This is an interview taken from the research The Online Music Economy for Independent Music Entrepreneurs.
Roger Simian is the co-owner of Scottish independent label Shark Batter Records, founder of his own band The Stark Palace and the co-founder and guitarist in Dawn Of The Replicants, a post-Britpop indie band with whom I was also a member for many years. I spoke to Roger in January 2009 to find out more about his views of the rapidly changing music economy and his experiences as an indie and major label artist and independent music owner.
You can find out more about Roger’s music, releases and read the label’s collective blog on the Shark Batter Records website.
Susi O’Neill: Tell me about your early experience, because you came into the music industry through a DIY route, what was it like putting out your own record in the early days of Dawn of the Replicants?
Roger Simian: In the 1990s there was quite a big DIY culture scene going on in Glasgow. We’d been doing a fanzine, Sun Zoom Spark, and off the back of that I’d been doing fanzines and stuff like that. I’d been keeping up with what was going on in Glasgow and obviously there were a lot of labels associated with it. I read in a fanzine that Org Records in London had started because they’d started a fanzine so they could get a lot of records that they could sell. So that really excited me, the idea of doing that.
When Sun Zoom Spark ended, I wanted an outlet for my writing, I wanted it to be more personal, so I started Dumb Sulk Trigger as a fanzine in 1995. The following year Paul Vickers was living with my parents in Galashiels. As naturally happens with Paul Vickers, we started collaborating on some songs. We just basically recorded on a Portastudio and took them into a local studio run by Dottle, to tart them up a bit. We ended up with four songs we were pretty pleased with. We weren’t sure what we were going to do but my friend Grant Pringle was saying “you should definitely release these, it’s the best stuff you’ve been doing so far”.
I was a Media Studies student at the time and you could get a student loan. So I got a loan to press up 1,000 copies of a vinyl single which was very exciting to do, your very first product. From the fanzines we got a lot of tips and pointers, some were going to a Czechoslovakian manufacturer. I didn’t bother doing that because it would have involved surreptitious meetings in airports with Czechoslovakians. We looked into it the best we could, and phoned around to find the best deal to get 1,000 vinyl singles printed. It was fairly exciting but we weren’t quite sure what to do with them.
SO: You ended up giving away your first seven inch didn’t you?
RS: I looked into distribution and it seemed very hard to get anywhere with distribution if you were unknown. We had no press, we hadn’t played any gigs, so it was very hard to get any kind of distribution. Our reasons for doing it were not necessarily to make our money back from pressing it, it was purely a promotional tool. Purely the fun of trying to get played on John Peel who was around at the time, or trying to get into NME. That was our aims. We pretty quickly came up with the idea of giving it away free to anyone that sent us a stamped addressed envelope, which was also quite a good little story, it capture people’s attention, people like the idea that this was a completely free single.
SO: Was it very easy to get people to take something that was free as a sample?
RS: Nowadays music is a bit devalued because anyone can give away a free MP3 or whatever whereas it was sort of known that to get a free bit of vinyl, there’s a difference between that and getting free digital information, which is about intellectual property rather than something you can actually hold in your hand.
We managed to plug it a little bit, Mark Radcliffe and John Peel had their show at night on Radio 1 and they both played it and mentioned it was free and both said the address to write to. We ended up getting about 300 people over the next three months writing off for it which basically meant we also had a database of 300 people who were potential fans.
SO: What did you do with that database? Did you manage to market to those users or was it valuable when you did come to sign a record deal?
RS: It did come in handy. We didn’t do anything with it then but we took it to the major label when we got signed up. There was the two of us, me and Paul Vickers. My job was to plug it to press and radio and Paul’s job was to try and get us signed up. Both of us did a pretty good job of doing it, I was able to get us on the radio and off the back of the radio Paul was able to get George Tycliffe interested from East West (a subsidiary of Warner Brothers). When they signed us up it was good for them that we already had a database of 300 names. I’m sure early on they must have got a card sent to them to say the new EPs out or whatever. Certainly a lot of those people ended up staying in touch and ended up people that did ‘zines or worked at radio stations. We kept hearing from people years later who said “oh we got that first single, we sent off for it.”
