Intervista a Mark Powell, presidente dell’etichetta discografica Eclectic Discs


Giulia Nuti: Let’s start talking a little bit about Eclectic . How did it al begin? Which was the idea behid the label?

Mark Powell: Ever since the 80s, when I was buying a lot of second hand vinyls and CDs came out, I had the idea to have a label to issue music on CD. Before I became a consultant working for Universal and EMI, I was working in mastering studios in London so remastering was something I was doing. I have been doing that for seven years, and through getting involved with Caravan I got into Universal Music and became a consultant. And after few years doing that, I realised that there was a lot of stuff that the major labels had but they were not interested in relasing it on cd, it would not sell enough. And eventually I came out with the idea “well, why not to set a label to do that”. And also to release new material by artists that I desired to to work with . I had discussions with a guy I worked with on all the remastering on all my Universal projects, called Paschal Byrne , and Paschal agreed to come in, to partnership and set up Eclectic. And the first album we did was Caravan’s Unauthorised Breakfast Item. It was originally supposed to be released on another label, and basically this label didn’t pay the final stages in advance. They were supposed to pay. So I payed them back the money they payed so far and we released the album on Eclectic. That came out in Sptember 2003, and then there was a series of albums I originally began to work on for Universal, for Decca. They were the albums by Can, Egg, East of Eden. Decca saw that we rellay wanted to do this and so I licenced those album off and started reissuing things. And from that I was involved with Nektar on a management label, and I just menaged to negotiate the rights to release their music outside Germany and to remaster it for the first time. And so the Nektar stuff came out on Eclectic as well. We did quite well with our first things, and so it became easier to get material from other labels. Now we are doing a lot with EMI records and with Univarsal as well. Barclay James Harvest’s boxes are compilation of Universal’s material, EMI’s material and material which is coming directly form the band itself, rarities and unreleased material. That is what Eclectic is now


GN: You talked about material coming directly from artists. I read in the liner notes of the latest Nektar release of the previously unreleased material coming directly from Mo Moore

MP: Yes, that’s right. I stay in touch with Mo and Mo actually suggested he had some recordings somewher in his attic. And so he had a look through and discovered this tapes with Robert Fripp playing the guitar and immediately worked on it. We were actually getting ready to release that album, and Mo said he found this extra material so we stopped the release. I happened quite a lot with the Barclay james Harvest’s box. We really finished everything, and I was still looking for some unrelesed tracks. John Lees, the guitarist, called me and said “I have just found a very interesting tape”, he said, “ this is a demo we recorded at Abbey Road in 1971 “. And it is totally different, they have got very interesting talking on it. And John Lees gave me the tape and said “just release it”. It happens a lot, lots of people always say “no, we don’t have anything” and when they find one thing they say “ ok, hang on with it” and then they search and find other things. People always have got something and that’s interesting

GN: So you work very close to the artisits, even when you do reissues…

MP: Yes, definitely. And when I do reissues for the major labels, for example with the Van Der Graaf Generator releases I found a lot of unreleased material up to about 1972, but after that there was nothing because people started making records in a different way… But then Peter Hammil said “I think I have some interesting recordings”, so Peter provided most of the bonus material on these later albums. And recently, woking with Steve Hackett, we finished all the remastering of the albums and Steve kept saying to me “there is a version of “Shadow of the Hierophant” that lasts 17 minutes , it has got Phil Collins and Robert Fripp on it as well. But it’s a shame it is not there at EMI, they don’t have it”. So we said let’s leave it the way it is. But we where just about to manifacture the CD, and Steve found the tape in his father’s garden shed. And so it was sent over and we were able to add that, and we made a much better reissue. So people once they get the feeling and how you want to present something, they are usally very cohoperative, they usually find things too.

GN: A lot of attention seems to be focused on progressive music. Is this the direction you deliberatley chosed or did it just come to be this way?

MP: It is my favourite type of music. The term “progressive” covers such a wide…I don’t really like it, but it was called progressive at the time. It includes many inflences, from jazz to hard rock.. It is my favourite…but I also like psychedelia, British beat from the mid sixties…I hope we will be doing some of that with Eclectic. And there is some R&B stuff that I would like to do, British R&B bands… I am a fan of people like the Graham Bond Organization, Yardbirds…So Eclectic isn’t just going to concentrate on that, but we are maily focused on that.

GN: New releases also seem to be important like Jim Leverton, Caravan…Can you tell me something about this part of the activity?

