Colin Newman on Bastard, Wire and the Business of Running a Profitable Record Label
“I have always been interested in things that have a very strong unique selling point”
Colin Newman is a musician, businessman, and activist for economic creative freedom.
He is also one of the very, very few musicians who embody this rare and extraordinary magic: It is worth hearing, considering, discussing, analyzing and most of all experiencing, anything he is involved with.
In his extensive and ongoing body of work with his long-time partner and collaborator Malka Spigel-Newman; the releases on their label swim~; and the long and deep catalog of his sui generis band Wire, Colin Newman is constructing an extraordinary canon, based on a consistent commitment to quality and a desire to explore. Personally, I consider Wire – which Newman has been a part of for over 47 years – to be one of the most consistent and consistently fascinating bands of the entire rock era. In all honesty I put them on the same level that other people place The Beatles or the Velvet Underground. We are not here today to detail Wire’s accomplishments, but they have reached for and achieved perfection as virtually no other band in the last 50 years has (and I am especially enamored of the thrilling, ringing, resonant, chiming mesmer-punk they have released on seven albums since 2008).
But Wire is only one aspect of Newman’s creative and business life. Since the mid-1980s, Newman has been engaged in a deep personal and creative partnership with musician and photographer Malka Spigel-Newman, and nearly all of Colin Newman’s non-Wire projects – and there are a lot of them — are done in collaboration with her. Virtually all of these are worth spending considerable time with, but I will especially note that 2021’s Nanocluster Vol. I — released under the name project name Immersion — is one of my favorite albums of this century (and Malka Spigel’s Gliding and Hiding is also essential). Both reflect a luxurious, buttermilk approach to melody, repetition, guitar texture and noise, and my god, they are great records. In addition to generating and releasing new work with Malka Spigel and other collaborators via swim~ (spelled with the italics and the tilde, by the way), Colin, Malka and swim~ are also involved in the business of re-releasing and polishing their considerable back catalog of solo and band releases (including Wire, as we shall discuss, and Malka’s Minimal Compact). In addition, Malka and Colin host Swimming in Sound, an invigorating and refreshing radio show where they play a remarkable selection of new music and old, both startling and reassuring.
Very recently swim~ re-released Bastard, a very curious solo album Colin Newman first issued on the label in 1997. Bastard was Newman’s sixth solo album, and a considerable departure from his earlier work.
When I listen to Bastard, I hear a few different things going on: some of it, like “Spaced In” or “Without” lays the groundwork for the kind lush, mesmeric stuff you and Malka, and even you and Wire, were doing in the future; and some of Bastard sounds like background music in a high-end 1990s European hotel bar; and some of it sounds like stuff you’d use to check your speakers. It’s not one thing.
Obviously, there was some rule breaking going on. If you were part of that dance music scene in the 1990s, it was very, very specific. Back in the day, we would have different people to do DJ promotion depending on whether we were putting out a breakbeat record or a techno record. Literally a completely different set of people would be employed to get it to the right DJs. There were radically different tribes within both the professional and the non-professional dance music communities. So to have tracks on the record which were kind of breakbeats and technobeats or housebeats, these were all really, really different worlds. The techno people thought breakbeat was impure, it’s not ‘pure’ electronic music, because it’s got samples of people playing actual instruments. That whole thing was really fascinating. In many ways, those early swim~ records set the template for how Malka and I make music. It’s a very different thing to standing in a room with a band.
AUDIO: Colin Newman “Cut The Slack”
Bastard – when it was originally released, I mean – feels like an important moment for you. Most everything you had released as a solo artist before that is more or less song oriented, with the requisite anticipation of some commercial acceptance [Note: A significant exception was the exquisite all-instrumental album Newman released in 1981, Provisionally Entitled the Singing Fish]. Generally, you were playing by the rule of what a vocalist in an established band might be expected to do when they made a solo album. But after Bastard, you seem to be actively deciding, ‘I am going to do music for myself, because I love the way sound affects me and I can work with it.’ And that seems to be a direction you have consistently followed, and it kind of begins with Bastard.
