Sarah Records

I know this might look like a grubby old fax machine – and it is – but… it’s not just any grubby old fax machine, it’s the Sarah Fax Machine. Actually, it’s the second Sarah Fax Machine, as the first one got stolen, but… let’s not get distracted. Without this, there would be no Aberdeen and no East River Pipe and no records on sale in the Philippines: because this, before the internet came along and ruined everything, is how we used to communicate with people in far-off lands; otherwise, we’d have been waiting two weeks for an airmail letter to arrive or running up phone bills like Kate Bush runs up hills. It also came in handy when we needed to tell Jo Whiley to stop playing the first Oasis single* and also, a few years later – once everyone had replaced their fax machines with email – when Ryanair left me stranded in Vigo for 48 hours, as Ryanair only used to accept complaints sent by fax.** Anyway, my point is, for a while, this BT CF-50 was just as important a part of our lives as John Peel or The Orchids or top-notch Bolivian cocaine parcel tape, and it’s now on a tip in Thamesmead. Just behind Belmarsh Prison. I really must wash the kitchen floor.

* You people don’t know what a lucky escape you had. Please feel free to thank us.
** I know, it’s almost like they were trying to discourage people from complaining – they replied to each fax by email.

Over the years, many people have pondered the significance of the cherries. What symbolism was involved? Was it a sexual metaphor? Was it a non-sexual metaphor? Was it relevant that, though there were two cherries, the stalks weren’t joined? The answer, of course, is simple: they photocopied really cleanly, so could be reproduced in various sizes in various contexts without needing to be expensively scanned, and then printed using just one colour of ink. It’s also a lovely photo, of course – or the original is – but it was only ever used in that form on the cover of Air Balloon Road, our first CD compilation, which means only people who own a copy of that will have seen the thank you to Akiko, who took the photo and sent it to us from Nara in Japan. So, 25 years on, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank her again. She also took the photos on the sleeves of The Wake’s Crush The Flowers and Major John and Even As We Speak’s One Step Forward… and, in 1991, created the Sugarfrost label.

As for the metaphor of the broken bowl… well…

Everyone knows that success has more to do with your promotional budget than the goodness of your pop, but putting an actual price on fame is tricky. Unless you’ve got an actual price list. Like this one. This is just for “presenting” records to shops – as you can see, we’d still have needed to guarantee airplay and media coverage. And, no, we didn’t sign up. We didn’t even use press agents – well, we did once, but it didn’t do much good, so we went back to our old system of posting records to journalists with notes telling them to fuck off. Oh, and we briefly used a gig agent, but they booked Brighter for a Young Farmers hop at an agricultural college near Ipswich at which the promoter encouragingly told the band beforehand it “could go either way”, so we stopped doing that too.

These were badges produced by Quattro, the label to which we were licensed for a while in Japan, and we would have been given them when Heavenly toured there in October 1992, visiting Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. I’ve not taken it out of its wrapper, as obviously that would make it worth less on eBay, but I realise that this actually makes it look a bit like a condom. Sorry.

“A record label run from the fans’ point of view”, that’s what we always said… but it wasn’t always easy to know what people were thinking. Hence the introduction, with SARAH 34, of Quibble Strips. On these, fans could make their feelings absolutely clear, as this completed strip shows.

A ticket for the 1993 Sarah Records christmas party on board the Thekla.