We called ourselves The Replicants, and didn’t realise at the time – though it’s kind of obvious that there would be – there was at least one other Replicants with material out there, an American band. I had to stamp the new name onto each copy.
SO: You did end up signing to quite a commercial label but your background was in fanzines, would you have said that fanzine culture – make it, get it out there, give it away for free – permeated what you did?
RS: We started the process of signing to a major label. I was a lot more wary than Paul was because I’d heard all these stories like James signing to a major label and being stuck there. I’d liked the first James album which was on an indie label, then they’d kind of disappeared, and they signed to a major label, things hadn’t worked out and they’d been tied to the major label but hadn’t released anything for years. So there were all sorts of horror stories about that kind of thing. On the other hand, I also knew obviously the story that REM were a slow-burner who signed to a major label. There were examples of how major labels could f***k you over, but there were examples of major labels, if you found the right one, especially Island – Julian Cope, Tom Waits, PJ Harvey had signed to Island. There were examples of people on major labels being able to keep their own identities – not having label control.
I think in some respect, there was a slight attitude that we were less cool than bands signed to indie labels like Mogwai and Arab Strab.
SO: Was that from the press?
RS: Possibly amongst bands or amongst the fans…I never really picked up on that from the press. We often bumped into these bands and were very friendly with them; you’d bump into Arab Strab and they’d have just run off from a hotel without paying the bill because they had nowhere to stay, whereas we were paid to stay in hotels.
We managed to get the best of worlds because we were lucky to sign to an A&R man who was completely happy to give us full creative control over the look and the sound. The only time we had ever been pestered into changing anything was when we were on an indie label – we never actually had the bad side of a major label in that respect. There’s no way we’d have got as far as we did if we’d gone down the route that I wanted us to go which was to try to sign to an indie label – my aims were a lot lower than Paul’s – I just wanted to get on John Peel and in NME and have a bit of a cult following, which we got early on anyway. Basically the major label gave us money, pluggers and got us on tour supporting a bigger up-and-coming band Ultrasound, which was a great thing to get our foot in the door.
SO: Was it much easier to get doors opened like getting music reviews and support slots or get on the radio or TV?
RS: Definitely, I don’t think it’s the fact that it was a major label, it’s the fact that there was money there. Chemical Underground did very well with bands like Mogwai, they had a huge career playing in America, from the outside it looks like a little indie label managing to scrape by – but there must have been money there. When you’re originally reading NME and hearing about indie labels or major labels, there’s a lot of mythology there and you buy into it but a lot of what actually happens is what’s being sold to you. So I imagine that a lot of the cool indie labels that have managed to sustain a career, there was actually money there. I’m not saying it came from a major label, it maybe came from people’s own money.
SO: You mean there was investment up-front that helps bands, we’re talking here the late ‘90s predominantly?
RS: Yes, we put out the first EP at the tail end of 1996 then we got signed up in March 1997, this was when it was all starting for us, it was roughly the time we started hearing about Mogwai and Arab Strap. There were quite a few Scottish bands that were making a bit of an impact at the time – The Beta Band and things like that. I think being on an indie label had its pluses and being on a major label had its pluses, rather than having a kind of extremist view of “I’ll definitely do that, but not that”. It’s good to see what actually works best for you, or at least that’s the way it was then.
I think things are very different now. Our experience as a label now is that because of the experience we had before of plugging ourselves and trying to create a bit of a buzz, we’ve done quite well with very little money, just the input of friends.
SO: This is Shark Batter Records?
RS: Yes it was started to release my brother Mike’s band’s first album, that was primarily the reason. In 2006 they put out the first album, they sent it out to different places but they didn’t do it on a very big scale. Then it went to sleep. We resurrected it last year. Last year was sort of the proper start of the label.
We’re finding it harder to plug than a label with money would. I don’t know how playlist meetings work, but I’m imaging if you had a contact there in London that can actually go to the playlist meetings it helps. So that’s where having money behind you can really help.
