Simon Goffe wears many hats these days. As the Owner/Partner of London-based Brownswood Recordings, the former deejay and club promoter has devoted his life’s work to music. Early in his career, Goffe realized that he had more skill in the business side of the music industry, which led to an early pivot into label and artist management. Today, Goffe works to develop and support talented artists at Brownswood Recordings, an independent label he founded in 2006 with eclectic and inclusive tastes, and one of the central hubs for emerging talent coming out of the United Kingdom at the moment.
Recently, Simon Goffe sat down with Glide Magazine to discuss the shaping of his career and current activities in music.
How does Brownswood Recordings fit into the ecosystem in the United Kingdom as an independent label?
Really, we just do our thing and work to support artists we love working with. I had a management company for fifteen years before we set up Brownswood, and it got to the point where I just wanted to do stuff that I was passionate about. I think when you’re younger and just starting out you’re more driven and trying to achieve things, make money, or whatever it is that drives you. Obviously, everyone that works in music is largely doing it out of passion, because you’d make far more money as an accountant or an engineer. I just got to the stage in my life where I was doing things I enjoyed and was proud of.
Brownswood was a label that Gilles [Peterson] and I started. Gilles had asked me if I was interested in setting up a record label, and initially I thought it wasn’t something I was itching to do, but his point was that there was a load of great music and artists looking for deals. He had record labels in the past, Acid Jazz and Talkin’ Loud, and he wanted to set up a new record label. So I was like, great, if I’m going do it, it’s best to do it with Gilles Peterson because he’s got great taste in music and you know the selection is going to be good.
Since the formation, we’ve done our own thing, and it was pretty tough for years. We set up Brownswood at a time where record labels were struggling with piracy, how to handle the Internet, and sales were probably half of what they were ten years prior. The only reason we survived was because we were earning money from other areas, so it was very much a sort of hobby or passion project at first.
Then suddenly, in the last two or three years, it started to come through as a serious label, because the music has come around. Vinyl has become much stronger, streaming has started to pay off, and musically, we are in the fortunate position of being in a place where people are creating great new music and young people are excited about the music we are putting out. So, in the last two or three years, it’s felt like Brownswood has sort of come through, and found its own niche within the market place. We just continue to do our own thing.
Gilles chooses the releases, he’s the A&R (Artist & Repertoire), if you will, I do the business side of things, and its very non-commercial. Gilles doesn’t choose music for business reasons; he chooses it based on music that he likes and people that he likes. We are able to continue that concept of working with people we like, which is great.
If people get that, it’s great, some do and some don’t, obviously. Now, we have a staff of about ten people. Initially, we started with one person and it’s grown since then. The sales are relatively small, compared to a major record label. So if we sell 20,000 albums, we’re ecstatically happy.
What do you think differentiates Brownswood from major labels in the U.K.?
For us, it’s about developing talent, and I think major labels have, over the last twenty years, moved away from that process. They want instant results, whereas we’re working with artists and we’re developing them. We’re in a lucky position to stick with artists, and help them develop their careers, and between our experience, Gilles, myself, Emily our label manager, who has been with us from the start and very experienced in business, we’re able to sit down with artists in the early part of their careers and help guide them through.
A lot of artists decide to do it themselves, and we’re all in favor of people being able to release music independently and follow their own path. We see ourselves as an opportunity for artists, who want it, to have a team of people help them achieve more than they can do on their own. Some people are happy doing it themselves, and that is fine, but if they want to work with us and we want to work with them, then it’s great.
A few years ago you partnered with Arts Council England to help establish Future Bubblers. Can you talk about the impact of that program and how it has influenced Brownswood?
Future Bubblers was an idea of a way to give back a little bit and support up and coming artists that perhaps weren’t ready to be signed by us or anyone else, or even ready to release their own music. We felt there was a need for their music to be heard.
I used to teach a music industry course one day per week, helping give people knowledge, but it seemed to me that there was a gap. I noticed that people would come to courses like that, learn about how the industry worked, but were still unable to put it into practice. It’s not easy putting your music out, spreading the word, and getting to a stage where you’re earning a living from making music. We felt there was a gap there and came up with the Future Bubblers project.
There are projects out there that give money to people, and that can be useful at the right time, but also you can spend the money on recording or touring and still feel that you haven’t gotten any further, necessarily. For me, I felt that mentoring was the key that people really needed.
Future Bubblers was all about helping up and coming artists who had no management, no record label, no publisher, no booking agent, and offering them workshops and mentorship for a year so they could be supported through the next steps in their career. It’s literally designed to give them a support network through that process.
When we decided that’s what we wanted to do, we were looking at how we could fund it, so we approached Arts Council England. Luckily they were into the idea, and decided to fund it. It’s just a really good project for us to be able to give something back and help support artists, and hopefully, some of those will come through.
In the first couple of years, we were careful not to sign anybody from the program because we didn’t want it to be seen as a platform to take advantage of artists, we just wanted to be able to help artists. We’ve now signed one artist that’s come through the program, Skinny Pelembe, and we’re putting his album out this year. There’s another artist named Yazmin Lacey, who we haven’t signed, but we’re supporting her and she’s doing really well releasing her own music and performing shows. It’s really about having that support network there for people.
How do you know when it’s the right time to sign an emerging artist?
You sign someone when you feel they’re ready. Most of the artists we sign, we tend to have followed their early career in some way, and we have seen how they’ve developed, and they’ve impressed us. Obviously, their music needs to be good, we need to like them, feel like they have a future, and are people that we want to work with. They also need to be ready to do a record deal and have a team of people working on their music.
