Stephen Pastel tells the story behind the Geographic label as they embark upon reissues by The Pastels, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Lightships
Geographic is a label of quiet magnificence. Started in 2000 by The Pastels’ Stephen McRobbie (affectionately known as Stephen Pastel) and Katrina Mitchell as an imprint of Domino, it has been a beautiful expression of their ‘open to the moment’ philosophy for over twenty years now. In practical terms, this has meant periods of heightened activity alongside times when you might be forgiven for wondering if it was still an ongoing concern. Indeed, the label’s activity can be mapped out against how involved Stephen and Katrina are at any point with other projects, not least of which remains The Pastels. I would argue that this is part of Geographic’s charm, with the curatorial care and attention ensuring that their output has never been less than wonderfully endearing.
My introduction to Geographic was in 2003, probably with The Pastels’ The Last Great Wilderness soundtrack. The following year I joined Plan B magazine as a section editor and moved back up to Glasgow. Back then the label seemed to be releasing an outsider classic every other month and those records really spoke to me. In a feature I wrote at the time about Japanese artist Kama Aina, I described Geographic as “a natural home for this musician who conjures up such delicate, microcosmic worlds between the lines and around the cadences of his aural scrapbooks.” While not speaking for every artist on the label, I feel that this does at least capture something of the spirit involved. That time and those records continue to be an influence on me, so it was great to hear that Geographic were revisiting their catalogue and bringing Maher Shalal Hash Baz’s Blues Du Jour, Lightship’s Electric Cables and The Last Great Wilderness back to vinyl. Initial copies from Monorail Music and Domino include an exclusive mix CD, You Are Trying to Make Me Remember You, which joins the dots between Geographic artists, Jan & Dean’s “Like a Summer Rain”, European cinema and more.
It was lovely to catch up with Stephen and discuss all things Geographic on a winter’s evening video call. Hard to believe that Monorail is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this month, but the story of Geographic begins before Stephen and co. opened the shop…
If we could set the scene in the years before Geographic started. You were working at John Smith’s on Byres Road (the legendary record shop upstairs in a Glasgow bookshop) and The Pastels had released Illumination (1997). In 1998 the remix set Illuminati arrived. Looking back, this seems like a period of transition for you and I wonder whether the remix project forged new connections and even shifted things for The Pastels?
Yeah, I think it did. We already felt connected with other things that were going on, but just opening up our music to working with other people was actually really good for us. Laurence [Bell] at Domino was really influential – he wanted this to happen. I think he felt that we had these kind of connections and he wanted to formalise it. And it was a really good idea. Some of the remixes were really, really great. I remember around the time we toured Japan – it was either 97 or 98. And a person came along to the show, Kenji from Rover Records. He had this reissue he’d done on his label of the Hallelujahs album. And that was probably the first thing we’d heard of that kind of Japanese music which was slightly different. The music we were familiar with, the artists that liked us, were around Cornelius and his scene of music, which we also really liked. But then hearing things like the Hallelujahs and then Maher Shalal Hash Baz, we started to realise there’s a whole different thing going on there.
Did Laurence approach you and Katrina about starting a label under the Domino umbrella off the back of the remix project then?
I think we were always saying to him, “Oh this would be a really good group for Domino, why don’t you work with To Rococo Rot, why don’t you do this.” And I think eventually he just said, “Look, I’ll just give you a label, and within reason you work with these artists and we’ll support it.” It was good timing for us, because Annabel had just left the group and we were trying to reconsider our place and find out what we what we were going to do next. So it was something we could really get into.
Had you been thinking about starting a label already or did you take some convincing?
Maybe in the back of my mind. I think because I’d be working in John Smith’s and I just felt there were so many records coming out, I started to feel, you know, is there a need for another label? Katrina and I decided we would only work with music that maybe otherwise wouldn’t get released or bring music to people’s attention that was obscure. So the idea was try to have a loose collection of artists somehow connected with a certain kind of aesthetic. Be different from each other, but also have something in common so that there was a style. And we very much wanted to have the record sleeves look a certain way and just a kind of loosely shared identity.
The name ‘Geographic’ beautifully reflects the international outlook of the label. I assume it was always the idea to make those global connections?