SO: What formats are you distributing material in? Is it digital, CD or vinyl?
RS: What we were doing, to start with, we were just burning off copies at home on CD-R and Mike made up these fancy cardboard covers. These were purely for promotional purposes, so we would do 100 of each EP release and send them to press and radio. As far as the public was concerned, it was purely a download label. You could only buy this stuff by download. We’re hoping this year we’re going to step it up a gear and have products in the shop or at least online through places like CD Baby. A lot of DIY people are moving in that direction.
SO: The decision to be a digital only label, was that based on where you saw audiences going with digital sales, or was that based on the fact that it was the cheapest model?
RS: The second option really. We’re still slightly tied to our own pasts, we’re still slightly in love with actually possessing a real product. It was better when it was an album, you could hold an album in your hands and enjoy the artwork and sleeve notes. CDs you can still sort of do the same thing. We like the way things are going with digital downloads and stuff but we’re a bit old. We’ll never get past the idea that we do want to have a CD or something physical there. Our ideal would be for us to do both. If we had the money we’d do glass-master copies of everything we release and at least have it available for mail order or in whatever remaining indie stores or places like that there are.
SO: How do you approach copyright, do you have all rights reserved or do you encourage file sharing of your music?
RS: We want to keep control so we don’t believe in the free-for-all culture of people just using whatever they want to use, whenever they want to. We think that as a creator it should be up to a creator to decide what they want to do. For instance, if I was to release my demo album I may choose to give it away free, and that would be my decision and I’d be happy with that. I don’t like the ‘all or nothing’ attitude that people that want to protect copyright interests are ‘the man’, the evil, corporate enemy. I think each individual should be able to decide for themselves what they want to do with their copyright. That would be the same for our bands on the label, it’s up to the bands themselves.
It’s a difficult point just now, as we’re at a point where music is slightly devalued because it’s so easy to get hold of and you need to think about whether giving something away free is actually good for your label or whether it devalues the label and the music. For a while I was thinking it would be quite cool to have a label that was completely free, and you’re purely doing it for the love of it. We’re mostly doing this for the love of it but at the moment we’re utterly skint, so obviously anybody that does anything creative, there’s a part of them that would love to be able to do that full-time and make a living from it. We’re not complete idealists, or completely doing it for the love it, but that’s what drives us is the love of it. It’s enjoyable running a label, it’s enjoyable doing your own music, it’s enjoyable releasing it.
All of us have had dreams of what we’d do if we had our own label, there’s new ways of doing that now. Nowadays there’s so many different models of what’s out there you can probably find what suits you based on what your income is. Whereas in the past, certainly before punk happened, the dream of having your own label – no one had that dream. The only indie labels were Island and places like that which were huge labels – and maybe Joe Meek’s label. Punk opened the doors. The Buzzcocks released the Spiral Scratch EP and just did it themselves. They were inspired by The Sex Pistols and the idea of punk and that was enough to think “well why don’t we do it ourselves”, look at the cost of doing it, it turns out we can make up 1,000 copies for however much, if we get a loan from somebody, and just stick it out there. Suddenly that created a market for independent labels and a market for independent culture.
SO: Do you think in a way we’re in the second phase of that now where we have this type of independent culture where there’s almost very little professionalism in music because the money is going downstream but people are able to create their own music and give it away or try and sell it. Do you see any parallels between the two stages?
RS: I think there are similarities. In the late ‘80s indie culture was very strong and I think that’s because mainstream culture was so mainstream and it was so tied up with major labels. In a situation like that an underground is very much needed. It’s very much going to thrive. The support network was there for independent labels to support each other and there was a natural audience to buy potentially quite leftfield music, or music that didn’t have the highest production values but had great creativity.