Why did we do Bastard? People were saying, ‘Yeh, well, it’s all well and good you put out all these records, but you’ve got to put out a Colin Newman solo album.’ [swim~ released roughly a dozen albums prior to Bastard.] And by that point, I was not that interested in doing a ‘song’ record. ‘Song’ music was not very cool in the mid-90s. Everything to do with dance music and post-rock was coming on the horizon. My Pet Fish [a Malka Spigel solo album released by swim~ shortly before Bastard] was more centered around Malka, and she likes to sing on stuff, and on Bastard I thought it would be a laugh if I didn’t sing on my record, ‘What do I need to do songs for?’ You could say I was being awkward, but it was really about deliberately not pandering to an audience. That’s not to say it’s not a commercial record; it established a connection with a whole bunch of other musicians and consumers, someone who would have bought DJ Shadow would understand the world of Bastard. There’s quite a lot of breakbeat stuff on it, and drum and bass on it; when drum and bass hit us, it was like a massive game changer for us: the idea that you could have music that couldn’t be played be a band…you literally couldn’t play it? We were fascinated. What’s interesting is that the person who is doing the promo for us in the U.K. wasn’t really familiar with Bastard, and he heard it and said, ‘Wow, it sounds really contemporary.’ And I was really surprised because I was thinking, ‘This is just a break beat record from the ‘90s.’ I guess I have a tendency to undervalue my own work.
Although you have consistently been making extraordinary music for the last thirty-five years with Malka, your various projects, and Wire, just as extraordinary is the work you’ve done building swim~ into a unique, exotic, productive, and profitable record label.
One of the great things about having your own label is that you can actually make money from it. It’s not all about money, obviously, but you can make money out of it without necessarily pandering to a bigger audience. With a larger label, you might need to sell ten or fifteen or twenty thousand to make money, but selling five thousand is going to do us very, very nicely. That’s a game changer in terms of the much vaunted ‘artistic freedom.’ You can just make the music you want to make. You’re not going to sweating, and thinking, ‘Oh, is this commercial?’ You just think, ‘Is this any good.’
Virtually uniquely for a band of your status, Wire owns the catalog for its’ legendary 1970s releases [Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154].
You must understand how massive that is to a band like Wire. I know people whose numbers on Spotify are far, far greater than Wires, yet they’re earning far less money than Wire. Because of this, we don’t need to play the nostalgia circuit, because every single person who could ever call themselves ‘of Wire’ is earning an amount of money every month that means they don’t have to do anything if they don’t want to. It’s not ‘swimming pool money,’ but no one needs to worry about Wire’s financial circumstances, because we own the masters to our ‘70s catalog.
How did Wire come to own their catalog? And why don’t other acts also do this, and come to you for advice? You’ve actually figured out a way for a legacy act to make money and survive without going on the road.
I would love to do that. I would like to be in a position where people would be coming to me. But It’s a bit more complicated than saying ‘All catalogs over 30 years of age should be automatically returned to the artist.’ Most artists wouldn’t know what to do with it, and that would just create a secondary market of opportunist companies that will come along. You have to have a framework which allows the original label to say, ‘Okay, you can buy it back if you want, but you’re not going to do that because you don’t know what to do with it. So instead, we are now legally bound to pay you this amount, this percentage.’ Those things can be instituted, and to write legislation like that would be relatively simple.