MP: What’s happening recently is that a lot of artists know that we exist now, so we keep getting called by some people. Jim mentioned he recorded this album. He and John spent some time in his studio. Jim initially wanted to do it himself but he didn’t have distribution, so we worked out an arrangement to make the album come out with Eclectic. Then recently the band Audience reformed, they lived quite close to Canterbury as well, so one day Jim got a number and he called me up and asked if I would be interested in doing that material, so they have a new live album out and they actually recorded this themselves. We take material from the people who already got it . The advance is that we didn’t pay for the studio recordings, we did it with Nektar with their album Evolution, we did that with Woolly Wolstenholme solo album, “One drop in a dry world”…

GN: I like it very much…

MP: It is a great album. It is my favourite new album on Eclectic. We will been working with John Lees and Wooly Wolstenholme on a new album, and hopefully we will start the recordings very soon. We come to Florence to do this thing in the bookstore and then they should be going back and start with their album. And it will be ready for spring or summer next year.

GN: Lookin from the outside it seems like Eclectic has something special, many artists form the Seventies are finding a new home for their creativity…

MP: I hope so. I doesn’t really take a great deal of money to do these things. And I hope Ecelctic will be able to do more new material because it does interest me, I like the idea of finding great bands, great musicians and ispire them to go back in the studios and do something again, to make interesting music. And we have a very big relationship with Canterbury local recording studios, people are fantastic. Then there is someone who works for Eclectic in the offices, Julian Hastings, he’s Pye Hastings’ son . Julian is also record producer, he produced and engineered a lot of hit singles in the late 80s, early 90s, diffirent kind of music.It’s good when people do different things, when you have a small label everyone has to do different things

GN: How many people work for Eclectic?

MP: In the office we have my wife Vicky, Julian, Jane… Then Paschal is a director of the company and of the remastering. And I decide what to release, basically

GN: How did the idea of reissuing the whole Nektar’s catalogue come to be?

MP: In the 70s they were signed to a very bad record company in Germany. when the band came back together again they had some material released on CD but the record company had done a very bad job, the even used the wrong master tapes on some CDs. On Remember the Future there was no guitar, it wasn’t there. And fans complained about it, especially in America. And so when I started working with Nektar, the first thing I did was trying to persuade the record company in Germany to remaster the material and to do it properly. And they did Remember The Future, but then they did such a terrible job, they didn’t promote it, relationships where bad… And so we thought let’stake the tape and we will do everything for Britain and America. And what happened was that all the master tapes came to England, we discovered that the wrong master tapes were used for the CDs so we foud the right tapes and made it again and at the time we thougt about doing the whole Nektar’s catalogue. We are doing a Best of as well,

GN: I saw that there is also a lot of unreleased material…

MP: Yes, theree is. We just got some multi track tapes. their label in Germay didn’t release them so we decided to do it

GN: You went also through the reissue of some minor artists like Clive John or Locomotive, that maybe at the time were a little bit underrated.

MP: The Clive John’s album led me to so many things, it got me working for Sony Music in UK because a gentlemen by the name Tim Fraser-Harding, who is in charge of the catalogue, a very serious person…that happened to be one os his favourite albums. And we kept in touch by e-mail because he e-mailed me and said he relly loved it. He sent me an e-mail in which he sai “any label who releases this album has got to be good”. And even if it didn’t sell as weel as anything else we have done, it was important for me to release that album because it is a very good album and Clive is a lovely man. And the Locomotive album… when I set up ecelctic that has to be one of the first things to be relesed.A lot of people really like that album . It’s important to look at some of these things, some of these things didn’t sell very well at the time but can be very good sellers now. The Bill Fay albums at the time sold a couple of thousand each on vinyl, we doubled that in three months with CDs. Oddly thanks to the band Wilco, who in the States covered some things of his first album, they have been talking about Bill’s music. Bill is in touch with us, he is a very nice musician. In England we got a lot of very good press, on Mojo Magazine we had two pages as an interview, we are very pleased of that. I think if a lot of people see the same things in the same way that you do, it’s worth doing it. The Bill Fay’s albums have been very successful

GN: Let’s talk a little bit about other sides of your activity, you did the Vertigo Box, the Island Box. How did it come to be? It is a great anthological operation, very accurate…