I think that there’s a similarity to that now, but I think the reasons are probably different. I think then there was a network in place after punk, which survived until probably Britpop. Then a few things happened like the NME ended up having the monopoly on the UK music press just because their competitors died. There was a healthy competition between three weekly music papers, and indie music became a bit more generic and aiming towards getting onto Top Of The Pops. I think now there’s a similarity in that the major labels are clearly floundering a bit because they don’t know how they’re going to wrestle back control of music so they’re not making as much money as they used to. And meanwhile anybody in their own home can record their own music and release it quite easily to an international audience. So I think what’s happening now is very exciting and it’s very different to what was happening in the past. It’s sort of even more direct connections than in the ‘80s.
SO: How are you marketing your own output and that of Shark Batter, are you building one-to-one connections with fans and audiences or are you going for mainstream press or fanzine press or radio – what outlets are you using?
RS: We’ve mainly so far concentrated on trying to crack into mainstream press, also using ‘zines and online ‘zines – and as much radio as we can get.
SO: Are you dedicating most of your time and effort towards the traditional, bigger media?
RS: Mostly, but there’s also quite a few online websites. We’ve started sending out to MP3 blogs, there’s a good way forward. I love the idea of an MP3 blog, it’s like reading a ‘zine but you actually get to hear the MP3s of the bands you’re reading about immediately, so that’s a good way of connecting directly with people.
SO: One comment I’ve heard recently, because of the amateurization of the music press, it actually requires more of a scale of investment, like from a major label, because of the time spent in chasing a million different outlets. What are your experiences as an indie label trying to cut through the noise that’s out there – what are the key differences between marketing a record now and marketing your first free single?
RS: The obvious difference is the internet but like you’re saying the internet is so big and there’s so many people out there that it’s very hard to get to the place that could help you as well. When we put out the first Dawn Of The Replicants release ourselves we just sent it to, the three music papers and the music press – at the time there was John Peel and Mark Radcliffe who were quite approachable as far as playing new music – and we did what we’re doing now which is to plug it by phoning people up and saying “have you seen that single yet, have you had a chance to listen to it?”. We’re still doing that, that’s the main thing that we do and the most time-consuming thing we do as far as plugging, we are in a way still concentrating on the traditional routes. But as far as the new routes, we’ll do as much as we can of the extra stuff because we do believe that’s a part of promoting yourself now.
SO: Do you find it’s less tangible, trying to work out what your goals and your successes are when you get lots of friends on MySpace or developing a blog?
RS: It’s hard to judge how much of an impact you have with stuff like that. With something like MySpace, it’s good to get feedback. Those places are really good if you’ve played a gig someone will come on and say they really enjoyed the gig. Or I heard your song on somebody’s show, so that’s good for getting an immediate connection with the audience or getting an idea of how many people out there are noticing you. Just through a weird quirk we’ve ended up having a label that has basically a bunch of duos that haven’t yet worked out how to play live and a woman who lives in New York. So the only live experience of Shark Batter live was when Kono Michi came over.
SO: So it’s almost like you’ve formed a virtual business.
RS: Yes it’s a virtual business.
SO: The relationships were with people you already knew or formed online or through serendipity?
RS: Last year was about the four bands: me, Stark Palace, my brother who’s the other label co-owner with The Stone Ghost Collective, Vacuum Spasm Babies which was a friend of mine’s band, and Kono Michi which was someone who Mike met through MySpace – so there’s an immediate, great use of people collaborating from different continents. We started this label as we wanted an avenue to release our own music – the first things we did were to release our own material.
SO: Given you’ve previously been in an established indie band, were you ever tempted to go on the road and try and get another record deal at that point?
RS: Dawn Of The Replicants, the main band we were involved in, we didn’t die but went into hibernation because we wanted to do some of our own stuff. So Paul went off to do Paul Vickers and The Leg. He’s still signed to SL Records which was the small label that Dawn Of The Replicants were signed to, so rather than it being starting from scratch and getting signed up, we’re already signed up but we’re kind of going off and doing other things.
SO: Were you going back to the grassroots publishing you came from?
