerism track, Elephant.)

“Well,” he says, “Stevie Wonder would be up there, and not just because he’s blind but because I never had any idea it was all him, especially the drums. There’s also a Swedish artist who goes by the name of Dungen [aka multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes] – I’ve always looked up to him.

“I always make music by myself but I didn’t think what I was doing was right,” he adds. “So I pretended it was a band. I thought if people knew what I was doing – overdubbing and multitracking all the parts – they’d think it was selfish. It was only when I discovered that people like Stevie Wonder and Dungen did everything, I realised it could be an art form in its own right. It was just another way to be expressive.”

Playing live is different, though, and Parker isn’t tempted to appear onstage solo. “No,” he sighs. “For me, being onstage is far too much of a communal thing. Even if they’re songs I’ve written myself, it still feels like a normal band when we’re onstage. Playing live is all about connecting musically. It’s a relationship.”

I hate the idea that I rely on alcohol or weed to be creative. That would be depressing.

Does he have to teach his band their parts? “Well, the guys are my best friends, but they’re also amazing musicians,” he says. “They usually pick it up themselves. Sometimes I have to show them little things. I used to be protective about what kind of drum fills to do and stuff, but I quickly realised that stuffing someone’s musical personalty into a box only makes it sound stifled and contrived. Letting the guys play how they want to play makes for a better performance and vibe.”

Some long-term fans may not be keen on Tame’s new blissed-out vibes and synth-funk sound. Does he check Twitter for negative comments?

“I assumed there were going to be a lot of people into guitar rock who believed the sound of a keyboard represented a different type of music or perspective from guitar music,” he considers. “But part of me doing this album was to prove to myself, and other people, that they can all mean the same thing. I don’t see a huge line in the sand that others do, that guitars represent organic rock music and synths belong to digital electronic music. The only thing that’s different is one is plucking a string and the other is pressing a key.”

Rock music and pharmaceuticals often go hand in hand and Prog did read an article where Parker admitted to spliffing up in the studio, which was a surprise because his multilayered music clearly requires a lot of focus.

“Sure,” he nods. “For me it’s about being relaxed enough to be completely absorbed by the music. The more drawn in by the music you can be, the better. You have to allow creativity to flow. That’s not to say I start a recording session absolutely zapped. I drink while I’m recording because I drink while I’m doing anything that’s fun! And if there’s a spliff there, I’ll smoke it. But I hate the idea that I rely on alcohol or weed to be creative. That would be depressing.”

It was widely reported that in the run-up to recording Currents, Parker split up with his girlfriend, Melody Prochet of French shoegaze outfit Melody’s Echo Chamber. He agrees that there is, as a result, a loose concept with a theme about change running through the album.

“Definitely,” he says. “The songs are like chapters. The first song, Let It Happen, for example, is a long, drawn-out progressive song where this person finds himself in a world of chaos and there are these forces pulling him and he decides to stop resisting them because they’re not such a bad idea.”

It could be a message to himself – to go with the musical flow – or to his audience, to accept Tame’s multifarious peregrinations. Maybe it’s a warning to his future girlfriend? “I don’t think so,” he laughs.

One magazine decided recently that Parker is the new Jim Morrison, the new sex god of alt rock. Has he noticed an increasing number of women in his audience? “Um…” he hesitates, clearly embarrassed and deflecting the question. “I have a terrible eye-contact problem so I never really look at the people in the audience. But I’ll count tonight for you.”

Cheers. He must have detected a slight shift in demographic though? There are moments on Currents that could be mistaken for Daft Punk…

“It’s too early to say – the album has just come out, and things are settling as people make up their minds,” he parries.

Talk about Changesoneparker: he’s the prog voyager, the psych kid, the pop songsmith, the funkadelic stoner… Would the real Kevin Parker please stand up? “I guess I’m none and all of them,” he decides.

What he has realised is that concise three-minute pop songs are no easier to write – harder, in fact – than multipartite song suites.

“Incorporating more pop elements and even writing songs I would consider pop songs has completely flipped my perception of how easy it is to write a pop song, an alternative song or even a prog song,” he declares.

“Writing pop music is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. With alternative music and prog music the possibilities are endless: you almost can’t make a mistake. As long as you’re being free-flowing and expressive then it will be unique and cool and something different. With pop there are rules: you have to fit it into this amount of time, you have to build up the chorus to have an impact. It has these parameters.

“I like complex music,” he adds, “but I also love those up and down pop songs, an arrow to the heart, an instant thing with a moving quality. I believe in the power of pop.”

Tame Impala? Tame Kylie – it’s time to let it happen.

Currents is out now on Fiction. For more information, see www.tameimpala.com.

Dawn Records is arguably the ‘underground’ label that has faired the least well of all its counterparts, and that is, in part, due to the retrospective reputation of its parent company, Pye. Pye was one of the true warhorses of the UK music industry but always seemed unhip, in the way that even its closest counterpart, Decca, did not.