Yeah, I think we wanted it to be local and international. We were very open minded about where the music would come from. And, yeah, I mean someone like Bill Wells lived in Falkirk at the time and then International Airport were local musicians kind of based around Tom Crossley who then was playing with The Pastels and Future Pilot AKA – Sushil [Kumar Dade] was also local. So we never ruled that out. Also, we were looking to forge connections with other places.
How did you and Katrina go about deciding what music to launch the label with?
We just thought Maher Shalal Hash Baz was absolutely extraordinary. It was just like nothing else, a mixture of naivety and real sophistication and a kind of really odd robustness too. And just great songs. Tori and Reiko are fascinating people. I think we talked about it, but then as soon as we realised we could release records by Maher Shalal Hash Baz, we were just like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
Was Maher Shalal Hash Baz a recommendation from David Keenan?
It was. David found this group through The Wire and he reviewed it really enthusiastically. Then they left a message for him in Rough Trade to say that they were living in London at the time. So it just connected up in a really perfect kind of way. It was amazing, there wasn’t a better way to launch the label than with them.
I wonder whether that was the moment where the whole Glasgow/Japan thing stems from?
Yeah, I suppose so. Because Tori and Reiko were living in London at the time it felt geographically possible. It wasn’t as expensive as flying from Japan. So we decided we’d put on a concert by them in Glasgow and all these musicians just turned up from everywhere. We knew that Tori and Reiko would be there, but other people turned up, we didn’t know how. It was the 13th Note downstairs. I mean, no way would the fee that we could pay them have covered the costs of them coming here.
Are there any of those early records you’re particularly proud of? International Airport entered the picture early on with Nothing We Can Control and I remember you talking fondly about the Future Pilot AKA record.
Both those were really important. The Future Pilot, Sushil had a really beautiful kind of community way of working. And when he made Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea it seemed almost everyone in Glasgow played on it. He was sort of in control, he knew what he was doing, he’d this kind of gentle kind of leadership and that record was really good. Bill Wells was very involved in it. The two of them were a strong combination together. I think that’s a really special record.
The International Airport ones – Tom would just seem to kind of go away and work on things with people. Tom would be working in a kind of shaded corner, whereas Sushil would be in the bright sunshine. But they both very much knew what they were doing and trying to achieve. Tom is working on a new International Airport record, so that will happen eventually. But yeah, both of those were important.
The label launched in 2000 and when it’s surprising just how many releases you put out in those early years. I imagine there was a real sense of creative freedom? How did the relationship with Domino work in terms of Geographic?
Yeah, we had a really good run. They were really supportive. It was reasonably easy at the time to get things on to the schedule. Then the Maher Shalal Hash Baz record did well. Future Pilot Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea did well. We were getting lots of press. You guys were great, you were supporting us at Plan B. The Wire was supporting us and we were getting in broadsheets. Our idea was to explode the music and just bring it to people’s attention. Something like Maher Shalal Hash Baz, we wanted everyone to hear them. We didn’t want it to be a secret.
We worked with Empress quite a lot. They were important to the label too. We had an idea that they play – they played quite a lot and they wanted to play a lot. We thought that would be great, because they would be playing all the time. So it’d be a Geographic group kind of out working. The other groups were slightly impractical or didn’t really want to play much. But Empress did. Their music was beautiful and quiet, fitted into that kind of quiet music style – at that time Low were just coming out. And so we released their album, but then they stopped playing. We didn’t really have a group that was going out, which was slightly problematic. But I think we learned from that with The Pastels later when we came back. It was important to be out playing, have a presence.
You opened Monorail in 2002. How did that change things?
At the time, I was still involved with Domino, I was on the payroll. And so in a way I felt a responsibility to put out a lot of records. Then it was something we’d been – I felt a slight frustration, that I didn’t feel there was a record shop in Glasgow that was really great, that carried all the labels like Geographic and other local labels that were really strong too. I just thought, a city like Glasgow should have something like that. My initial idea was that I would help set set it up, but then in a way stand back from it, but it just didn’t happen.
In 2003 The Pastels released The Last Great Wilderness soundtrack on Geographic. It’s a personal favourite of mine and is indeed one of the 2022 reissues. I’d love to hear about how you got involved with the film (the band also appeared in it) and what it was like working with director David Mackenzie. Did scoring a film add new dimensions to what The Pastels were about?