RS: There’s a mixture of poverty and excitement in what we’re doing. The label’s run by myself, Mike who’s my brother, Brendan who’s in The Stone Ghost Collective and Cameron Jack who’s in The Stark Palace with me, but really the day-to-day running of it is me and Mike. We’re both skint but we both wanted to release our own material. Traditionally I’ve been into the DIY indie culture, whereas Mike’s always been not that interested in it. We found ourselves at a point where we were both thinking in similar ways about what we wanted to do.
So the label grew out of a mixture of us saying we want to do this, we know the music industry’s changing, we’ve seen it, we’ve been inside the music industry, we ran a fairly successful music magazine, we’ve been in a fairly successful band, we’ve seen how different sides of the industry work and we can see everything’s changing – it’s all up in the air, people don’t know what they’re doing anymore, they don’t know what the routes forward are. It’s quite an exciting time because it means there are many potential routes forward.
At the same time we were aware of Fence Records in Scotland who were a new model of working where you could just do it on a really low budget, run a CD-R label, which is a kind of upmarket equivalent of the cassette labels in the past. But because they got some success doing that and obviously they had a similar connection with the past – Lone Pigeon was originally the guy who was in The Beta Band and King Creosote was his brother – they obviously had an understanding of the music industry from that angle. They became a good model because they had some success doing it. We thought “yeh, we’ll have a bit of that and add our own thing to it”.
How can we do this, with no money? The way we did it, we would burn the CD-Rs at home – the initial ones I would just stamp them with a stamper I’d got for the Shark Batter label. Mike would make up these cards – a folded over A4 bit of cardboard – and leave it up so the cover would be the artwork and on the back was the press release, so that became a very cheap way of making a fairly impressive and different looking, so it immediately attracted people’s attention when we sent it out. So that was the kind of exciting thing about having no money is thinking a bit wider – well how can we do this, how can we make it happen. So to me I love the idea of people doing stuff like that, seeing what they have around them and seeing if they can make that work.
SO: You mentioned that you think music’s been devalued. Can you explain more about what your feelings are, particularly from the time when you were making music in the ‘90s and listening to music in the ‘80s and ‘90s and now?
I think that the inRS: ternet has opened a lot of opportunities but in a way it’s made it too easy for people to get hold of music for free – and that’s not the only reason. Culture has changed in such a way that music isn’t so primary. If you look at the ‘60s and ‘70s, that was the time of rock gods, music was very much in the forefront of culture, it was what young people shared – what bands do you like? What bands have you seen?
SO: Do you think that was because we didn’t have the internet and people had to talk to each other and share and copy tapes and talk about it?
RS: Yes, they were the roots of what’s happening now on the internet. People had to find ways of communicating with like-minded people. Our own story is a story similar to many, many people. You either live in the suburbs, like the Bromley Contingent and Siouxsie Sioux. The Buzzcocks are a better example. In those days if you lived in Manchester nothing happens musically in Manchester. There’d been Herman’s Hermits in the ‘60s. But because these people were outcast from where things were happening, which was London, anybody who was at that Sex Pistols gigs wherever it was in Manchester, so many bands came out of that because ‘you’re a freak living in this city, there’s no outlet for you’, then suddenly over there, there’s a similar band of like-minded freaks so you sidle up to each other, check each other out. And the connection between you is this band The Sex Pistols. And because of that you form your own band, The Buzzcocks, or whatever.
Before email you had to write to people – personal calls weren’t cheap, so there was a lot of different media, you find out about bands through either Sniffin’ Glue fanzine - I’m talking about before my time obviously – or reading NME, Melody Maker or Sounds, or you’d hear John Peel playing something. John Peel was kind of like the internet of his day.
SO: It’s that kind of community connection, some of the theories I’ve read say bands should be forming communities and web nets around themselves to connect fans and like-minded bands together, which I guess Shark Batter is starting to build a world around it.
RS: Yes, I’ve always loved the, not uniformity, but a label like Factory or 4AD always had a mystery about it because the acts didn’t all sound like each other but they seemed to tie together – maybe they only tied together because of the artwork from Peter Saville, maybe it was just the look of the label. But certainly there was something that gave a sense of community to Factory or to 4AD. The Pixies were on the same label as The Cocteau Twins and very different sounding but they seemed – maybe just because of the artwork – they seemed to live in the same community.
