… unless, of course, all proceeds are being given to the local homeless shelter or food bank. Do they have homeless shelters and food banks in Pompano Beach? I’m sure they do. They have them everywhere these days…
I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t have put our red flag back in the loft.
Obviously the thinking behind the Severn Beach Line postcards that were included with SARAHs 21 to 30 was to make important political points about Capitalism and public transport. But they also unwittingly provided an opportunity for lonely hearts – an indie-Tinder, if you will – as this cutting from the NME classifieds from 1990 amply demonstrates: lovelorn Rodney of West Didsbury is seeking someone to help him “complete his jigsaw”, and I think we all know what he means by that – “doubles and desires” is what he’s euphemistically after, the saucy devil. Well, I hope you found true love eventually, Rodney; or at least managed to get rid of some of those spare clocktowers. I wonder if that NME journalist ever found a flat in Camden?
A cutting from a February 1990 edition of the NME to show that it wasn’t just us: Mega City Four were also trying to do the decent thing because they didn’t “want to be dragged into marketing”. Ironic, of course, that the 7″ single has had a revival of late; though only as a limited-edition heavyweight-vinyl premium-priced marketing gimmick, perfect for International Celebrate Capitalism Day Record Store Day; if you want popmusic, you’re better off with MP3s and streaming. Or CDs for the nostalgists. Discuss.
We’ve got the date function turned off on these posts, because it’s generally not really relevant. Just for the record, though, we’re posting this at 8pm on 28th August, 2015.
And here’s the NME reviewing Saint Etienne’s cover of the Field Mice’s Let’s Kiss And Make Up. Some of you might be shocked to see the phrase “Incredibly girlie and irritating” appearing in a supposedly right-on, left-wing, politically correct music paper, but you have to bear in mind that it was absolutely fine to say things like that in 1990. No, really, it was – absolutely fine. That’s why so many people writing for the NME in 1990 still work in the media. Is it just me, by the way, or is the tone of this review vaguely patronising?
You wouldn’t think it would be possible to misunderstand us to such a large extent in such a small number words, but obviously Mojo‘s whole raison d’être is to completely miss the point of everything about pop music, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. This is from a feature called Nuggets which judges records according to how much idiots are prepared to pay for them. And he’s right, of course… if only we’d put as much effort into making the records good as we did into making them collectable, we wouldn’t have been forced to give up at SARAH 100 and take out hugely expensive adverts explaining that the label was no longer financially viable. Noah’s Ark is fantastic, by the way – as music, I mean, not as an investment opportunity.
A flyer from November 1986, advertising upcoming events at the EEC Punk Rock Mountain; which, I discovered on a trip back to Bristol the other week, is now flats, rather than the slightly peculiar country and western pub in the middle of a traffic island that I remember so fondly. And, frankly, so badly – my only real recollections of the gigs listed here are that The Clouds were ace and that The Jasmine Minks were completely spooked by the mirrors that lined the rear wall – given the size of the bar, they were effectively staring at themselves for the entire duration of their set. Younger readers might also like to know that only four of the bands on this flyer were any good; I’m afraid you’ll have to decide which for yourselves.
The six issues of Clare’s old fanzine, Kvatch, starting with #1 in the top left, which came out in 1984 when she was 16, and moving round clockwise to #6 (bright red title lettering), which is the one that had the Sea Urchins/Groove Farm flexi.
In my head, this has always been a ticket, not a flyer, but in retrospect I’m not sure it’s the sort of gig that would have had tickets and, looking at it again, it feels more like a flyer… but, that said, I’m not quite sure why I’d have had a flyer, given we’d only arrived in Oxford that evening (on a Subway-organised minibus from Bristol – I think Martin Subway was checking out Razorcuts). Oh, I don’t know: it was a long time ago and it’s all a bit hazy but, basically, 7th March 1986 was the first time I saw Talulah Gosh, and the first time anyone saw them, as it was their debut gig. They were also possibly last-minute additions, given they’re not actually mentioned anywhere. In fact, I could be making the whole thing up. But I’m not.
Dipping our spoon back into the primordial indie soup, these stickers were given out on the door when Talulah Gosh played the EEC Punk Rock Mountain, a pre-Sarah club night at the George & Railway in Bristol. I was never entirely sure where to stick them – despite many suggestions over the years – which is why I still have them. I should probably credit Robena with the design, by the way – she was the artist in the EEC PRM’s utopian indie-pop collective. NB for those not around in 1986, Marigold is what Amelia was then calling herself, Pebbles is what Liz was calling herself, and the EEC was an attempt to bring about pan-European economic cooperation and integration and establish a common market which is, of course, a Very Good Thing.
A poster for the last issue of Clare’s pre-Sarah fanzine Kvatch, which came with a flexidisc featuring Cling Film by The Sea Urchins and Baby Blue Marine by Bristol’s Groove Farm (see here for a picture of the flexi in its handpainted sleeve). The Sea Urchins are the band in the bottom half of the poster. Of the other bands mentioned on the poster, Mighty Mighty’s Throwaway was on the first Sha-la-la flexidisc, and Friends of the Family morphed into Pram.
