FatCat Records: On Demos

Mr. Tom FatCat

Welcome to the first in a series of columns from FatCat Records!

We pride ourselves on finding bands through demo CDs. We get about 10 CDs per day and we listen to every one of them.

Although it may not seem too out of this world for a label to be working like this, you’d be surprised. Without naming anyone, I know of several places where demos go straight in the bin by the bag full. You just need to look closely at how the bigger labels work to get an idea of how they find their bands. A lot of the bands signed by major labels or by bigger indies are cherrypicked; the band have already been broken, press have written about them, radio have played them, people have seen them. All the hard work has been done already.

So, at FatCat we take a lot of pride and satisfaction in being the first people to find a band. The most exciting part of working for a label is seeing how your hard work is paying off. A good example is Frightened Rabbit (Live and Acoustic At Captain’s Rest review here). They sent us in a tape – a cassette tape! It was very rough recordings of a few songs, recorded with an old 4-track or something. We asked them for more, which they gave us in bits and pieces. We got to know them, their songs, helped them out with a few things, and now we’re waiting for album three, with their last one, The Midnight Organ Fight, being listed in a fair few end of year polls on 2008, including Pitchfork, NME, Drowned in Sound, The Line of Best Fit, The Skinny [Ed - and us, little old us].

Now, we’re in a position to hold on to our bands (we’re working again with One Little Indian who helped to start the label all those 12 or so years ago), so we can fight off anyone who comes over waving a cheque book at anyone’s face. It’s a relieving feeling to say the least.

We don’t feel bitter at all about bands moving on, it’s usually a career decision and nothing personal. And although there’s a big element of disappointment, there’s also the knowledge that we did our best and there’s nothing more we could have done. Animal Collective, Sigur Ros and No Age have all gone on to do fantastically. We hope now that bands like these will stay here and do fantastically at FatCat.

So if you make music and want to send us a demo, we guarantee it’ll get a full listen. We’re a small office, there’s about seven of us including interns, so we all get to hear the music and discuss anything that we find interesting or exciting. Things we think are worthy of people hearing we put on our demo site so everyone else can here them too. If we don’t pick them up then sometimes another label will.

You might be interested to know what we’re listening to now: Women, Sic Alps, Titus Andronicas, Blue House. And new FatCat bands? Umm… Get Back Guinozzi, We Were Promised Jetpacks, The Balky Mule and Storsveit Nix Noltes.

Here’s a couple of the latter as tasters:

The Balky Mule – ‘Range’

Storsveit Nix Noltes – Wedding Rachenitsa

Thanks for reading me!

Tom FatCat