Interview: Unsung Heroes Of 2010, No.1 - The Richter Collective

We know it's already been said many times both here and elsewhere, but 2010 has been an exceptionally strong year for Irish music. It's been a year that's seen Conor O'Brien's Villagers send a reminder to Mercury Prize judges that they should look across the Irish Sea a little more often; meanwhile, Two Door Cinema Club have apparently played over two hundred sold-out shows and counting (not to mention accounting for one or two mobile phone sales along the way); and Solar Bears offered proof, if it were needed, that Irish acts are capable of generating far-reaching blog buzz once the music's good enough. 

It's also been a year in which one domestic indie label has stood proud at the forefront of a sparsely-resourced, but never-more-crucial part of the country's music industry. It's fair to say you'd be hard pressed to draft a list of 2010's finest Irish releases and not include albums from The Redneck Manifesto, Jogging, Enemies, Adebisi Shank and Not Squares. Similarly, the new year would start to look a lot more barren without the prospect of full-length debuts from the likes of Squarehead and Logikparty to look forward to.

In case you didn't already know, what unites all of these acts is their tenure on independent Irish imprint The Richter Collective - the biggest small label in the land, you might say. As a highly successful twelve months for the Dublin-based collective draws to a close, we were delighted to catch up with Michael Roe: label co-founder, Adebisi Shank drummer, The Cast Of Cheers manager - and the first of our 'unsung heroes' of 2010.

Hiya, Michael. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. When you look back on 2010, do you think it might prove to be the year when Richter became a real force in Irish music?

I think this year the label seemed to be taken a lot more seriously by people. More of the hard graft probably went in in years previous - building things up slowly and getting things organised - and this year was just a culmination of that, building things up further and expanding the roster. I think the first big one for us this year was The Rednecks' release, which seemed to get a lot more people looking at the label. We were just lucky that all of the subsequent releases were of a good standard after that really.

Getting to release The Rednecks' album seemed like quite a coup when it was announced earlier this year. How did it come about that they signed to Richter? Did they come to you or did you approach them?

Well, originally they came to us - we already knew Richie (Egan, Redneck Manifesto/Jape) and we kinda just knew the rest of the lads from being around. Richie knows Barry (Lennon, Richter co-founder) pretty well from back in the day, back when Barry used to do punk gigs. I think The Rednecks lads were big into BATS and Adebisi - the two releases we'd done before they got in touch with us - and they liked the attitude, what we were about and that we were taking it seriously. So they came to us, but it was a bit of a no-brainer as far as we were concerned; we were already big fans. It might have seemed too big a project for us at the time... for where we were at, but we just ran with it and it seemed to work really well. Everything's just snowballed since then really, I think.

It certainly has. But going back to the work you put in during those first few years - why did you start the label? Was it initially just to release your own music?

For me, I had a separate label from Barry at the start and yeah, Richter was set up in the first place to release stuff by my own band, but I've always had a love of indie labels in general. I always wanted to build... I hate to use the word 'scene', but a kind of a little club around a couple of bands. So we did Adebisi initially, along with a couple of other bands. So for me, first of all the primary thing was that nobody else wanted to release an Adebisi Shank EP (laughs), but the second thing was that I did want to build up a little scene around what I saw as exciting music at the time.

You say nobody else wanted to put out your EP, but is it fair to say that, over the course of the last decade at least, there haven't really been any independent labels of note in Ireland chasing talent - in the way that, say, Domino, FatCat or other smaller indies have done in the UK?

I didn't consciously see that at the start, but I started to notice it more and more from being in contact with the smaller indies in the UK and Europe through Adebisi - I really started building and learning through them. It suddenly struck me that there wasn't really the same thing here; there were a couple of labels like Out On A Limb in Limerick who were doing things similarly to us, but certainly as far as I can remember, there hadn't been one in Dublin - as you say, on the same scale as Domino, FatCat or whoever.

At the same time, it makes a hell of a lot of sense in Ireland to release music yourself - see the likes of Messiah J & The Expert, Halves etc. - but what's exciting for me now is that in Richter, Ireland finally has an indie label that people really want to be on and associated with. Exciting young bands like Logikparty and Squarehead, for example. Do you get a sense of that now too?

I think so, yeah... It's a really weird thing because I tend to be really unaware of it all until you get someone approaching you whom you'd consider to be on a totally different platform. Like, we've had a couple of pretty big artists approaching us recently, and every time it just really hits me... I'm just like "Fuck, maybe we are doing something right!" (laughs). It is really nice - at the end of the day, we can only do what we can do. There are three of us who make decisions at the label at this stage, so we can't really take everything we want on just yet, but there's so many bands releasing stuff themselves... I guess bands maybe don't need labels as much any more, but I think sometimes it can work in bands' favour or their detriment. I think if a band already has that label mentality - like Halves or MJEx, like you say - then they're good to go, they have it nailed. And we worked with MJEx on a 7", so you can still do little tie-ins like that. But it is definitely surprising when people approach us or we go to them and they're really enthusiastic. 

Do you have a lot of bands sending you in stuff? More so than, say, a year ago?

Yeah, that has noticeably picked up. I try to listen to as much as I can, but it can be hard sometimes to go through absolutely everything. The ones I'll always listen to and engage with are people who show they're willing to go the extra mile... bands who are keen to meet up face-to-face, for instance; or if a band we play with gives a CD to us. A lot of the emails we get are clearly, not even blind carbon-copied, but carbon-copied on to hundreds of other labels. Some of the labels are friends too, so that can be a bit of a nightmare!