Pye had been long established thanks to its sales of television and radio; it reached across to recorded music when it acquired the Nixa imprint in 1953. Nixa had been established three years earlier as a vehicle for European pop artists and classical. Nixa then acquired Leslie Clark and Alan A Freeman’s Polygon Records, which was one of the first UK independent labels, and Pye-Nixa was established. Pye-Nixa was one of the first companies to introduce the 45 in 1955.

When commercial television launched in 1955, the Lew Grade-backed ATV bought a 49% stake in Pye, which gave the label huge funds and a new general manger in the shape of Louis Benjamin. His was not a musical background, but a strong business one. Pye established itself as a leading label thanks to Lonnie Donegan. The 60s had seen success with the trad jazz of Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and Acker Bilk, and then brought the Searchers – who proved a valuable ‘line-in’ to Merseybeat – Petula Clark, Sandie Shaw and the Kinks.

As the world turned by the late 60s, Pye joined EMI, Phillips and Deram in having their own in-house progressive imprint. Dawn broke in 1969 with releases by John Kongos, Man and Trader Horne. But the almost immediate, runaway success of the single In The Summertime by Mungo Jerry the following year at once undermined the label’s underground credibility.

** HOW IT BEGAN: **

Pye in the mid-60s was quite the place to be. “I thought Pye was cool,” Ray Davies told Jim Irvin in 1998. “They had all that R&B, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, and they’d put out Preachin’ The Blues by Cyril Davies which I thought was the best British R&B single ever made. So I was very happy to be on Pye.” Pye also had a toehold in distributing important international catalogues – Reprise (and later all of Warner Brothers), Chess and Elektra were all released through Pye in the UK. Pye had established its ‘pop’ label, Piccadilly in the early 60s seeing hits for Joe Brown.

In 1964, Benjamin secured the services of John Schroeder from Oriole, who had co-written Helen Shapiro’s Walking Back To Happiness and had also distributed Motown in the UK. He became an A&R manager for Pye. “I think my time with Pye Records was (my) most successful,” Schroeder says today. “The company’s success was down to one person, Louis Benjamin. He ran a really tight ship where money was virtually the only important factor. The Rockin’ Berries, the Ivy League, Status Quo and Sounds Orchestral were some of my artists.” As the decade progressed, Schroeder signed Welsh beat group, The Bystanders, and stood by as they mutated into Man, to make their Revelation album.

By 1969 the winds of change were blowing and Pye had to get with it. Dawn Records would be Pye’s imprint to rival Harvest and Vertigo. “I did suggest to Louis that we needed another label because the music industry was rapidly changing,” Schroder says. “Having a hit record was no longer the be-all and end-all. Artists were being signed because they were playing music of a totally different genre which was, in most cases, album-orientated.” Schroeder was working as a producer while industry veterans Peter Eden and Barry Murray were brought in as executives as Benjamin didn’t know how to market rock. He was sniffy at Schroeder’s charges Status Quo turning heavier and refused to sign the New Yardbirds, opting infamously for Max Bygraves instead.

“Pye had decided that they were missing out on the psychedelia/underground/progressive genre,” Judy Dyble, vocalist with Trader Horne recalls. “The people who ran Pye didn’t know anything about it, but just saw the success that others were having with their ‘underground’ labels, decided that maybe it was a good idea to jump on the bandwagon. Barry, I think, had been given a free hand to find artists to bulk out the label and who would just about fit into the label umbrella. He was happy to record us and let us make an album for Dawn. I think we were probably one of the first albums to be released on the label.”

Acts like John Kongos switched from Pye to Dawn and were later joined by new signings Comus, Mungo Jerry, Titus Groan and Atomic Rooster. “No one actually ran the label as each record producer looked after his own artist,” Schroeder recalls. “An artist could be signed to Pye or Dawn and looked after by the producer of that artist. Dawn used exactly the same promotion guys as Pye. There was little difference except that product released through Dawn was mostly album orientated not pop orientated. No one minded having their artist released on Dawn if it was conducive to that label’s image.”

One of the key promotion guys was Peter Prince brought in as Creative Services Director, and he was a larger-than-life character. “We would have been introduced to Peter Prince and maybe Louis Benjamin,” Dyble recalls. “All I can remember is men smoking huge cigars!” Dyble had some experience with major imprints from her brief association with Fairport Convention at Polydor. “My experiences with both labels were that the management dealt with the labels and we artists really weren’t supposed to worry our pretty little heads about all that sort of thing.”