A flyer for issue 6 of Are You Scared To Get Happy and its two Sha-la-la flexis, one of them the Poppyheads’ 4-song Postcard for Flossy EP – yes, a 4-song 6½” flexi. The Poppyheads later recorded for Sarah, obviously, while Remember Fun had two tracks released by Egg and a retrospective EP on Matinee. Emily’s 4-song Irony 12″, meanwhile, was not only the 50th single on Creation but also much heavier than our flexidisc, as many journalists pointed out at the time.
In 1988, Spiral Scratch – a sort of inept Record Collector (“for those who know the value of nothing but would still quite like to know its price in G/VG condition” – Oscar Wilde) – printed this bit of pro-Tory propaganda suggesting readers invest in Sarah, a label “run by Matt and his girlfriend Clare” (oh dear… not a good start…), because “even if you lose in the collectable stakes, you can console yourself [with] some fine music”… as if listening to Sean Urchins’ dreary Summershine could ever really make up for the loss of 50p and an SAE. Whatever happened to Mr Urchins, I wonder? I hope he’s OK. Shadow Factory was never really going to called Doing It For The Publicity, by the way: that was a dig at Creation’s Doing It For The Kids with its one previously unavailable track…
I know we’ve posted the original A Day For Destroying Things advert elsewhere, but it’s also good to see it in its original context, so here’s a copy of Melody Maker from 26th August 1995. Big stories that week were clearly the release of another appalling record by Oasis, Babylon Zoo and True Noise, whose new single Hanging in Mid Air had just been issued by Blanc Records. You’re probably whistling it right now.
Many people, and not just those who got four clocktowers in SARAHs 21-24, were confused by our postcards. But it’s pretty simple: Temple Meads is the last stop on the Severn Beach line, the line’s other ten stations are on the centre labels, and the postcards were put in randomly to annoy collectors. (That’s Brunel’s original terminus to the left of the car park, by the way; I think it closed when people realised the platforms were nowhere near the tracks.)
These were the flexidiscs we released with our fanzines prior to setting up Sarah; the Sea Urchins appeared on two flexis, one with Kvatch (Cling Film), one with Sha-la-la (Summershine). The Orchids, Talulah Gosh and Poppyheads also had Sha-la-la releases (From This Day, I Told You So and the Postcard for Flossy EP respectively). It was important that all the flexis came in proper sleeves; they were throwaway, but weren’t meant to be thrown away. (In case you’re wondering, Sha-la-la was a flexdisc label, with the discs distributed via various fanzines, chiefly Are You Scared To Get Happy?, Simply Thrilled, Baby Honey and Trout Fishing in Leytonstone.)
Back in the days before computer design (1995), all artwork was done as paste-ups; we’d enlarge or reduce text on the photocopier in Hatcher’s tobacconists in Clifton, stick it down and obscure the edges with white paint, then take the paste-up back to Hatcher’s to enlarge it to the right size. This poster was for use in Revolver Records (The Triangle) and Replay Records (St James Barton roundabout, by the bus station).
To announce the end of Sarah, the release of Sarah 100, and the end-of-Sarah party on the Thekla, we produced this newsletter – click to download a pdf! (6 pages, 4.2Mb – those of you with a keen interest in geometry and the four-times table might suspect that the original newsletter had 8 pages, and you’d be right; but the centrefold was a photo of Stewart Boyracer posing coquettishly in nothing but an apron from his baked potato stall, and that would have had to go the other way round on the scanner. Or possibly it was a discography, which isn’t really that interesting.)
At the start of 1996, we produced a very sombre (i.e. photocopied on a black and white copier) newsletter to let people know what had happened at the final Sarah party and to bring them up to date on some of the bands’ future plans. The obituary also announced the launch of Shinkansen Recordings and the birth of Trembling Blue Stars. Click to download a pdf (4 pages, 2.5Mb).
This was the advert we took out to celebrate our fifth birthday; I think it amused us to use a quarter of a page in NME and Melody Maker to write the words “seven inch single” and “CAPITALISM” as big as we could, though in retrospect “seven inch” should have been hyphenated.
Sarah 70 was released in 1993 and was a package containing a 5½” flexidisc (Blueboy performing Cloud Babies live) and three 4-page fanzines (Just As Good As I Should Be, Nice Boys Prefer Vanilla and I Am Telling You Because You Are Far Away). The text in the image below appeared on the inside of the package cover. (A pdf version is on the “Texts/Fanzines” page.)
We took out half-page adverts in NME and Melody Maker to announce SARAH 100 and the end of Sarah. It was also the first time we’d used the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol’s most famous landmark, on artwork. Given the price of half-page ads, you’d think it would have stopped people saying we’d gone bust… sadly, it didn’t. Clare was nineteen when we started Sarah, in case you’re wondering.