Yeah, the days of decent independent labels making money are long gone.
“Certainly if you’re talking about proper money, yeah, it simply doesn’t happen any more – the sales figures just aren’t there. It’s a kind of depressing exercise to think of a label the size of ours, and think how many units it would’ve been shifting in the mid-90s, and how much money you might have made out of it. But you can’t let yourself get saddled with that stuff, there’s no point thinking about it.
“It’s true of the whole music industry, really – artists are making more money from live performances than records now, and it’s the same for everyone, from the top down. So yeah, the record label was never a business thing really [laughs].”
“Whether a tune like ‘Hyph Mngo’ gets the kind of attention it did is always going to be slightly arbitrary.”
Your two most notable recent signings have undoubtedly been Joy Orbison and Mount Kimbie. Can you tell us how you came to release their music?
“The process of A&R – for want of a better word – is kind of ongoing. When you run a label and you’re trying to put out new stuff and keep everything interesting, you really have to pay attention to every demo you get sent, and the rest of it. Having said that, most of the A&R over the years has been through my DJ sets. If people send me stuff and it fits into my sets, then I guess that’s the first stage in the process of putting them out on the label.
“Obviously that’s not so true in the case of Mount Kimbie’s stuff, that’s a slightly different thing. Basically Dom from Mount Kimbie was sending me tunes for ages, a couple of years before Maybes came out, but really, really out-there stuff – much, much more out-there than anything we’ve released [laughs]. It just caught my attention, you know, and I thought, well, you don’t get sent stuff like this every day. So it was just a long process of them sending stuff to me, and it developed and developed. The sound they’ve got now, well, they’ve been building up to it for a while. When they sent me Maybes, I was obviously like, this is great, let’s put it out, it doesn’t matter if no one plays it. As I said before, the point of the label has never been to make money; you obviously want to well with releases, but selling units isn’t the primary goal. I thought, if it sells, it sells; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I was actually quite surprised with how quickly it caught on and how many people were really into it.
“And yeah, it’s just been really smooth since; they’re working on the album at the moment, which is hopefully going to come out in May. And like I say, with the kind of lead-in that they’ve had over the last couple of years, they’re really confident in what they do and how they’re work, and I think it’s going to be a great album.
“With Joy Orbison it was more of a traditional Hotflush A&R process. Great tunes, stick ‘em out, sort of thing. It’s kind of the opposite to Mount Kimbie really, because I don’t think he’s been writing tunes that long, but he’s still coming out with tune after tune after tune. With ‘Hyph’ ['Hyph Mngo'], obviously it’s a great tune, but obviously whether a tune gets that kind of attention is always going to be slightly arbitrary. But it’s great for him, and it’s great for us putting it out; and there’s much more to come.
“When you don’t have to get a job, and you don’t have that kind of pressure, it makes the whole thing a lot easier.”
Was it for personal or musical reasons that you relocated to Berlin?
“It was a bit of both, really. I moved over in 2007. It had got to the stage where it was a viable thing to want to do; I had a proper job, as it were, until the summer of that year. So I got to the stage where I thought I could do this [Hotflush, producing, DJing] full-time if I wanted to. So, I thought about it and I thought yeah, I could do it, and stay here [in London] but then I’d always wanted to live somewhere else and I thought, fuck it, this is as a good a time to do it as any other.
“I’d played in Berlin a few times, so I knew it a bit, knew a few people out here. And Jamie from Vex’d has just moved there, so I spoke to him about it, put my stuff in the car and drove, got here and that was it really. A lot of people spoke like it was a big deal moving to another place, but it didn’t really feel like that to be honest. When you don’t have to get a job, and you don’t have that kind of pressure, it makes the whole thing a lot easier.”
Did the prevalent club sounds of Berlin have an immediate impact on your own DJing and production?
“When I moved I was in the middle of writing the first album, so pretty much the first few months I spent here [in Berlin] was me just sitting around trying to finish it. I had my head down, I didn’t really engage with the city at all. When I finished the record and had a bit more time, I obviously started going out more and seeing what the place was like, and the most unique part of Berlin is really the club scene – it’s totally different to anywhere else in the world that I’ve been, certainly different to anywhere else in Europe, it’s just a different world.
“I’d been kicking around the idea of starting a night for ages, since I first moved back to London really, and when I got to Berlin there was a scene here – a few little dubstep nights – but no one had really stuck their neck out and put on a big line-up at a big club and just seen if people responded to it. So myself and the guy I run Sub:Stance with, Paul, we were just kicking ideas around, and obviously the pie-in-the-sky one was to do it on a weekend night at Berghain [laughs]. One of the things I did do when I moved over here was to get to know the guys at Hardwax, because they’d been supporting the label for ages and been really helpful. So I got to know them, and there’s a lot of overlap between them and the people who play Berghain, there are connections in that respect.
“When we properly sat down and made some concrete enquiries about trying the night, we hooked up one of the guys who worked at Berghain and set up a meeting with the owner. We got there and told them the kind of night we wanted to do – they’d obviously already heard all about it from the guys at Hardwax – and pretty much the first thing that they said to us was, ‘Do you want to do a Friday night?’ [laughs]. It was poker faces all round and then when we got out of the room we were jumping up and down…
“It was all very straightforward, and they’ve been great to work with…they’ve got a very slick in-house promotion team and they handle pretty much everything themselves. It’s only us and one other night that’s actually promoted by ‘external’ people. First night everyone was bricking it, but it went great…”
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CSK