… 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.
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.
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.
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…
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.)