In general terms, how do you go about finding/looking to sign bands? I assume there's no strict rule...

You're right, there is no real rule set in stone, but with pretty much all the bands - either Adebisi have played with them at some point, or else a band on the label have played with them. We found Not Squares through BATS after they played with each other, and then I went up to Belfast to check them out. A few of the other bands I would have heard about first through journalists or people talking about them, and there are a couple of others again who would be old friends who've just started new bands, like Squarehead or The Cast Of Cheers. It's such a small scene that you kind of know everyone. It can be a bit of a mish-mash at times, but it is a kind of a natural thing. As of yet, there's been no real case of "Here's a CD", I check it out and I love it. 

On the monetary side of things: are you and maybe others able to make some sort of a living from the label now, or have you plans to do so in the future? 

No! (laughs)... I don't think there's ever really going to be a situation further down the line where we can support the number of staff we need through a traditional label model. We are planning to expand and do a couple of new things next year - we've already taken on manufacturing from another company, and the same staff in Richter are going to do that. As far as a straight-up livelihood goes, it would be tough for this to be our only job... I do management and stuff as well.

How many of you are working for Richter now?

There is a 'staff' of four now. There's one guy, Lewis, who we took on about a year ago, and he does a lot of the work now at this stage. Recently we got Danielle in to do publishing as well. Then there's me and Barry who set up the company and own it, and we still make the major decisions, but we wouldn't be in the office every day... I'd only be in two or three days a week at this stage, and Barry can only do one day because he has a full-time job. 

In terms of sales of albums for you guys - what are they like? Do you have any sort of breakdown on CD/MP3 sales?

To be honest, we won't have a proper sales breakdown for this year's releases until the middle of next year, when we can properly find out. For the one we can see at the minute - The Rednecks - we've shifted about a thousand CDs in Ireland to date; that's just before this tour. But The Rednecks, as you well know, don't do many live shows. It's healthy over a certain period of time, but it's a case of just striking that balance between getting your returns against the investment you've put in. I mean, when you hear a thousand you tend to think that's not that much, but for a small country like Ireland it's actualy pretty good... good enough to get you into the indie charts for sure. Adebisi charted too, so you'd be surprised at the level at which some of the stuff gets in! (laughs) It's not major numbers.

Digital sales are incredibly healthy though; especially through Bandcamp, which has been great for us and which we get a lot of money from. It can take a long time before you see any money from iTunes sales though - for The Rednecks' LP, we probably won't see proper returns until February. Overall, though, I would say it's healthy; it's not terrible, but it's not amazing.

Against that backdrop, is it even more important to be realistic when running a label in 2010? In terms of giving away free downloads, streaming albums on blogs etc. prior to a release, can there sometimes be too many different modes of distribution to keep tabs on?

Obviously, if someone has a model or a platform that works - and plenty do, be it concentrating on just short runs of vinyl or whatever - then they should go with that. But I think now, within a semi-traditional label framework... if your album isn't available for free online, controlled by you - whether that be via streaming through Spotify or Bandcamp or wherever - then you're really damaging yourself. If people can't hear it, then they're just going to go straight to BitTorrent or Rapidshare and find a link. At least you're giving them a slight option with Bandcamp, and with a low price-tag on the sale of digital stuff. The more closed you are now, the more infuriating you'll be to internet listeners. You know, stuff like a thirty-second sample of a song, that drives me fucking bananas! You have to be realistic. Majors who won't let people embed stuff, that's just insane. It doesn't make business sense... You have to be open, and then if people like the music enough I think they'll be willing to pay for it. That's what I'd like to think anyway!

What other advice would you have for someone who wanted to start a label? What are the big pitfalls to avoid?

I think definitely start small. We got into a lot of trouble at the start by signing up to a distribution contract that ended up really not working out well for us. We thought in the beginning that it would be better to have some distribution sorted than nothing at all, but by the time we'd moved on to bigger releases we were still stuck in that contract. So don't sign up to anything for the first six months that might tie you down later, because you probably won't get good terms when you're starting out. Try and keep things open, try and stay up-to-speed with new technology... Instead of doing a music management degree or something along those lines, you're better off nowadays doing a web design course, or some sort of technology degree. Nobody really knows for sure what the future holds for the music industry, but you will definitely have to be seriously web-savvy to succeed. 

Finally, what's on the cards in 2011 for The Richter Collective?

We definitely have a Squarehead album to look forward to, which is really exciting. We're going to rerelease the second Adebisi Shank LP in the UK because it never went through proper distribution over there. What else do we have?... The Cast Of Cheers record is going to get a proper release - I'm not 100% sure yet if that will be on Richter, but it will be coming out anyway. There'll be a Logikparty album too at some stage, as well as a Hands Up Who Wants To Die album. There was one other thing confirmed, although I can't quite think of it just now... All in all, it certainly looks as though we'll have another busy year in store!

The Richter Collective will round off the year in fine festive style with a Christmas Party featuring live sets from no fewer than seven Richter acts. The gig - which will also act as the Dublin launch party for Not Squares' RW-approved Yeah OK LP - takes place at The Button Factory on Wednesday, December 22. Full lineup details can be found here, while tickets (at a very reasonable €12) are available through tickets.ie here.