SO: You mentioned about place, you’ve always been based in a rural pretty inaccessible part of Scotland, when you were signed to a major label, an indie label, and now. What difference do you think it makes now, is being away from an urban area detrimental now?
RS: Well I always thought it made us special. I’ve never been mad on scenes based around cities. Very early on my model was someone like Julian Cope who obviously came through the Liverpool scene but his own stuff was very rural, so we could see connections musically with what we were doing, we were trying to make the equivalent of the music Julian Cope was making, like you’re a freak living out in the country and there’s not many other people around you who are going to understand you so you have to hang around with the other freaks in the village.
I think that now, teenagers living out in rural areas are still having that same sense of alienation. When I was a teenager in the mid ‘80s, I didn’t have many friends that were into The Fall or whatever, purely the focal point for our attention was John Peel or the music press – that’s what tied us together. Whereas now I think if you are out of the city, because of the internet, then the freak that you befriend could be living in another continent.
SO: Essentially that’s virtuous for an independent musician to make those international connections? Or does it make it less accessible? What we’ve been talking about is that everything is much more accessible because there’s more of it, therefore it’s harder to climb to the top of the pyramid.
RS: I wonder if that’s detrimental in a ways because maybe if you were The Buzzcocks, or the people that became The Buzzcocks in Manchester, if they’d just been a bunch of Londoners like the rest of them, probably they wouldn’t have bothered making an indie label. Necessity sometimes forces you to extremes that can be beneficial. Because now it’s easier to make a connection with like-minded people somewhere in the world you maybe don’t have to try as hard finding people where you live to work with you.
SO: What are the business models with Shark Batter and other music you produce? There’s a lot of talk about the landscape shifting, and this theory that “music should be free like water”, by Gerd Leonard, that in the future music will be free and it will be a service wrapped around other content or services.
RS: That could be the future, something I’ve been thinking. Music could be the hook but you spend money and what you get is music plus a book or music plus a DVD.
SO: There were always t-shirt bands like Neds Atomic Dustbin who sold more t-shirts that records.
RS: I think the peripherals are where the business is going to be. It’s like music will be the hook and it will be the merchandising or whatever they come up, or maybe you’ll go to a website like YouTube or MySpace with advertising. It’s free to join the community there and do stuff like build a community or upload music, likewise YouTube it’s free to watch videos. But YouTube are clearly making a lot of money through the banner ads and also by partners, so a very successful YouTube users, with thousands and thousands of hits and they’ll be adverts on their video. So it’s like the deal itself and the music itself is free to consume, but off the back of that they’re advertising to you.
SO: As a producer and a distributor of independent music, how effective would that be for you as a business model to sustain music – is it sustainable to make music when there’s no income, at what point does it fall apart?
RS: Until we find out what the potential business models actually are that can work on a smaller scale, obviously we’re striving to find out ways where we can do this and make a living from doing it, some ways of getting in music or some copyright or radio play, PRS for Music or PPL…there’s not very much money in that unless you get very mainstream radio, there’s not much of a living unless you’re managing to break through into mainstream culture.
SO: Would you say it’s not that different to 10, 15 years ago that you need that big investment to sustain a career?
RS: I think maybe 15, 20 years ago you could have a career in indie music running a little label because there was an audience there from that and there were routes of getting the product to them and them paying you for that, whereas I don’t think that same kind of audience exists in the same way now.
SO: So even though the distribution is wider and faster, the audiences are actually shrinking?
RS: If we’d been 10 years older and set up a label in the mid ‘80s and we’d had enough money – however they did it, they mortgaged their houses or whatever – there were indie labels but there were indie charts that actually reflected the music that was out there and people promoting those indie labels – John Peel and people like that. What happens now is that the BBC radio, with John Peel dying, they’ve tried to find new ways of making it look like they’re still interested in new acts. The way things are going, I think mainstream culture is quite interested in what’s happening outside the mainstream, so it’s quite a good time in that respect. For instance, Introducing, the BBC show, this is something that culture in general is quite interested in. Mainstream culture is interested in the idea of bands breaking through because of MySpace.