I knew David through John Smith’s, he lived quite close by. I remember I was on a train going to Edinburgh and he was on the same carriage. And he said he’d made these short films. He said actually, “I did one with a musician and I got him to try and do it with a bit of a Pastels vibe.” And I said, “Well, why didn’t you just ask us to do it? We’d have been able to do it with a Pastels vibe!” He just started laughing and said, “Well, if I get funding for a full length, do you want to do it?” And I said, “Yeah of course, we’d love to do it.” So he was trying to get funding for two or three different films at the same time. Then The Last Great Wilderness just landed and he had the funding. And he held his word. He said, “Well, do you want to do this music?” We said, “Yeah, totally.” And so we did.
We did three main themes for it, just to reflect different characters in the film, what we felt were the three main characters. We tried to leave them quite open-ended. I think they were quite strong. They could go kind of darker, lighter. I think David gave us the go ahead from that. But then he was also looking for something else. Part of the plot was that one of the characters had come up to Scotland because his partner had left him and she was going out with this pop star. So we had to write a song that was on the radio that was tormenting him. We asked Jarvis if he would collaborate with us on it. He had such a recognisable voice – very convincing as a radio thing – and he he did it. So we put it all together very quickly. We worked with John McEntire from Tortoise.
Was that the first time you worked with him?
Yeah. And that was really important. He was just really fast and skilful and he absolutely knew what he was doing. I don’t think it would have got made as well with anyone else, he was just really surefooted. Bill worked with us on it, Bill Wells, and he was really great at transitioning from one part to another. He could do these kind of piano bits that were just really helpful. And yeah, we were really happy with how it came out. You know, in a way it felt different from Illumination, but it felt like The Pastels, especially something like “Everybody Is a Star”.
It really does feel like an album.
It’s got enough content, I think. Some soundtracks are just soundtracks. You’ve got the main theme, but then beyond that there’s not much else.
The 2003-2004 releases on Geographic are really evocative of that time for me. Directorsound, Movietone, September Collective, the second International Airport record, Kama Aina and Maher Shalal Hash Baz’s Blues du Jour (which is another of the reissues) – it’s quite a run! Could you talk about this period at the label and what some of those records mean to you?
Yeah, that was a really prolific time. Unfortunately it coincided with the time that records started selling slightly less and it became slightly harder. So sometimes it was just impossible to do the records on vinyl. Directorsound and Kama Aina came out as CD only releases. It was just feasibility.
Directorsound we were introduced to by Mike Tanner from Plinth. He said, “I’ve got this friend Nick and he does all this amazing music but he’s terrible at getting it out to people.” We heard it – it was one that Katrina really loved and we just thought why not? I think I possibly heard Kama Aina through Mike. I just thought it was really beautiful, slightly exotic, but in a low key way. It was like pure imagination music. We approached him and asked if we could make a compilation. He was really lovely to work with.
The September Collective record was Stefan Schneider [of To Rococo Rot] and Barbara Morgenstern and [Paul Wirkus]. To Rococo Rot was one of my favourite groups and September Collective was a bit different. It had this kind of dreaminess and just really seemed to seem to fit with what we were about. It was really lovely to do that record and to work with them.
Blues Du Jour I would say was one of the most important records from the period. They came over to work on it in East Kilbride. Made it over a two week period – maybe not even two weeks, maybe about ten days.
41 tracks in ten days? That’s incredible.
Recorded every single song that Tori had. They front loaded all the more substantial compositions, then by the end it was just kind of like nine notes. Because I remember even he said, “Maybe they’re getting a bit rubbish.” When he did Return Visit to Rock Mass [on Japanese label Org Records], he only agreed to record the record with Shinji Shibayama on the condition that they would record every single Maher Shalal Hash Baz song that existed. There were hundreds – a crazy amount of music! Tori’s very prolific. Blues Du Jour was slightly more manageable than that. We were there at the recording a lot of the time and it was so brilliant just to see them working and see the methods. And we met Saya Ueno from Tenniscoats on the record, and that became a really great friendship for us and became a really strong creative partnership with them.
