Morning!
It’s that time. Wednesday, at 10:00 am: New Cue time. Stop what you’re doing, put the kettle on, throw your feet on to the table/sofa/seat opposite and get ready for the best twenty minutes of your morning/afternoon/evening.
Today we’re speaking with Simon Williams, the main man at Fierce Panda records, the ground-breaking, extremely indie record label he’s run since 1994, when he decided in the bar of the long demolished Blue Posts on Tottenham Court Road that he and two other NME writers would put out one EP for an experiment and a laugh. Nearly thirty years later, he’s still at it. He’s released early singles by Coldplay, Keane, Placebo, Embrace, Supergrass, Ash, as well as dozens of bands you may be less familiar with.
He’s a living legend - though on New Year’s Eve 2019 he nearly became a dead one when he made a serious attempt to take his own life, in what he cheerfully describes as the “grand malarkey”. This act was mercifully interrupted. During a long spell recuperating in hospital, he decided to write the story of how he got there. The jaw-dropping resulting tale was published a couple of weeks ago by Nine Eight Books and is called Pandamonium! How Not To Run A Record Label. We’ve got a couple of extracts below as well as a lovely, clear-eyed chat with the author.
But you know you have to be a subscriber to read that. You know that. It’s Wednesday. Mondays are free, Wednesday and Friday are for the hardcore. Are you hardcore? Are you? There’s a button below that allows you to become a crew member for a fiver a month. Help three working guys out, go on (and if you do already, we love you).
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
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