The Music Industry Is Great! by Holy Roar

Rather than being completely unoriginal and moaning about illegal downloads, how independent music press is dying (we will miss you Plan B!) and so on, I have decided to write about how fun running a small independent music label/management company can be and the fun things that happen to me! Hopefully it will be insightful and informative and not too self-indulgent or gloat-tastic on my behalf! I just think that a bit of positive mental attitude in today’s music industry/economic climate doesn’t go amiss……and, to be honest, I’m a firm believer in the theory, or ethic, that the more you say or do something the more you believe in it and the more it comes true! So here goes….

The biggest myth that a lot of people seem to hold about Holy Roar and other small independent labels is that we must have an office in London and be sat here with at least 5-7 employees. This, unfortunately, is very far from the truth. Ellen Godwin and I run the label, with occasional help from an intern called Max. I ‘work music’ full-time, splitting my time between the label and the three bands I personally manage (Rolo Tomassi, Youves and Throats - with no involvement from Ellen or Max on the management stuff). Ellen has a full-time job and so contributes to the label as and when she can, with all business decisions being made equally between us. Max was doing one day a week for us until recently, but due to geographic problems for both him and me, he is temporarily out of the picture. There is no office – all of this is run from wherever we happen to live. Hopefully this goes some way to showing that we do not have oodles of money or cash reserves. I literally scrape by, regularly maxing out my overdraft, whilst Ellen has never drawn a penny from the label, and Max the intern gets expenses/lunch paid on his one-day-a-week, when active.

So you’re probably thinking right now ‘why bother?” when you consider the current profile of some of the bands we have worked with, such as Ghost of a Thousand, Rolo Tomassi, Gallows, Devil Sold His Soul, Dananananaykroyd et al. Well, admittedly, it really is a labour of love and you truly have to love the bands you work with, as there are no realistic big financial incentives. We are a label built upon personal relationships in the vast majority of cases. We have made a lot of good friends and artistic (artwork, screenprinting, promoters, the list goes on….) contacts through the three years we have run Holy Roar, and this outweighs any financial gain tenfold. It’s a nice feeling to know that I always have a place to stay with people in various bands on the label, or that I can go for a beer/coffee/shopping with many of them and have a great time as friends and not even have to talk about the label or their band.

There are and have been a multitude of other perks and praises too, which makes it all the more worthwhile and exciting on a tangible level. Very early on we had a whole page label feature in Dazed and Confused magazine which was both flattering and an early indicator of people understanding what we are trying to achieve. In other words, we are not just some ‘heavy label’ – we like to think we can be appreciated by a wide cross section of people who may not naturally approach the heavier end of the music spectrum. We have tried to strip away the macho bullshit by putting care into non-clichéd involving music, visuals, packaging and presentation. Dazed and Confused was not a one-off though – we have done label features for Drowned in Sound, Plan B, Rocksound and a load of webzines. It’s consitently an amazing and humbling thing to do.

This year it feels like this awareness and acceptance of our wide-focus, non-genre specific approach has reach the live arena too, with a good portion of Holy Roar or affiliated acts playing Offset Festival in September (lets not forget their motto is to “take risks and put on credible, forward-thinking music to passionate audience”, which is certainly something we feel a kinship with), being asked to co-curate a stage at South-East In East festival in late August in London (again, being based in South-East London we certainly felt at home with this idea!) and finally the icing on the cake – being asked to curate a stage on the Saturday night at The Great Escape in Brighton. We were worried that with this being a predominantly indie festival and with us being hugely overlooked in any festival preview articles, that we might have had a disaster on our hands putting on Ghost of a Thousand, Throats, Youves and Battletorn. These fears proved to be unfounded with a queue of people waiting to get into our stage (despite a choice of about 30 or so venues) before doors opened, and all the bands playing to a packed, enthusiastic audience. Lets chalk that up as another forward-thinking success.

On the flipside of this coin is me managing an ex-Holy Roar band (Rolo Tomassi) and two current Holy Roar bands (Throats and Youves). The lines can sometimes be blurred, with everything seemingly sometimes turning into one big 24/7 musical pot. However it really isn’t conceited – I think it’s best to manage people you know well and know you can work with, rather than to randomly walk up to a band at a gig or such, especially as I’m not a proven management company with Muse under my wing or something! I’ve now know Rolo Tomassi for nearly four years, meeting them when they played a very early gig in my old front-room in Birmingham. We released their debut cdep on Holy Roar and things went from there. Being with the band as they go into Nike or Adidas for free stuff, tour with The Bronx, Foals, Blood Red Shoes,  Gallows, watch them play festivals across the UK and Europe and see their record get loads of press and praise from the UK, Europe, Japan and Australia has been ridiculously satisfying for a band that essentially has lots of time changes, is very heavy and has loads of screaming.  Its early days still with Throats and Youves – but again to see the reaction these bands continually get live (including Throats playing two shows with Gallows recently on huge stages) makes it all seem worthwhile. It will perhaps be a long hard struggle but if anything, Rolo Tomassi act as a beacon to show that dogged determination and a strong work ethic gets you everywhere, something which I feel equally applies to the label. Here’s to many more years of non-conformist, interesting, progressive music, artistic and creative integrity and forcing it into new areas, new angles and onto new people.

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