Blues Du Jour, in a way it’s the last record from the original vision for Maher Shalal Hash Baz, which is Tori Kudo’s kind of cutting Syd Barrett style guitar and Hiro Nakazaki’s euphonium. Tori’s really sprightly, but euphonium is not a sprightly instrument. So it’s quite a kind of odd combination. I don’t think anyone else has ever tried it.
The next couple years were relatively quiet, but there’s a key release with The Royal We LP in 2007. That’s another favourite of mine and to this day I regularly play their version of “Wicked Game” when DJing. How did The Royal We come to be on Geographic?
I really liked them and I suppose the label was entering a different phase by then. I just thought they were a really important group in that moment and it was important to them. They were really young and had done this thing and I just thought someone should document it. Katrina loved them too. We both did. By the time we were agreeing to do it, they were already splitting up.
In a way it was difficult and frustrating. Because we thought they were great and we just thought if they went out and played, people would love it. I’m really happy we did it. And you know, we got it down. I really love a lot of the music they did after that, they all kind of carried on doing their own things. It was quite a mad collection of individuals. It oughtn’t to have really worked, but it did work. But just for a really short period of time.
The label’s output had definitely slowed down. Was that a conscious decision? The Pastels made a beautiful record with Tenniscoats (Two Sunsets) during this time and you were also working gradually on Slow Summits, right?
Yeah. The first session for Slow Summits maybe was around the time that we did The Royal We. It was done very sporadically over the years, but whenever we worked on it was very concentrated.
I suppose Bill Wells Trio Also in White was a really important record for us. And you know, I just hear that record in so many – someone like Andrew Wasylyk, I really love his music, but I can I can hear the influence of Bill’s music in that. Bill brought something really incredible to [Geographic]. He ended up playing with Maher and he plays on The Last Great Wilderness, he plays on the Future Pilot record. He really brought something great to all those records. He was really, really important to that phase of Geographic.
I think we reached a period where records weren’t selling so well. It just became impossible for us. The Domino model changed slightly and Domino needed artists to sell a certain amount just to be able to justify what they’re putting into it. And probably a lot of the Geographic groups weren’t really selling that amount. Domino didn’t really have a model that worked so well for groups that were selling 1000 records or less. And Domino started to say to us, “Look, let’s make a Pastels record. That’s what everyone wants.”
So in a way, Two Sunsets was really important for us. Just to collaborate with Tenniscoats and that kind of Glasgow/Tokyo thing. It made something that we had in our minds, this kind of connection. Putting the record out showed what the connection was and how it could work. Two languages and people collaborating. I sometimes think it’s maybe the best record we made.
Two Sunsets could perhaps be viewed as some sort of quiet summation of what the label had been about up to that point then?
I think so, yeah. It probably does in a way.
Geographic returned in 2012 with Gerard Love’s Lightships project (Electric Cables is being reissued). Did that mark a shift in the label’s output, given that it was followed (albeit some years later) by Spinning Coin?
The label became more sporadic because The Pastels became more active. Because Monorail took more of my time and because Katrina was working full time as well. Also, there were practical reasons. I heard records or music that I thought would be good on Geographic and I just had to consider did it work within the framework that we had with Domino. Lightships was one that we felt could. And Harry Martin at Domino is a massive fan of Gerard’s music. Gerard had been playing with The Pastels since the 90s. Harry kept saying, “You know, I just think it’d be so wonderful if there was a whole album of Gerard songs.” He said, “It’s just always frustrating on Teenage Fanclub records you get four of his songs, imagine if we presented more.” Both Katrina and I were really up for it. By then I probably wasn’t doing the label so intensively as I had been and neither was Katrina. So it was probably a different kind of relationship in a way. Gerard also had a direct relationship with Domino that earlier artists on the label didn’t have so much – it’d all been through us. But I think musically it connected. You know, Tom’s on it and I think it fits in with our style.
What about Spinning Coin?
It was similar to The Royal We. They did this song at a soundcheck and I thought it was really great. It was like a kind of 60s garage song. I thought the guitar player was amazing, Jack. And the person that was singing it, Sean, had this kind of really fragile, slightly kind of garagey voice. And Laurence again said, “You want to do something new and what is there in Glasgow just now?” I said, “Well I’ve seen this band Spinning Coin that I think are pretty good.” So we worked with them. And it was probably a different kind of relationship from the artists that we’d worked with ten years earlier. They had their own thing, they never said let’s get Bill Wells in to play. They kind of knew what they were doing. I really like those records too, I think they’re great.
