DOMINO RECORDS
3.1 / 91490
This is an excerpt from How Soon is Now?
By Richard King, Faber & Faber, 2012
I’ve edited big chunks out of the book, added footnotes and sometimes simplified King’s language.
It’s all 80s-90s music and you won’t like some of it, but these were some of the golden years of indie
music, so there are plenty of larger-than-life characters and great yarns to be told. Hope you enjoy it.
As you read, highlight names, facts, figures, quotable quotes – anything that might be useful in an
exam.
By the middle of the 90s, Laurence Bell had established Domino as a label with a distinct identity,
that of a company that released inexpensive but elegantly recorded albums, made mainly by American
artists.
Mark Mitchell had left RTM to work alongside Bell at Domino as the label entered a hand-to-mouth
existence, releasing considered and reflective, quiet records into a market that was full of brash, threechord Britpop. As well as the label making very different records from everybody else, the artists
themselves were not very organised.
“No-one had managers,” says Mitchell. “It wasn’t about business, it was love of music. You’d be
scared if the drummer phoned up, quite literally. Oh, God, we must really be in trouble.”
Whatever Bell wanted to do with the label, the odds were stacked against him during the Britpop
boom, after Oasis and Blur. “What held me back was the lack of money,” he says. “It was just so
competitive at that time. A band like Moose would come and play and you’d think, oh, they’re pretty
good, I like that, and then they’re signed to Virgin the following Tuesday for a quarter of a million
and people are writing four-page features on them in magazines, and they’d barely got out of the
rehearsal room. You’re just like, ‘This is nuts.’”
Alexis Taylor had started working at Domino in 2003. His main job was to try to organise the label’s
first attempts selling its releases on the internet. There wasn’t much room in the company’s cramped
Wandsworth offices. Taylor took the only remaining desk space – a corner in Laurence Bell’s room.
While he was processing orders, pushing CDs into cardboard mailers, the songs on a demo that Bell
was constantly playing started to stick in his head.
“Before I worked there someone had told me things had been pretty tough at the label for a while,”
says Taylor. “Laurence was playing the Franz Ferdinand demos pretty much the week that I started.
They were pretty raw demos, so they were very exciting. Then Domino put loads of money into
signing them and then there was a period when no bills could be paid.”
Bell had no doubts about the group’s potential. To prove he was serious about the band, he matched
their highest major-label offer; it was a colossal gamble and one that required Domino to increase its
debt burdens. In so doing, Bell effectively bet the whole label on the band’s chances of success, a risk
he was sure was worth taking.
Luckily for him, the band really did take off.
The worldwide success of Franz Ferdinand allowed Domino to move into larger offices and use the
momentum to develop the label. It was growth that was made possible by record sales alone, which
nobody thought could be done in the record business any more. “Everybody in the music industry
wants to believe that anything can happen in the music industry,” says Bell, “and it so rarely does,
because that it’s so tied up and it’s such a closed shop and it’s so bloody corrupt and it’s hard to get
in. So when something does happen that’s not meant to happen, everyone’s excited. That guy who’s
just been sitting in his room just putting out records for years and now they’re number one or
something – how did that happen? I think that really excites people and it still does whenever it
happens, it’s such an exciting idea, pop terrorism.”
By 2005 Domino had sold over four million Franz Ferdinand records worldwide, the White Stripes
and the Strokes were multi-platinum artists and independence, in contrast to the ailing major-label
business, was thriving. It was a situation that would be highlighted by the sector’s next breakaway
success, Arctic Monkeys.
Arctic Monkeys were content to play around their native Sheffield and its neighbouring towns. The
band had no desire to play to a showcase audience in London, a decision that had instantly made
everybody want to sign them even more.
Several record companies believed they were close to acquiring the band and a lawyer had been
instructed to draw up contracts. “Obviously I wanted to work with them, and in the blink of an eye
everybody wanted to work with them in the world, because they were just so undeniably good,” says
Mike Smith of EMI. “I think in my whole career no band’s been more obviously destined to be
successful – and then they decided to go with Domino, and the irony is Laurence wasn’t the obvious
choice.”
The band’s decision to sign with Domino caught the industry, and particularly the labels that had been
after the band, completely off guard. Domino hadn’t been quick to show interest in the band. To
Mike Smith, the decision made perfect sense: “Every single A&R man in England wanted to sign the
band,” he says. “By working with Domino, I think they knew they had someone who would let them
pursue their artistic vision.”
“I snagged a meeting with the manager,” says Bell. “And one thing led to another and the
conversations were good. Then I was invited up to Sheffield, then I was invited back again, and that’s
how it happened. It all happened in about ten days. From hearing them to signing them, it was all
done in about ten days. We were genuinely independent, they were genuinely independent minded,
and we had Franz Ferdinand under our belt, we had the hottest band in the world at that moment, and
we’d just sold four million records for them.”
Once Arctic Monkeys were signed, the impetus continued. Such was the demand for tickets for their
first London gig that it had to be moved to a bigger venue that could hold 1400 people. “The whole
strategy,” says Domino worker John Dyer, “was to keep them outside of London media. ‘This is so
hot the media hasn’t spotted it.’”
What the mainstream media also failed to spot was the fact that the band were being much discussed
and shared on the internet. Although the band had released one 7-inch single, many of the crowd in
the venue were already singing along to the words of every song. Trying to understand it, the press
labelled Arctic Monkeys “The first MySpace band.”
“It wasn’t MySpace,” says Bell. “It was filesharing and it was word of mouth. It was on the first
level of internet insanity. The kids were swapping it, and that was just going on independently – it
wasn’t a MySpace thing. The band had given away demos of their songs, they’d made ten CDRs of
their songs, taken them to sell at gigs, had a couple of beers and given them away. It was also
something about being up North, outside of London; the ownership was there for the fans, because
they’d kept out of London and the media hadn’t introduced them and it was outside of all that.”
The forthcoming Arctic Monkeys album had generated so much interest that recordshop chain HMV
issued a press release. The shop announced that it was anticipating enough record sales to make
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not the fastest-selling debut album ever. As and
example of how quickly new music was now being consumed, the statement and the record caught
people’s imagination. It was clear that the internet was starting to have a major effect on how the
industry was going to work in the future.
To the independents, who had always been forced to operate on tight margins and be sensitive to the
headwinds of the market, the major labels’ response seemed both ignorant and, possibly, fatal. Rather
than move into partnership with tech companies and adjust to the digital age, the majors resorted to
lobbying and litigation.
“They had all that time and all that money, and they just couldn’t put their egos aside and get together
and find a solution to just cook up digital distribution,” says Bell. They could’ve owned Napster and
have the brand name that everybody could go to, and do what iTunes did. Instead, they lost the means
of distribution to iTunes and they just sat there and let it all roll out and then they just lost
everything.”
“When [major label] BMG bought Napster, that was an opportunity for the whole of the music
industry to buy into it all and have a very legitimate online service. Instead, the whole music industry
banded together and shut it down. So many opportunities were lost,” says Mike Smith of EMI
Publishing.