MAGNETIC TAPE ZINE
What’s been the steepest learning
curve for you so far?
Andrew: Two things stand out to me in terms of
learning curves: firstly Record Store Day, our first two
vinyl releases (Wrestling / Champions League 7” and
Bayone 7”) were delayed quite considerably by RSD
(I will leave my opinions on RSD for another day), and
secondly, we did maybe bite off more than we could
chew in terms of quantity and timescale. At the start
things would be a little stressful to get stuff done for
certain deadlines. I think learning early on that things
can be a lot more time consuming that you might first
think has helped us a lot, and now we are a lot more
on the ball with what needs doing and when it needs
to be done by.
Richard: I think I was surprised just how much of my
free time the whole thing started to take up. At one
point I was spending so much time on label stuff that
it started to affect my relationships and personal life.
It became less of a hobby and more of a second
full-time job. I really didn't want that, so I had to
re-evaluate and reprioritise everything, learning
to strike an appropriate balance in the process.
Maintaining that is still tricky at times, but I think I
keep it pretty healthy on the whole!
Rory: Record Store Day. It fucked us over last year
when all the pressing plants went into meltdown
over some shitty reissues no-one really needs and
it’s looking like it might do the same in a few months’
time when it rears its big ugly head once again.
We completely forgot to factor it in for a couple
of releases timeframes, so we haven’t learnt from
that mistake!
How do you feel about the current
state of affairs with DIY music?
What about it is important to you?
Andrew: People are the most important thing as it’s
what stops the rot setting in. Once people stop caring
about DIY, it will die, simple as. That’s why any elitist
bullshit has to be stamped out – no one is better than
anyone else. Also it can’t be policed or controlled by
the cool kids/taste police/UK emo police/whatever,
people need to be able to say “I like band x, band y
and band z” without being censored or shouted down
because it’s “not cool”. Keep elitism and dickhead
attitudes out of DIY and it’ll be fine!
Richard: I could talk about this forever - there
are obviously both really good and really bad
points to make about the current state of DIY
that we definitely do not have space to do here!