In more recent times a record that Katrina and I go back to a lot is the Crescent record. In a way that was a culmination of a relationship we had with Movietone. Movietone was always a group that we felt was very Geographic. We did the reissue of their first album during the time that we were doing lots of records. They’re extraordinary. Whenever The Pastels would play we’d try to get Movietone to play as well, because we all loved watching them so much. So we played a lot of shows together. Matt was the drummer in Movietone, but he also had his own project Crescent. He just said, “I’ve been working these songs and just wondering if you’d have a listen.” At the time we weren’t really doing very much with Geographic. Both Katrina and I really loved it and then I spoke to Laurence. Laurence said, “Yeah, I’ve got the tape too, it’s great, isn’t it?” We just felt it was as good as some of those Robert Wyatt solo records. Matt had been really central to the [Bristol] scene, but he’d written this incredible personal record and it just seemed timeless. So in a way, that was a really important record for us. It felt like it was bookending that part of Geographic. You know, maybe that would be the last record in that series that we would do. I mean, you never know, but it felt like a – it was an emotional record and it was emotional for us.
I was actually going to ask if there are any plans to release new stuff on the label?
A massive project that I’ve been working on is a Strawberry Switchblade retrospective and that’s mastered now. So hopefully that will happen next year. That’s kind of a historic thing. Over the summer, I did the music for This Is Memorial Device [a play of David Keenan’s novel that was staged in Edinburgh].
I wish I could have seen that.
It’s going to be on next year in London and Glasgow and Dublin.
Are you putting it out as a record?
Yeah. I did the music with Gavin Thomson. Katrina’s had a really hard year for family reasons, so she wasn’t available to play on it. I ended up doing it with Gavin. Then we got Tom to play on one track, which was really beautiful – it kind of made it much more Pastels. Some of it was music that I had jammed when I was really young, that was just mad – just made a total racket with my friend John – and it seemed to fit into that world. Then there were other things that we needed it to go someplace else. So we did it with Gavin Thomson, who’s The Pastels’ sound person. It came out well. So I think there’s a good chance that will be on Geographic.
That’d be great. In terms of the reissues, are you going to do more of those? I would love to see the Movietone one on vinyl. Is there any chance of that or are there rights issues?
I don’t think there are rights issues, but Steven from World of Echo came to us maybe two years ago at the start of lockdown and and said he’d really love to do a vinyl reissue of Movietone. And at the time, I think Domino – just considering the practicalities of doing reissues – felt that it would be good to have it back out. So it is coming. [And has since been announced in fact.] I feel good about that. I think World of Echo is a really good home for it.
I understand that there are other Pastels reissues in the works?
Mobile Safari and Illumination are coming out next year. There have been complications with Up for a Bit with The Pastels and Sittin’ Pretty, but we’re closer now to resolving them. We’ve got a good talking relationship with James at Fire. It will happen, we need to just find out the best practical solution. Our plan is for everything to come back into print. The really early stuff, we’ve got all the rights for that. So we’ll definitely do some kind of singles compilation too.
That’s cool, I’m really looking forward to those. Speaking of reissues, I saw you’d posted something really eloquent about Revolver recently and since I’m on a heavy Beatles trip at the moment, I thought that might be a nice place to finish.
Well, from an early age I just really remember my mum saying that if The Beatles came on the radio, I would just start stamping and kind of going mad. The first time I heard Revolver I thought it was pretty incredible. The Beatles [are] so three dimensional, there’s always some new way to hear something and it’s just great to hear all those other takes. And yeah, the new mix is really interesting. I think the original mixes are better, you know, the George Martin ones from when the group were there. If you want to listen to them you’d probably take either the original mono or stereo. I love that it still sounds so modern, that’s an incredible thing.
Get The Pastels – The Last Great Wilderness from Monorail Music
Get Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Blues Du Jour from Monorail Music
Get Lightships – Electric Cables from Monorail Music
The Pastels at Domino Recording Co.
Main photo credit: Blair Young
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