The advent of the internet has, supposedly, empowered DIY enterprises, brought the world together and enabled wee setups to take on the world on equal terms. What it has also supposed to do is do away with the need for physical product.
Livingston’s Soft Power label has decided to grab the best of both these opposing worlds. A indie, Becky and Graeme – partners in the business sense as well as the real world – run the fledgeling setup from home, with the same panache as a full-time, if underground, label. They also are signing acts from far and wide.
We quizzed Becky, one half of West Lothian’s latest cottage industry.
The ‘couple’ thing has some relevance in that I was wondering how you run the ‘business’ – are you genuinely running the label from home, and how do you fit it into your daily lives?
Oh, actual cottage, or more indie bedsit?
“We run the label from our house in Livingston, which is pretty unremarkable in fact, total suburbia. The label and shop have taken over two rooms and the garage, so it’s pretty full on. If you don’t like records our house isn’t for you, we just about can’t move for them. Graeme has a proper job and we both do the label, I do the shop & label most of the time and look after our three kids.”
How did the label start off? A grand plan, or a one-off release that snowballed?
“We started the label when we inherited a little bit of money, we just needed a bit of cash to get going which we’d never had, so as soon as we could feasibly do it, we did. We contacted Memphis Industries who we worked with on our first release – a vinyl reissue of Theoretical Girl’s Divided LP, which turned out very nicely although we spent way too much, of course, it was a steep learning curve, having never done anything remotely like putting out a record before, so naturally we made mistakes and hopefully learned from them.
We’ve never had a grand plan. We just put out music that we love, and hopefully other people like it too. It’s really nice when they do. We do sometimes worry that we should be a bit more coherent as a label, as some of our releases are quite different from each other, but we can see the common thread between them and in our eyes they do work as a whole. Initially we’d just planned to release one or two things a year, but we’re now in our second year and approaching double figures, it’s a little bit addictive.”
Are you yourselves musicians, or are you just music fans? (If the former, any plans to release yourselves?)
“We did once record a song together, but if it ever saw the light of day hari-kiri would be the only honourable thing to do – so it’s probably best to leave that sort of thing to actual bands / musicians.”
What’s your (musical) background? I’m thinking of your love of more old school formats and indeed sounds – how did you get into these – older brothers or sisters, helpful music teacher at school…? Unlikely I know!
“We both like music a bit too much, and spent our teenage years locked in our bedrooms obsessively listening to records, tapes and the radio – highly antisocial behaviour I think you’d have to agree, and nothing has really changed. Apparently Graeme had a record player at the age of two, so he wins hands down in the early adopter stakes- I didn’t get my own record player until I was 9, but after that there was no stopping me.”
As for the ‘unplayable’ formats like cassette… ok, I jest, a little, though like vinyl I guess there are people buying the tape and not listening to it but using the download codes – what’s the thinking here?
“Unplayable formats? You’re breaking my heart here! The physical aspect of music should never be underestimated – human beings are by nature tactile creatures, there’s something lacking for me in a download-only release – it feels like cheating, only paying for the noise (and nowadays only paying for the blood sweat and tears of the musicians who took the time to make the music if you feel like it) the physical heft of an LP or 12” the sheer size of the artwork, makes it a beautiful thing. Cassettes are another story, they’re practical, look great and for us are very evocative, nostalgic maybe, but plenty of labels coming through now don’t have that nostalgic aspect as the folks that run them aren’t old enough to remember a time before CDs and downloads – there are so many reasons to plump for the physical product over the download – tapes can sound inferior, but there’s an argument for that warmer softer analog sound, the click and hiss, the actual process of committing music to tape – we hand dub all our tapes ourselves in real time, and make the sleeves, so you’re not just buying the music, you’re buying the time and effort, it’s more personal, personable even. It’s easy to get around the fact that some people don’t have the equipment to play the tapes etc. The music can be made easily accessible on the internet so, you can have it both ways.”
Also, I am kind of assuming you’re both quite young (compared to myself anyway). But did you live through the music scene of 10+ years ago, before the internet?
“Ha! I strongly suspect that we’re older than you – definitely old enough to know better anyway, hmm how can we do this politely? What was number one when you were born? Graeme’s was ‘The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde’ by Georgie Fame and mine was ‘Love Me For A Reason’ by The Osmonds. That should sort this out…”
I’ll draw a veil over that as I can’t find my wax cylinders to check… Back to Soft Power; your releases are from a fair range of countries – how are you coming across the acts, or are they hunting you out?
“It’s a mixture really, when we started out it was just us hearing bands we liked that friends had recommended or we’d come across ourselves, and emailing them to see if they fancied putting something out with us, but we have a couple of releases now, where bands have found us. They’re from all sorts of places though, their geographical location is irrelevant, it’s only the sound that matters.
“It looks like we’re going to be pretty busy for the rest of this year, with upcoming releases from September Girls who we released a cassette single with in April, we’re doing their debut 7” which is ridiculously exciting, and we’re putting out the first release of another new Irish band – HUNK! who have a lovely noisy harmonic sound, also we’re doing tapes with Beat Mark who are from Paris and Obedient Wives Club who are from Singapore – they both make very beautiful melodic scuzzy indie pop, and we’ve got a couple of other things up our sleeves as well, which we’re very much looking forward to.”
Next up from the label is a cassingle from Hulk, plus the September Girls single pictured. More at
http://softpowerrecords.tumblr.com