Sarah were always seen as a political (with a small p) label. Was that your intention from the start?
CW - Absolutely. It was always very much about the music, but never ever just about the music. We'd have liked to have been more political really - with both a small and a large p, but it didn't suit all of the bands. Some of it was large P - The Orchids (from Glasgow) did an anti-poll tax song before the poll-tax was introduced in England & the protests kicked off nationwide. Politics came into everything we did and how we did it - the fact the records were 7" not 12", the fact they weren't ever deliberately limited, the fact we never squirreled any away to sell at inflated prices later (fools!), the fact that everything came out on vinyl even towards the end when it would have made more sense to make the albums CD-only (before vinyl got trendy again), no extra tracks, bonus tracks, coloured vinyl, elitism, usually 3 or 4 tracks on a single so they were value for money. & especially the fact that we didn't release anything sub-standard, ever, which would have been ripping off the audience, who often just sent cheques for the next 10 or whatever, even before we had the slightest idea what they would be.
MH - I can't argue with any of that! I think one thing we always hated was so-called "political" bands whose politics never actually extended to the marketing of their own records - to rant and rage about socialist revolution whilst using every capitalist trick in the book to exploit your own fans seemed like the height of hypocrisy. Yes YOU, Manic Street Preachers. The only exceptions that spring to mind are Billy Bragg (with his first couple of albums, anyway, which were priced deliberately low) and of course the whole Crass stable, where 79p would get you an A3-sized poster of political diatribe along with your unlistenable grunting. Sadly, because most of the politics was in the marketing, it was something the press never picked up on, and because none of the music was shouty, people always assumed no one was angry. I always wanted to sit Steven Wells down and hit him over the head with one of our records. Or a chair leg - anything that came to hand, really.
Would either of you consider starting a label again?
CW - I wouldn't. I was 19 when we started Sarah, and I think that's a good age for starting a record label. I'm 40 now, and that's a good age for being at home with the cat. I think I'd do it a lot better now in many ways, I certainly know much more about business and about the music business, but I bet you there wouldn't be the same spark, the same excitement, the same messy screwed up whatever that makes it pop music. It'd be all grown-up.
MH - Agreed. Also, I really don't think there's a place for a label such as Sarah, because it's so much easier for bands just starting out to do it themselves, via the internet, mp3s, MySpace, etc. Even recording is cheaper if you can do a lot of it at home with Garageband or whatever. You only really need a record label once you need someone to market and publicise you to a bigger audience and, to be honest, that wasn't really the side of running a record label I enjoyed. I enjoyed being responsible for a band's first-ever release, especially if we got to go to the studio with them, and I enjoyed making silly inserts and producing absurd press-releases and dreaming up weird and wonderful ideas for gigs... if I'd just wanted to market musical product, I'd have applied for a job at EMI.
Do you think there's still a place for record labels in the 21st century?
CW - I guess I sort of answered this one already... there always has to be marketing, there always has to be a shortcut or shorthand for people to find the sort of thing they want to find, because there'll always be too much music out there to listen to it all. So I think there is, but the in what way remains to be seen really.
MH - Again, as in the previous question. I think there's still a place for big labels as glorified PR companies/banks, and for small labels whose sole raison d'etre is producing collectors items (something we never had any truck with - I've never understood why anyone would be so proud of selling only 500 copies of something that they set out with that very AIM...), but as for the rest... if I was in a band, I'm not sure I'd bother. Of course, in my darker moments, I wonder just how successful Sarah, and all the bands on it, might have been had we had the internet at our disposal...
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