This is what happened with the Wire masters, and this had to do with EU legislation, because we were still in the EU at the time: When EMI went bust, they sold it to Warners, which reduced the number of major labels in the market, and the EU monopolies commission challenged that – this wouldn’t have happened in America. Because it violated the monopolies legislation, they had to, basically, sell off some of their catalog to independent labels in order to satisfy anti-trust laws. The battle I had was that they wouldn’t sell it to artists; so I ended up going to Martin Mills from Beggars Banquet – Martin Mills is very, very well connected – and he interceded on my behalf, and we bought the catalog. They didn’t give it to us, I want to make that clear, we bought it lock, stock, and barrel. But that should definitely be a possibility for all artists. You don’t want to put the record companies out of business, but on the other side, maintaining this idea that you have to exploit the historic artists and catalog in order to subsidize the new artists is bullshit. Record labels don’t invest in new artists anymore. If you’ve got a million followers on Instagram, yes, they’ll sign you on; but if you’re a great band someone saw in a pub who don’t have that following, they’re not going to sign you, they’ll wait for a small label to pick you up and get the social media following going, and then they’ll pick you up. Nobody is spending that A&R money anymore. That no longer exists. But the record companies are very happy for that fiction to continue, and that’s what most people out there in the world still think.
VIDEO: Colin Newman “Turn”
Your quality control has always been very, very high, to everything you and Wire and you and Malka do.
What’s the point in doing it if it’s shit, y’know? That would be my way of saying the same thing. I have always been interested in things that have a very strong usp [unique selling point]; to know that you are doing something a bit different from what everyone else does. I remember back in the day, you’d have support bands turning up, and they’d say, ‘Oh, this is just my little project’ or something like that, and I’d think, if it’s just your ‘little project,’ why are you doing it? You should think it’s the best thing in the world, even if you’re the only person in the world who thinks it’s the best thing in the world.
I am obligated to ask if anything is going on in the Wire universe.
There is nothing to say. There is literally nothing more to say. The documentary reached a bit of an impasse, but I am hopeful that it will get finished, though I am not entirely sure when it will get finished. And I’m not in charge of Wire. It’s as simple as that. I run the bands’ business, but I am not in charge, I’m just a member. It’s up to the collective will of the band to decide what it does and does not want to do. I do think Wire is in a position it’s never been in before: What does a band who have been going nearly fifty years do when they’re earning more money than they’ve ever earned before – it’s not vast amounts of money, but it’s an income, and most musicians do not earn that much – so to have that coming in without actually doing anything, it changes your ideas about why you are doing it. You’d like to think that all artists look at everything from a purely artistic point of view, but they all have to look at the bigger picture. Why do you see artists in their seventies suddenly out on tour playing crappy little gigs and staying in cheap hotels and eating badly and staying up late? Because they need the money. Of course, it’s nice if they enjoy the connection with the audience and enjoy the artistic experience, but they need the money. I wanted, for a long time, to present Wire with a situation where it wouldn’t ever have to do anything it doesn’t want to do because there’s money there. I don’t want to set myself up as a hero of any kind, because I benefit from this as well. And that’s basically where Wire is right now, and I can’t tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do. They get their money every month.
Let me end by once again saying that I think it’s really extraordinary what you are doing… you’re creating a musical life, and honestly, everything you put out – including relatively odd re-releases like Bastard – is worth hearing, adds something to the picture of a musical life led completely, in coordination with a carefully run business.
Malka is a really, really essential part of that. We operate as a partnership on so many levels. I almost don’t regard myself as an artist separate from her anymore. I think you’ve got to just follow your instincts. And it’s a controversial point, but I think you really have to understand how the money works, because it gives you freedom. If you are all the time struggling for money, it’s a dead weight on you. Unless you can live rent free somewhere, it makes it impossible. It’s a really important point for creativity. Nobody should ever do it just for the money – I’ve never understood how anyone can do music just for the money, that’s almost a contradiction in terms – but you’ve got to buy yourself that freedom. It’s weird, I don’t even think of myself as being a musician – most of the time I’m not doing anything particularly artistic, because I have so many other things I need to do – but Malka and I, in half an hour of intensive work, create magic. That’s still a very exciting thing to me and will always remain so. It’s fun, and it should be fun.
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