Label Love: Simon Raymonde on Bella Union

I am fast-approaching my 50th year on this strange planet of ours and yet I still feel like an excitable child in a sweet shop most of the time. For all the waves of doom and gloom that lap at our shores on a daily basis, desperate to erode what remains of our fragile musical universe, I am still buoyed by the astounding beauty that grows in seemingly, surprisingly fertile soil, and I am a willing tiller. With a very sweet tooth…

I have resisted the temptation to expand the label in the past year or two, not for fear of going too fast nor conversely because we know the industry is in some sort of a decline, simply because I love the intimacy of what we do, and the close relationships we have with our artists. Bella Union operates from a very small office in London, and is a label run by just four of us. Mark, Luke, Anika and I, with Duncan our redoubtable head of press sat close by.

It’s long been my contention that what lets this business down most times is when all the different factions and elements fight against each other. For example with antimatter, when an electron and its antiparticle – the positron – collide, they destroy everything. When management, agent, label and band have separate agendas, chaos is always just one breath away. I have seen it at close hand, as a musician, as an observer, and as label.

Yet when we all work together, incredible things can happen. We use the word fusion in music, to describe occasional hybrid styles coming together but thinking beyond that back to the physics analogy, fusion is a process by which two or more atomic nuclei come together to form one single, more impressive nucleus which is then accompanied by a release of powerful energy. When we work hand-in-hand together in the music business, we can achieve anything. The energy of us all working together can conquer most things.

Small IS best for Bella Union, though I realise it isn’t necessarily so for other labels. Seth Godin says “Small means you can tell the truth on your blog, and small means that you can answer email from your customers ” and whilst there’s a lot more to running a label than either of those examples, they do sum up my reasons for loving ‘small’ pretty well.

The last few years have been clearly fantastic for Bella Union, the runaway success of the wonderful Fleet Foxes in 2008/2009 no doubt bringing more attention to some of the bands who released records in their wake. I recognise this from my own days in Cocteau Twins and the residual exposure it brought other bands on the 4AD label. While Bella Union has since been flooded by demos from bands who seem to think we would like nothing more than to sign another band who sound awfully just like Fleet Foxes but not as good, we have just gotten on with what we have always done.

So what do we do and why?

We love to discover our own bands. We love the word-of-mouth we are able to build, simply because it is real. We don’t, where possible, go to shows that other A&R go to. We love the remarkable. And mostly we love adorable and nice considerate people, and that’s not just for the bands, we feel the same way about managers and booking agents. We could work with a ton of great bands but if it doesn’t fit us as people, we wouldn’t go there, no matter how awesome the band were. (Done it and won’t be doing it again!)

We don’t look at numbers or estimate sales, as I believe this is counter-productive and probably a total waste of time. We want to build something long-term for our bands and the way to do that is to get music out to as many places as possible and to generate as much awareness and attention as possible. Most artists we work with appreciate that the biggest issues are not about getting paid, but about getting attention. Once you have people’s attention, only then you can start seeing the model changing into one that has a financial element. That may take a month or three albums and this suits us fine because ultimately, we are in it for the long-haul.

Simon Raymonde

All of this week, The Line of Best Fit is taking a closer look at the work of Bella Union, so keep an eye out for exclusive sessions, interviews and content over the coming days.