Heavenly Recordings has been breaking new acts for 18 years. Some of the label's biggest stars reminisce with Robin Turner
James Dean Bradfield - Manic Street Preachers
We were worried. Here were two people from a proper record company coming to see us in the Rock Garden, a pay-to-play venue. They were holding the elixir of life and here's us, a dodgy punk band from Wales. It was clearly going to be a hard sell.
The first thing we did for Heavenly was "Motown Junk". It's the exact point where we started to believe we could be the band we wanted to be, that people from London could see past Slough and over the Severn. In those early days, every band on the label seemed so different. They were going from white urban scuzz funk to bucolic soundscape pop to punk.
There was such a strange mixture of people there, people like Tim Burgess, Oasis, Tricky, Paul Weller. It seemed like a new gateway out of the whole Manchester thing, the last real "scene".
|