EPISODE 18 - KEVIN CRACE

The Counterforce with Aug Stone

Young Southpaw chats to Kevin Crace and gets the skinny on his legendary label, Humbug Records. Ignored in their native country, the label was nevertheless home to some of the finest eccentric British songwriters - Captain Sensible, Martin Newell, Simon Turner, Colin Lloyd Tucker, TV Smith... Some excellent records were made, along with homemade jam, early xmas parties, and the conviction/label motto that “two dozen people can’t be wrong”.

https://www.discogs.com/label/29069-Humbug-2

Kevin Crace: I wanted to create my own label and a label that was sort of themed, sort of stylized label. I was really listening to people like él Records. That’s really where I was coming from at that time. Me and my friends were some of the few people sitting around in London listening to él, listening to XTC, listening to this sort of esoteric pop music. And really I felt the world really needed that at that time. And I nicked a couple of the él artists, and was quite pleased to do so. Louis Philippe came and joined me and I did some work with Simon Turner, The King Of Luxembourg. I loved él. There were probably very few people who were ever listening to it, if I’m being honest, it was so specialized. It didn’t represent anything else that was going on in the music world at that time, but it just really worked for me, it was so beautiful. And as much as I’d come from a punk background, and an electronic background, and an indie background, I really like things like The Ink Spots. I love some of those old classic bands that had just been totally forgotten at that stage. So when 1992 came around, I started to look at acts to sign for Humbug Records and I found that there was this whole amazing selection of great, great British singer-songwriters that were homeless. They weren’t able to make money, they weren’t able to get signed, and they certainly weren’t able to get any recognition in the media for how great they were. So to some extent, there was an endless list of people that I could have signed as an independent at that stage.

So I started off, the first signing was Captain Sensible. I love The Damned. For me, they were my childhood band. They were the punks, not the Pistols, they were the real punks. And Captain had split with The Damned at that time, he’d been apart from them for a number of years, he was creating this wonderful, wonderful pop music. Just simply brilliant. That it was almost impossible to get anybody to listen to. That was always the problem. With Captain, with Humbug, with all of these, it was a very difficult time to get the media to support you. Because at that time there wasn’t really the respect shown to the great British artists.