We don’t sign artists very much because we want to have the time to focus on the artists that we have signed and the music they’ve released. We will release an album every two or three months, so we’ll typically do four or five artist albums per year, and one or two compilations. Each one of those we want to give proper attention to.
You don’t really need a record label today to release music. The point of a record label today is to give you the attention and have the team of people working on your project to take it further than you could yourself. Otherwise, there’s no point. For us, we need to be able to give attention to artists and help develop them. As for when they’re ready, it’s usually when Gilles gets excited by what they are doing and feels that they’re ready.
Do you feel that London has the infrastructure for artists to grow as independents?
Yes, I think so. There are tons of venues and getting gigs is not too difficult if you’re good and you’ve put a bit of effort into it. Now, you can release music yourself very simply. There are lots of aggregators online that will get your music onto iTunes, Spotify, and other digital services. Obviously, it’s expensive to release music on vinyl so you need to have money if you want to do that, but you don’t need much to get on Spotify and iTunes.
Unfortunately, in life, it’s not always about the music. A lot of it is about how driven the artist is, how determined they are, and how much effort they put in, but if you have all of those things, you’re at an advantage. You also have the choices to sign to a label at some point or doing it yourself.
Some artists don’t even want to put records out, they just want to do gigs and vice versa. There are definitely lots of options for artists, but it takes hard work and dedication without a doubt.
Can you talk about your work with Mistral Productions?
Mistral Productions is a separate company, but we set it up originally as a content creation company because we were making radio shows. Gilles has been making radio shows for over thirty years.
When we initially set it up, we made a few documentaries for the BBC, and some for record labels. Originally, we were offering our services to make radio shows, short form videos, or documentaries. Then a couple of years ago, we decided to set up an online radio station, Worldwide FM, because we felt there was a gap to fill for a station to play the sort of music that Gilles champions: everything from world music and jazz, to electronic. Mistral Productions has now really become a vehicle to run Worldwide FM. We still do a bit of third party production for other companies, but nearly everything goes into Worldwide FM now.
With Worldwide FM, are most of the programs broadcasted remotely?
Most of it is broadcasted remotely. We have shows from Tokyo, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Paris, for example. We do shows from all over the world, that’s really the point. We do about half of the shows from our studio in London, but the other half are done remotely. Every week, we have Lefto from Brussels, Le Mellotron from Paris, and Toshio Matsuura from Tokyo. There’s a whole bunch of shows that are done remotely, and it’s easy to it these days. Most of the shows are live, and with the joy of the Internet, you can broadcast remotely live. Sometimes, people will pre-record shows just for various reasons, if they don’t have a good enough Internet connection if they want to edit the production down, or edit mixes. Most of the shows are live, though, so it works out really well for us.
Have you seen that aid in bringing new artists into the fold of Brownswood?
I don’t think directly through Worldwide FM, but certainly through our contacts. This past year, Gilles has been playing a band called Mildlife on the radio, which released its first album earlier this year. Then we got them over to do some shows in London, and they managed to get a few more shows in the rest of Europe, so it worked out.
Recently, Gilles was in Melbourne, Australia and was able to do some radio with the band. They’re not on Brownswood, they have their own label in Australia, but they’ve very much become part of the team, which is nice.
It seems like that the network would help for distribution and promotion, in general for artists.
There’s no giant strategy here. We’re not trying to do all of this to sign people to Brownswood. We just do what we enjoy doing. Some want to sign to Brownswood, and some are already signed to other labels. A lot of music that we play on Worldwide FM is music that has been out for a long time, and hasn’t necessarily had the attention it deserves. We just enjoy doing what we’re doing, and make it an international thing.
We have the Worldwide Festival in the South of France, which we’ve been doing for twelve years now. Each year, the Worldwide FM family gets together in the South of France every July. You see people return year after year, which is nice. From our point of view, it’s all about building the community.
Going in an opposite direction, what first got you into music?
I just loved music. I was fortunate enough to be a teenager in London during the punk era, so that was amazing. I was a big fan of the Clash, and as a result of that got into listening to reggae, because the Clash used to have reggae bands play with them.
I was also a big record collector, and eventually people started to ask me to deejay their parties. Then, I ended up starting to deejay and put on my own club nights, so that I could deejay, because nobody was booking me, apart from friends for parties. Then, I started to book other DJs to play, like Gilles, who I used to book to play at my parties in the 1980s.
Later, I got into pirate radio, because there was a big scene in London. The radio stations were very controlled by the government, and the BBC was very traditional. There was commercial radio, and no alternative music on the radio those days. So pirate radio started up in London, and I was on a station.
Running the club nights worked out really well for me. I was a DJ for about eight years, but I soon realized that I was actually better on the business side and there were lots of DJs who were better than me. So I ended up setting up my own record label, and then a management company, and over time got more into the business side of things. I ended up working at Universal Music Publishing Group for a bit, but I realized that it was becoming purely about money. They didn’t care what the music was like. The only question was whether or not it was going to make money. I understand that reality, that’s the world we live in, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do, so that’s when I went back into management, working with artists and music that I like.
What makes you most excited about the future of music right now?
Right now, it’s an amazingly exciting time in London with the jazz scene, which is really incredible. There’s been this explosion of great music. Earlier this year, we did a compilation album called We Out Here, which is sort of a snapshot of the early scene. It seems like artists are just going from strength to strength. The world is starting to discover this really exciting new scene. That, together with artists like Kamasi Washington, Kendrick Lamar, and other artists developing in the United States, makes it feel like a really exciting time.
Nick Gunther lives and writes in Philadelphia, PA. In addition to his contributions to Glide Magazine, he also publishes a monthly music newsletter titled obsession.fm.
One Response
Great work Simon! Well done.