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#ff The inimitable @a_deplume is releasing his debut album soon and it's amazing. Listen here http://t.co/bLLC6hU6 (general release 28/5/12)

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DEBT Records is a label born out of troubled times, a label nurse-fed on the understanding that current music industry practices are failing both artists and listeners. DEBT IS A LABEL THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO THAT INDUSTRY

November 2010's Articles

Becca & The Broken Dreams

10 November 2010

Pop music has always been about hope. After all, it’s a young person’s genre and Hope is what young people trade in. The rule applies to every pop hook from “We’ll meet again” in the 1940s to “I hope I die before I get old” in the 1960s and it continues on into the present day with no signs of abating.

Well now Becca & The Broken Biscuits are telling Pop Music that it’s time to grow up.

“Train Driver”, the new single from the Manchester three piece, was directly inspired by a list of bullet points its singer had come up with in response to the common question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” - a list she’d written over twenty years earlier.

On it the words “alt/folk-pop vocalist with day job in higher education and administration” are conspicuous by their absence. “Deep-sea diver”, “cowboy”, “explorer” and “spy” are just a few of the fanciful answers that pepper this moving song about when Rites of Passage give way to Rites of Past-It.


Songwriter Becca Williams (like the other artists on Debt Records) has always chosen to do things her own way. Attempts by others to change her image or influence her performance style have repeatedly been met with disinterest from the singer. As a consequence Becca’s beautiful voice, easy onstage performance style and naturally infectious music has, for the best part of a decade, been confined to the opening slots of dingy Northern pub music nights. Nevertheless, a mixture of indomitable enthusiasm and dogged determination has meant that over the last year she has finally been getting the recognition that was always due to her: receiving regular airplay, mainstage festival bookings and a growing international fan-base.

It’s strangely apt that the songs are so often about going somewhere - both in terms of geography as well as aspiration. “Astronaut Song” - the single’s B-Side and a long-time live favourite with fans - is a good example of this but, when one delves a little deeper into Becca’s lyrics, the message is more often about going nowhere. They speak about a life away from Pop Music’s promises - a life far more familiar to the X-Factor generation than to any other in the history of the mainstream music industry.

So it is with great pleasure that this independent label announces the release of “Train Driver”, the first of many projects Debt Records has planned with The Broken Biscuits. I’m tempted to make a Train Driver pun about being “on the right track”. But I won’t.

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Relighting Fires

01 November 2010

As Take That celebrates the release of their latest studio record and the twentieth year since they first squeezed into the leather waist-coats and learnt how to head-spin, Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six show that it’s not all about the Take, but also a bit about the Give.

Last Summer, Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six were asked to be a part of BBC Manchester’s 40th Birthday celebrations (along with label-mates Richard Barry and Becca Williams). The project, entitled 40x40, saw forty of the best new bands on the Manchester circuit rearrange and record famous songs with a Manchester connection - each song being specially chosen to represent a year in the life of the Radio Station.

Chris Long, Producer of BBC Introducing, says: “We were asked for ideas to celebrate 40 years of BBC Radio Manchester and the idea instantly popped into my head for 40 of the acts that I work with on BBC Introducing to cover 40 Manchester musical moments. We’re trying to showcase the fantastic musical history we’ve got and the brilliant musical future in Greater Manchester.”

At first it seemed that The Bedlam Six had been given a rather short straw - their year was 1993 and the song was Take That & Lulu’s cover of Dan Hartman’s disco classic “Relight My Fire”. Not exactly Music’s finest hour!

Louis accepted the challenge with relish, however, and quickly knocked the pop classic into a lounge-shaped barfly lament with a generous helping of customary Barabbas filth. The band then spent a day in Nether Alderley’s Kasbahn studio (which is run by Bedlam bassist Dan Watkins) and put together this five minute dirt-swing epic that couldn’t be further from Take That’s chart-topper if it tried.

“We’re all rather fond of this strange little number” says composer Louis, “we thought it a shame to just let it disappear after BBC Manchester’s birthday celebrations fizzled out so we’re letting people download the mp3 and they’re free to do what they like with it. We don’t own any rights to the song and, what with our new record and preparing for a big tour, we really don’t have the time to chase up the legal side so there will be no money changing hands and no email addresses bartered… it’ll just be there for anyone who enjoyed listening to it on the radio over the last few months.”

“Relight My Fire” is now available to download free from the Debt Records Shop.

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