SO: To future gaze, if you were doing what you were doing with Dawn Of The Replicants 12 years later, not in 1997 but in 2009, what differences would you make?
RS: I don’t think a band like us would get signed to a major label now – it was pretty unlikely we got signed then. I think we managed to sneak in on the tail-end of Britpop, because the A&R guy at the label George Tycliffe, his job was to try and sign a Britpop act but by the time of us that was all heading toward the end. So there was a little period there where he had the headway to sign up slightly more leftfield bands. The reaction from people in the press was ‘this is f***king weird that a major label have signed lofi Scottish band Dawn of the Replicants”. I think it’s unlikely now unless we were tied into something like Orange Unsigned Mobile Act or something like that.
SO: They don’t have much investment money at the moment!
RS: They’re having to work on their bread and butter at the moment which is being tied into TV shows, like X Factor things or whatever else it is the major labels are doing. If Paul and I had just recorded our four songs and wanted to release them, we could have ended up giving them away free. We probably would have, like Shark Batter, got the CDs pressed and sent to press and radio. At that time we weren’t thinking of it as long-term, it was a kind of side project that became a career in a way. If that was us now, we may have just stuck it out free on the net. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s good.
SO: Do you think it was a unique set of circumstances then around the time you came to be a band that were successful that couldn’t be replicated in the present day?
RS: Yes, the success of bands – we didn’t have big success but relatively we did – it’s always about a special set of circumstances. Somebody like Captain Beefheart could probably have only been signed up at the time he was signed up, when major labels were really looking for stuff to sell to the kids, but were willing to say “we don’t understand this culture but we’ll let the ‘heads’ decide”. That happens even more with films, Hollywood in the early 70s and late ‘60s was handed over to the younger generation and became very European and leftfield because the money-makers knew there was money there but they didn’t understand what it was the kids wanted so let some of the more talented kids decide for them. don’t think we would have been signed up and had as much money spent early on in a different decade.
SO: What else are you working on now?
RS: I’m getting quite back into fanzines. I’ve a friend in Philadelphia who does a ‘zine, because I did my own Dumb Sulk Trigger ‘zine in the ‘90s before the internet, and for me that was my equivalent of going online. I was connecting with people around the world through producing my own ‘zine and sending it to other people around the world who did their ‘zine, and getting their ‘zine back – there was a bit of a kind of pre-internet community. So ever since the internet happened, I got interested, I taught myself to build websites and I concentrated on that, I’d not kept a tab with what was going on with the ‘zines. So I was interested if ‘zines bother to exist anymore, who’s doing it and why are they doing it. I think the answer I’m getting it there were thousands of ‘zines before the internet, but the people that were doing the majority of those are now doing a blog. But what that leaves are people who are left doing a ‘zine, it’s perhaps a higher quality now.
SO: Are they selling them as budget price pamphlets?
RS: I imagine they’re doing it just for the fun of it, another ways of communicating, because it’s fun to cut and paste bits of paper together.
SO: Pre-computer old school ‘zines!
RS: They will be using computers. My friend in Philadelphia has a childish love of cutting it all out and sticking it together and putting glitter all over it or whatever. Actually making something with your hands is quite a creative craft and it’s fun. I think the people that are doing something like ‘zines, or vinyl labels – certain vinyl is still selling like dance music – if there are people running a label in the old way, pressing up vinyl singles or whatever, they’re doing it for the love of it, and for the love of holding – not exactly a hand-crafted product, but something they’ve crafted in their hands. So that’s a big thing I find interesting. So I’m working on a new ‘zine now, just a single folded over page thing, a micro-zine which is quite cheap to do. I actually started doing it because my Mac died, the beauty of paper and glue is that they don’t crash! So that’s what’s interesting me now – DIY culture, how are people doing things for themselves.
You can find out more about Roger’s music, releases and read the label’s collective blog on the Shark Batter Records website
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