"After Napalm Death exploded really, John Peel was playing loads of their stuff, it was a really bizarre period"
Digby Pearson dropped out of Nottingham University after just one semester and was working as a roadie and promoter when he founded Earache Records in 1986 from his bedroom in Hyson Green. Pearson, already a huge fan of independent music, had noticed the beginnings of a crossover of the Hardcore Punk and Thrash Metal scenes and became one of the first to start releasing records by extreme heavy metal bands.
His third release, Napalm Death’s Scum LP, epitomized this new sound (dubbed by the Birmingham band as Grind Core) which was soon picked up by the legendary John Peel. In 1988 the band crashed into the mainstream, their second album debuting at No.1 in the UK Indie charts, giving Pearson a platform from which to release a succession of new and extreme records to a rapidly growing fan base. Earache quickly built up a catalogue of the biggest names in extreme metal including Godflesh, Morbid Angel, Entombed, Pitchshifter, Linea 77, Mortiis and their biggest selling artist this year, Adema. 17 years on and 8 million records later I caught up with Digby to reflect on the astounding success of this Nottingham based independent label.
At what point did you realize Earache could become quite big?
After Napalm Death exploded really, John Peel was playing loads of their stuff, it was a really bizarre period and this happened to loads of bands before my experience and after, you send the stuff to Peel and he’s such an institution he was just playing Napalm Death all the time on his show, not just one play and “that was Napalm Death” he’d invite them down for a session, spin like three or four tracks and rave about them on the radio. At the Brit Awards he spent about ten minutes in the rough trade shop just showing my releases more or less because Earache was the first label that kind of epitomized extreme metal.
Why does Nottingham have such a low output of new bands?
That’s the mythical Nottingham question! My theory is because it’s a town of students, I grew up here and I’ve lived all my life here, I’ve seen the summers when everyone disappears, I’m still here we’re still here, but like all the bars are empty, everyone that was in a band it seems was at uni here, then three years later they bugger off and get a job elsewhere and so it’s almost like they’ve got three years to make it that’s my theory. That might be why the only bands to really break out of Nottingham are rock bands of people who live here. Who’s the biggest band now? Bent probably I don’t know, they’re Nottingham born and bred, they’ve got their deal with Ministry of Sound or whatever they’ve got and they do well.
It’s great to have an institution like Earache in Nottingham it seems many people however are unaware of your presence.
I like the fact we’re going to be in a Nottingham Magazine, we’ve been invisible in Nottingham for many years, which is kind of cool in a way I don’t actually mind, we’d see metalers walking up and down everyday going to rock city wearing our bands shirts, none of them know I don’t think that the place where a lot of it comes from is this place above a cob shop and a futon shop.
How have you avoided moving to London?
I like being slightly provincial and we’ve got a London promo office in Camden which is how we got around that one, I’d already resisted the temptation to move the whole thing to London coz that’s were it’s at in the music industry. I just like the fact that we’re in Nottingham, I really like that. We’ve got a New York Office as well which is like our branch office, I used to visit that all the time it’s really similar to this, same amount of people putting out the same releases into the American market where we’ve got a big fan base and some of our bands get in the billboard charts now and again. And that’s right in the middle of Manhattan that’s like as central as you can get, but I really don’t like it when I go there, I can’t stand it. I live in Ruddington which is a village to the south, twenty minutes away on a bus you’re in the countryside, that’s what I really like about Nottingham you can get the best of both worlds and if you need to go to London it’s only an hour and a half.
Have any of your bands caused you any trouble before?
Well we had a police raid here once (NME) we did this band Carcass in the very early days, they’re an extreme death metal band. It was about ten in the morning when we opened and about ten coppers barged in the doors basically with crowbars and proceeded to ransack the office looking for stuff they deemed obscene they were looking for obscene material and then they found these Carcass CD’s, which weren’t being hidden or anything they were on open sale and we also had a band called Cadaver which also had a similar sleeve, we were going to get sued and I was going to be prosecuted under the obscene publications act believe it or not. They took away ten bags of evidence away and that was it, my lawyer said don’t worry the last person to get prosecuted under that act was probably Lady Chatterley’s lover in the 70s. We rang up the NME at the time and they ran a big story on it and luckily we got a lot of support from the industry, censorship should never be applied to music even when it’s strong stuff like that. It was really helpful to get the support from other labels because I didn’t know I thought I’d just get sued and I’d go to prison literally I was looking at a prison sentence it’s fucking insane, for putting out death metal records. We went to the director of prosecutions and we had a few interviews and gave evidence and eventually it fizzled out, luckily, and my lawyer showed them the absurdity of their actions.
Earache Records website
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