Man came across to Dawn with their 2 Ozs. Of Plastic With A Hole In The Middle album. “I was very proud of Man,” Schroeder says. “They were very pop orientated and then decided to change musical direction to being much heavier.” Dawn also picked up on the mercurial Trader Horne: “Jackie and I were being loosely managed by Barry Taylor, the manager of Steamhammer and he introduced us to Barry Murray at Dawn.” “I signed John Kongos who was so underestimated at the time,” Schroeder says. “He was an amazing talent as was proved later but at least I recognised it.”

THE GOLDEN PERIOD:

Dawn launched and quickly hit the ground running with something of a doubled-edged sword. The jug-band influenced Mungo Jerry took a short-cut to the top of the UK chart with In The Summertime. Barry Murray was
a friend of Ray Dorset’s who had been in a band called The Good Earth. “Pye Records wanted to get hip because they were a mishmash and they wanted something that was more offbeat,” Ray Dorset told Jon Kutner in 2015. “Barry started Dawn Records and he asked us to make an album, which we did in a couple of afternoons and evenings.” Mungo Jerry’s success was a perfect storm – the expertise of their Red Bus Management, their appearance at the Hollywood Festival in Newcastle-Under-Lyme the day after the release of In The Summertime where they blew the Grateful Dead off the stage. And then, there was Dawn’s marketing coup of the ‘maxi-single’ – a three-track single offering 16 minutes playing time – which sold for the price of a single. The idea was Peter Prince’s and it was seen as bridging the gap between the album and the single – perfect for prog. In The Summertime remained at the top of the charts for seven weeks, which was not, frankly, a calling card for an underground label. “To my mind and with no disrespect, In the Summertime should never have been released on Dawn,” John Schroeder says.

Elsewhere, Donovan moved over from Pye for two albums; his album of Celtic rock, Open Road and his double album of children’s songs, HMS Donovan, and Trader Horne released their much loved, much sought-after album Morning Way before Dyble left on the eve of the Hollywood Festival.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT:

There was the usual musical chairs between artists and personnel: Man went to United Artists, and various staff left Dawn in the early years of the 70s. Schroeder left Pye and Dawn in 1972 to set him his own Alaska label which signed Cymande. “My departure came about because the industry was changing,” Schroeder says. “Independent production was beginning to take a hold, like Mickie Most and RAK Records. I was in fact one of the last producers to leave the confines of a major record company.”

Peter Prince signed Fruupp, who were managed by Paul Charles at Asgard, which brought in some fabulous progressive rock. Elsewhere, Dawn maintained its schizophrenic existence until 1975, releasing albums by the Brotherhood Of Man, and – for export only – Dick Emery. Curtis Knight, trading on his reputation for being an early champion of Jimi Hendrix, formed Zeus, and released the album The Second Coming, which was one of the first times on vinyl for ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke, who within a year would be playing with Motörhead. Kilburn And The High Roads signed a deal in the label’s latter days, which resulted in the only Kilburns album issued in their lifetime, Handsome.

TODAY:

Five years after Dawn ceased to be, Pye finished trading in 1980. Its successor, PRT (Precision Records and Tapes) existed until the late 80s. Its catalogue went to Castle Communications and then Sanctuary; Pye’s various labels can be now be found across many companies.

WHY WE SHOULD CARE:

In the sense of its failure to really get the heads motivated and not having a real flagship band on its roster, Dawn is a bit of a black sheep within the prog family, and, of course, because of that, there is great interest shown in it. “I think Dawn came late to the game and didn’t really have a solid idea of what they were looking for,” Judy Dyble concludes. “It signed anyone who was vaguely connected and not under contract to any other company. I think Barry and Peter probably did their best to populate the label, but perhaps they had missed the boat a trifle,” John Schroeder concludes. “I believe Dawn could never compete with Harvest or Vertigo because it wasn’t set up in the same way. With no disrespect, Louis Benjamin didn’t really understand the musical significance of this type of product. His whole ambition was to make money as quickly as possible and that he achieved. Dawn could in my mind have been a lot different if it had had its own label manager and it own production team and as such operated outside of Pye Records.”

Dawn Facts:

The details behind the label.

First album release: Gates Of Me by Richard Stevensen (Released finally as Pye NSLP 18358, originally intended as Dawn DNLS 3001)

First UK No. 1 single: In The Summertime by Mungo Jerry (Dawn DNX 2502, ⁵⁄₇₀ – number one for seven weeks June-August 1970)

Highest charting UK album: Mungo Jerry by Mungo Jerry (Dawn Records DNLS 3008, ⁷⁄₇₀)

Final UK album release: Live At Woodstock Town Hall by Stu Martin / John Surman (Dawn Records DNLS, 1975)

One perhaps to forget: Good Things Happening by Brotherhood Of Man (Dawn Records, DNLS 3063, 1974 – that said Lady is the group’s Showdown by ELO – honest)

An example of a Dawn collectible album: Morning Way by Trader Horne (Dawn Records, DNLS 3004, ³⁄₇₀, currently on Discogs for £200)