MP: When I first started working for Universal, I was specificaly working on catalogue which was part of the Decca label, like Deram. And I have done the Caravan catalogue for them and Camel, and Ten Years After . At that point it struk me that EMI did a great box set 1999 on the Harvest label, so I thought we could do something on the Deram or Decca label telling the story of psychedelic progressive rock. It was a project we worked on as a sort of a side line to everything else. Eventually there was space in the reissues and and Andy Street at Universal said ok, let’s do the box. That came out in January 2003. Within six weeks it sold three thousand copies, which is really good for a box set. And it got great reviews. And after this box set called Legend of a mind I thought we could do it with Vertigo, we could do it with Island, we could do it with all these labels of the Universal catalogue. I then suggested doing Vertigo and Island and other projects came along with more energy. And eventually Joe Black at Universal said ok, and he took over a lot of things that Andy had begun. The Vertigo box was the first one to come out, and we worked for more than one year to put the things together, trying to find the rights… I really enjoyed the Vertigo box, I love that kind of music. I chose the tracks. That was the idea behind it and it was the same with the Island label. It was again a real labour of love. Unfortunately we couldn’t get some of the tracks because Universal lost the rights. Other people like Rober Fripp were very supportive and let us issue some King Crimson’s tracks. So it was good, it was enjoyable. It is coming out now

GN: Which are your favourite tracks on the compilation?

MP: On the Island?

GN: Yes, but also on the Vertigo one if you have one in particular

MP: Ok, in the Vertigo one it is easier. It is definitely “Let it happen” by Vangelis, or “The four horsemen” by Aphrodite’s Child. “The four horsemen” is probabily my favourite one, the album “666” is great. But there are so many good tracks on the Vertigo box. It might be the Affinity track as well, they were fantastic. On the Island box it is hard to say… It is not so obscure, but it probabily has to be something like “No time to live” by Traffic, or “ Song for Suzie” by Heads, Hands and Feet, something completely different… but there are so many good tracks on it by different artists, Spooky Tooth… I could go on and on !

GN: Did you learn something, also for your own job, going through the history of these labels?

MP: Always. I am always learning. Every time I think I know about somebody, when I do research I then find I don’t know as much as I thought I did. The other thing is that when you go to the master tapes, the dates on the tape boxes sometimes contradict the previous history and you think actually everyone’s got that wrong, because that date is there and people say it happened on a different date, and then you look back to find the studio records and you realise that people’s memory was wrong. That happened with Van Der Graaf Generator, every member of the band came out with a different story! their memory got confused with something else so e-mails were circulating between all the members of the band syaing “It didn’t happen then, did it?. That’s what it says on the tape box…” It is quite funny sometimes. But yes, I am always learning things. And the other thing is that I go back to music press of that time. In London there is a Library which has the whole collection of news papers and magazine going back to the 50s, music papers like Melody Maker or NME. So you go back to them when you want to know when an album was originally released, you can go there and find the original reviews, find out where the band played… I ma always learning something, I am very lucky

GN: Do you have any suggestion for the younger generation ? For boys, girls who want to get to know more about music, to play an instrument…

MP: It’s funny…I don’t know really ! I think the secret about music and being a reasonable musician is to listen to as much music as you can, not just one style. I play the guitar. For me starting playing rock guitar and understang different elements in rock music in general starts up with the blues. Because it is basically where it started, anyway. I look to all the bands and people I admire and they all started often from that, or at least in Britain they started admiring Rithm&Blues, Jazz…If you listen to Beatles or Rolling Stones, British R&B, Psyhedelia, Progressive rock…And I think people shoud listen to blues, jazz, people like Stockhausen, also classical music… Everything. It is just music. Listen to as much music as you can. And I think the reason I like music form that psychedelic era is that it was one of the few times when record companies forgot what was going on for a minute and let people do what they wanted, in the studios…Sometimes they didn’t get it quite right, trying something embarassing, but other things where astonishing because of this “happy accidents”…things didn’t need to be planned, they just got together and sounded amazing…You couldn’t see record companies these days allowd an album like “666” to be made !

GN: And going back to Eclectic, which are your future projects?

MP: The most imminent thing is the Barcaly James Harvest 5 CDs box set which is quite a big project for us, and it’s the first time we have a major corporation with two different major labels. And then we are doing a couple of albums by an English band called High Tide. We are doing their albums Sea Shanties and High Tide. I found unreleased material from the first album that EMI’s got, so we have a deal with EMI. We are now able to take unreleased material form EMI and mix it, and we are the first reissue label to be able to do that, mostly because people envolved with Eclectic are also wotking for EMI or Universal. And once the Hight Tide are coming out, maybe next year, we have an album by a singer-songriter called Colin Scott, it was recorded in 1971 and it features members of Van Der Graaf Generator, Genesis, Linda Hoyle of the Affinity, Brinsley Schwarz, Robert Fripp…It’s a very nice album, and I found some good alternate takes. Lots of Robert Fripp guitar on it… Then we are doing three albums by the Edgar Broughton Band… and many other big surprises!

Giulia Nuti