Single Life
BBC Radio 4
To the basement of a record shop in Huddersfield where the Mancunian musician/writer Mark Hodkinson is sifting through a pile of self-funded seven-inch singles from the 1970s and 1980s and wondering what happened to the people who made them (15 January, 11.30am). Thirty thousand such records stuff the room. That’s a great deal of hope and effort. “Do you sense the work and the ambience?” Mark murmurs in awe to the shopowner. “Oh yeah,” comes the sighing reply, “but a lot of them have moved on to be solicitors and accountants – the punks anyway. The rockers don’t change, mind. They just cut their hair.”
Once the calling card of any determined band, a self-funded single showed, if nothing else, how hard you were prepared to graft. “You had to book a studio,” someone points out, “to record it. Then mix the record, then find someone to master it and oversee the mastering, then find a manufacturing place and a distribution deal and get the sleeve printed up and get it into the shops. It was a rite of passage that said we are serious.”
Yes, but it could also mostly just be done in your bedroom. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (1989 in Manchester), your teenage correspondent had a boyfriend who was very nice and cool. A young musician in a band with his twin brother and a school-mate, he self-funded a single that became a surprise hit at the Haçienda and the follow-up got to number three in the charts.
Standing in the crowd and watching him on Top of the Pops may have been one of the most vomitously nervous moments of my life, but something I remember happily to this day (and have discussed with him since) is the idiosyncratic, all-consuming, sweat-and-tears making of that white label: in a bedroom in south Manchester on an SH-101 vintage synth. The toing and froing to the kitchen for toast. The intricate sampling from Fatal Attraction. The borrowing of £200 from his mum to press up 1,000 records and then the driving around in a clapped-out Maestro from record shop to record shop in search of an approving seller.
The trio went on to form the successful indie rock band Doves, and so you could say that that agonised-over white label was completely transformative. Hodkinson’s documentary was concerned with somewhat sadder outcomes (bands breaking up, dreams dashed) and yet that same enabling spirit was there. Money borrowed from your mum or aunt, post-recording pizzas in crap suburban bistros, intense pride in the object when it emerged. This past week it was reported that sales of vinyl records rocketed to 9.2 million in America last year, the highest since 1991. They may be only about 4 per cent of all albums sold, but increasingly records are kept as objects, collected. A little more romantic than a download, you know? At this rate, the self-funded seven-inch may well make a comeback.
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