6. Harvey MilkLive At Supersonic 2008
Harvey Milk are a four piece. We saw them for the first time at South By Southwest, they were doing a number of showcases with the band Torche. One of the shows that we went to see was in this tiny fire station. It was so packed that people were on the PA. It would never happen in the UK, it was such a health and safety nightmare, but somehow you get away with it in Austin. I just thought they were utterly amazing and wanted to bring them to the UK. When we got in touch with them, they didn’t even have passports. There’s a lot of pre work that happens in persuading a band that’s never travelled before to come to the UK and guaranteeing that you are going to actually pay them and that there will be an audience for them. It was a great challenge, but then when they opened and they just got these really heavy, heavy guitar sounds, it was all worth it and the audience at Supersonic went nuts for them. Again, we put that out as a live record to capture that really special moment.
We’ve put out four [live records]. When Southern Records existed, we used to do it through them and when Southern stopped, we stopped doing the records. We put out Blue Ruth’s EP cassette as a limited edition recently, but that was during COVID. Because we weren’t able to do live we were trying to think of ways to kind of support artists and also still keep connected with our audience.
The band come from Athens, Georgia, and they just didn’t expect that there would be an audience for them in the UK, so they were completely blown away by the response they got from the audience. I played one of the tracks [from the record] for Stuart Maconie when I did an interview with him ages ago, and he just absolutely loved them. It was like this infectious thing. Once you’ve heard it, you tell everybody else about it.
